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72 PCB007 MAGAZINE I SEPTEMBER 2025 product, and Dad was offered a position with the new Oster Avionics division, which was located in an old schoolhouse where he needed to keep a broom handy to keep the bats and rats at bay. An innovator and entrepreneur at heart, unsolic- ited, he convinced the company to let him design a 2-inch fuel management indicator that required a small precision three-gear train. There were no electronics used at this time, and all the avionics were driven mechanically by miniature precision servo motors interfaced with precision gear trains. He taught himself trigonometry, how to calculate pitch, root diameter, and tooth count, and how to use a slide rule to help create specific gear ratios. I fondly remember receiving my first calculator: one of Dad's old slide rules. It Began With Welded Circuit Technology The general manager of Oster Avionics wanted to expand the avionics business, but the Oster fam- ily did not agree, so he quit and started his own company, Astronautics Corp of America, in 1959. Astronautics landed a number of military con- tracts and quickly offered Dad a ground-floor op- portunity in the company as chief draftsman and employee number 25 (today Astronautics em- ploys over 1,800 people). One of the early military con- tracts was to produce something called "welded circuits." Astro- nautics had convinced the mili- tary that Astronautics had a lot of experience in this manufacturing technology, when in fact this was a new emerging technology for them. The technology required standing components on end between two insulated sheets that had holes drilled in them and welding nickel ribbon wire to the leads to interconnect the components (also called cord- wood packaging). Printed circuits were quite new at this time and the mili- tary would not approve their use. This was Dad's first exposure to a technology that would affect his and our family's lives later on. The next ground-floor opportunity came when a couple of colleagues left Astronautics to form their own company called Control Technology Cor- poration (CTC), again bringing Dad in as the chief draftsman to design flight cockpit instrumenta- tion for the military. The next military contract used nickel ribbon-welded circuit technology. Due to nu- merous poor decisions by the owners, employees arrived at work one day to find the doors locked with a bankruptcy notice posted. Winning Over the Navy A few doors down from CTC was the Louis Allis Power Electronics company (Louis Allis), and along with some colleagues, Dad joined and was hired as a draftsman. He was quickly promoted to man- aging the drafting department and rebranded it as the Product Design Department. His first two proj- ects were for the Navy. The first was a very high T H E R I G H T A P P ROAC H D a d 's f i rst of f i c e ▼ Fun Fact #1: Dad designed the Astronautics logo, a rocket superimposed over a "C," which is still the logo to this day.