understand.Your first compulsive, seemingly irrational action. I’d like to capsule …”
As Ambassador William Hill droned on, summarizing his conclusions point by point, Andrew wondered if the old man really did understand. It was all so long ago; yet yesterday. There had been only one priority, one objective. To make a great deal of money; massive amounts that once and for all would eliminate the remotest possibility of ever having to experience what he witnessed his father living through in that Boston courtroom. It wasn’t so much a sense of outrage—although the outrage was there—as it was a feeling of waste; the sheer waste of resources—financial, physical, mental: that was the fundamental crime, the essential evil.
He saw his father’s productivity thwarted, warped, and finally stopped by the inconvenience of sudden poverty. Fantasy became the reality; vindication an obsession. At last the imagination lost all control, and a once proud man—moderately proud, moderately successful—was turned into a shell. Hollow, self-pitying, living through each day propelled by hatreds.
A familiar, loving human being had been transformed into a grotesque stranger because he hadn’t the price of survival. In March of 1952 the final gavel was sounded in a Boston courtroom and Andrew Trevayne’s father was informed that he was no longer permitted to function in the community of his peers.
The courts of the land had upheld the manipulators. The
best-efforts, endeavors, whereases
, and
therebys
buried forever the work of an adult lifetime.
The father was rendered impotent, a bewildered eunuch appealing in strained, falsely masculine roars to the unappealable.
And the son was no longer interested in the practice of law.
As with most histories of material success, the factor of coincidence, of timing, played the predominant role. But whenever Andrew Trevayne gave that simple explanation, few believed it. They preferred to look for deeper, more manipulative reasons.
Or in his case an emotional motive, based on revulsion, that lucked in.
Nonsense.
The timing was supplied by the brother of the girl who became his wife. Phyllis Pace’s older brother.
Douglas Pace was a brilliant, introverted electronics engineer who worked for Pratt and Whitney in Hartford; a painfully shy man happiest in the isolation of his laboratory, but also a man who knew when he was right and others were wrong. The others in his case were the Pratt and Whitney executives who firmly refused to allocate funds for the development of close-tolerance spheroid discs. Douglas Pace was convinced that the spheroid disc was the single most vital component of the new high-altitude propulsion techniques. He was ahead of his time—but only by about thirty-one months.
Their first “factory” consisted of a small section of an unused warehouse in Meriden; their first machine a third-hand Bullard purchased from a tool-and-die company liquidating its assets; their first jobs odd-lot assignments of simple jet-engine discs for the Pentagon’s general contractors, including Pratt and Whitney.
Because their overhead was minuscule and their work sophisticated, they took on a growing number of military subcontracts, until second and third Bullards were installed and the entire warehouse rented. Two years later the airlines made an industry decision: the way of the jet aircraft was the way of the commercial future. Schedules were projected calling for operational passenger carriers by the late fifties, and suddenly all the knowledge acquired in the development of the military jet had to be adapted to civilian needs.
And Douglas Pace’s advanced work in spheroid discs was compatible with this new approach; compatible and far ahead of the large corporate manufacturers.
Their expansion was rapid and paid for up front, their backlog of orders so extensive they could have kept ten plants working three shifts for five years.
And Andrew discovered several things
As Ambassador William Hill droned on, summarizing his conclusions point by point, Andrew wondered if the old man really did understand. It was all so long ago; yet yesterday. There had been only one priority, one objective. To make a great deal of money; massive amounts that once and for all would eliminate the remotest possibility of ever having to experience what he witnessed his father living through in that Boston courtroom. It wasn’t so much a sense of outrage—although the outrage was there—as it was a feeling of waste; the sheer waste of resources—financial, physical, mental: that was the fundamental crime, the essential evil.
He saw his father’s productivity thwarted, warped, and finally stopped by the inconvenience of sudden poverty. Fantasy became the reality; vindication an obsession. At last the imagination lost all control, and a once proud man—moderately proud, moderately successful—was turned into a shell. Hollow, self-pitying, living through each day propelled by hatreds.
A familiar, loving human being had been transformed into a grotesque stranger because he hadn’t the price of survival. In March of 1952 the final gavel was sounded in a Boston courtroom and Andrew Trevayne’s father was informed that he was no longer permitted to function in the community of his peers.
The courts of the land had upheld the manipulators. The
best-efforts, endeavors, whereases
, and
therebys
buried forever the work of an adult lifetime.
The father was rendered impotent, a bewildered eunuch appealing in strained, falsely masculine roars to the unappealable.
And the son was no longer interested in the practice of law.
As with most histories of material success, the factor of coincidence, of timing, played the predominant role. But whenever Andrew Trevayne gave that simple explanation, few believed it. They preferred to look for deeper, more manipulative reasons.
Or in his case an emotional motive, based on revulsion, that lucked in.
Nonsense.
The timing was supplied by the brother of the girl who became his wife. Phyllis Pace’s older brother.
Douglas Pace was a brilliant, introverted electronics engineer who worked for Pratt and Whitney in Hartford; a painfully shy man happiest in the isolation of his laboratory, but also a man who knew when he was right and others were wrong. The others in his case were the Pratt and Whitney executives who firmly refused to allocate funds for the development of close-tolerance spheroid discs. Douglas Pace was convinced that the spheroid disc was the single most vital component of the new high-altitude propulsion techniques. He was ahead of his time—but only by about thirty-one months.
Their first “factory” consisted of a small section of an unused warehouse in Meriden; their first machine a third-hand Bullard purchased from a tool-and-die company liquidating its assets; their first jobs odd-lot assignments of simple jet-engine discs for the Pentagon’s general contractors, including Pratt and Whitney.
Because their overhead was minuscule and their work sophisticated, they took on a growing number of military subcontracts, until second and third Bullards were installed and the entire warehouse rented. Two years later the airlines made an industry decision: the way of the jet aircraft was the way of the commercial future. Schedules were projected calling for operational passenger carriers by the late fifties, and suddenly all the knowledge acquired in the development of the military jet had to be adapted to civilian needs.
And Douglas Pace’s advanced work in spheroid discs was compatible with this new approach; compatible and far ahead of the large corporate manufacturers.
Their expansion was rapid and paid for up front, their backlog of orders so extensive they could have kept ten plants working three shifts for five years.
And Andrew discovered several things
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