Legacy - 26. Coöperation - Debbie McLaughlin

Thursday, October 28, 2032 - Eleven Years before the Assassination

“Jesus, it’s cold,” I exclaimed as we exited the terminal at Rochester International Airport. Cathy and I were here to meet with city and regional leaders as part of our takeover of the once mighty corporate giants of photography and photo-reproduction, Kodak and Xerox. Back home it was the peak of fall color. Here in Upstate New York, most of the leaves were already off the trees. It felt like it couldn’t be more than thirty degrees outside.

Fortunately, a limo was waiting for us right outside the terminal door, so we didn’t have to go far. Getting in the limo, the air inside was warm and the plush seats seemed way too comfortable for a couple of women and their support staff, who’d all been traveling since before noon. We were nearly asleep by the time we reached our hotel, which was in a lovely, restored art deco building downtown.

The trip to Rochester was relatively short and should have taken us less than five hours. If we’d taken the corporate jet, we could have made the trip in only two but we were all too new to the realm of wealth and it just seemed so wasteful to travel in our own personal jet.

Our one concession was traveling in First Class so we’d have the room to spread out and get some work done but not even First Class tickets could make up for delays. Congestion over Detroit caused us to miss our connection and then mechanical problems kept us on the ground for three hours, during which time we couldn’t even fire up our laptops. Our time was valuable and delays such as these had us rethinking our strategy of using commercial flights.

Thanks to the delays, we’d missed having dinner with the mayor and county executive but, knowing how these sorts of dinners are, it was just as well. At least the airline’s flight lounge in Detroit, available to those of us in First Class, had a very nice buffet and so we were far from hungry.

I was asleep almost as soon as my head hit the pillow. As I drifted off to sleep, I thought about the extraordinary events that had brought us to this day. The changes in our lives during the past several years had truly been breathtaking. We were only forty-one but we were among the wealthiest people in the world - at least on paper, we were.

Since taking over her dad’s business, Cathy had single-handedly transformed it into a major electronics powerhouse, buying up patents and focusing on the manufacture of the optoelectronic chips central to the burgeoning field of holographic imaging and projection.

Renaming the company ‘Andrews Optoelectronics’, she went head-to-head with the likes of Intel, Hewlett-Packard and National Semiconductor. Most of the other companies had long ago moved their manufacturing operations overseas. We, on the other hand, strongly believed we could build a better product locally with local talent.

Beyond a doubt, overseas labor was cheaper but that hardly made up for the ability to oversee every step of the product development process from the drawing board to manufacture to quality control, all on-site. Furthermore, modern chip fabrication processes were becoming less and less labor-intensive, largely negating any advantage of offshore manufacturing.

Although our rapidly developing reputation as a maker of quality products had much to do with our overnight success, it was truly Cathy’s brilliance as an engineer that made the company. Cathy literally spent hours of her own time studying existing designs and finding ways to improve on them. Our chips produced better images using less power and were far more reliable than those made by the competition. Except in the economy market, most original equipment manufacturers were happy to pay a 25% premium to use our chips in their products. Andrews became the ‘Intel Inside’ of the optoelectronics world.

Thus it wasn’t a complete surprise when Cathy assembled a group of our top engineers and presented something entirely new. She’d come up with a design for an optoelectronic chip based, not on traditional silicon and gallium arsenide semiconductors, but rather making use of carbon nanotubes. Graphene, which consists of sheets of carbon in layers only one atom thick, had long been known to have semiconductor properties, as Cathy explained it. Stacked sheets of graphene are what make up graphite, the common ‘lead’ in pencils. It wasn’t until someone discovered how to ‘unzip’ carbon nanotubes, however, that a way to manufacture graphene had become practical. Long considered little more than a laboratory curiosity, recent breakthroughs in the development of graphene semiconductors got Cathy thinking about a way to use nanotube arrays as switchable, steerable miniature optical waveguides.

None of our people had any idea how to manufacture such an array but they certainly saw the value in patenting the technology and so the wheels were set in motion for a future in nanotube technology. It was scarcely a year later that Cathy came up with a manufacturing process that could be used to fabricate nanotube arrays at a fraction of the cost of conventional optoelectronic semiconductors.

A mere four months after that, we had a working prototype of a single-chip holographic projector that could, in quantity, be manufactured at a cost of roughly ten dollars per chip. Such a thing was unheard of until then - existing projectors, which didn’t come even close to offering the resolution of ours, cost thousands of dollars apiece.

We took our prototype to the Consumer Electronics Show that year and ended up coming back home with nearly thirty billion dollars in venture capital. It was more than enough to build assembly plants to manufacture our nanotube-based chips on an unprecedented scale.

When we took our company public a year later, our market capitalization leapt into the stratosphere, putting us on a par with the largest global corporate giants. Cathy and I were personally worth billions - we were among the richest people in the world.

As far as we were concerned, however, nothing had changed. We had our lives in our house on the canal and we wanted to keep living in the neighborhood that had come to mean so much to us. Our son and his husband were ecstatically happy and had just begun medical school together, eschewing a chance to go to an Ivy League school in favor of a chance to stay in town.

Adding a dormer on the backside of the house, we turned the two attic bedrooms and bathrooms into a complete, one bedroom apartment with its own outside stairway, affording the boys some privacy. We’d offered to buy them a townhouse nearby but, as they joked, they liked the free meals and laundry service they got at home. We loved having them with us and they loved being there. In the meantime our lovely daughter had become a fine young woman and was in her senior year of high school.

In short, Cathy and I wanted to be mothers first and business leaders second. Additionally I had my own career as an academician and I didn’t want to give that up. That we had more than enough money to support our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren for the rest of their lives was irrelevant - as far as we were concerned, that money was ours in trust, to be used to better the community that had given us so much.

Andrews Optoelectronics, however, had been entrusted with large sums of money by the shareholders and they expected to realize a decent return on their investment. It was therefore up to us to find a way to invest that money wisely and to realize that return.

Many suggested we should diversify, buying up corporations that had nothing to do with optoelectronics to provide a hedge against the vagaries of the market. Cathy and I knew nothing about pharmaceuticals, the transportation industry or textiles, to name a few areas that we considered, and we were morally opposed to anything having to do with the military, tobacco or anything that degraded the environment. Furthermore, we believed that our shareholders invested in our corporation because they believed in our technology and our ability to bring it to market. The last thing they would have wanted was for us to use their hard-earned money to go on a spending spree.

Unfortunately, our involvement with the military industrial complex was inevitable and unavoidable. Our technology was central to the development of the next generations of spy satellites and guided weapons. The government had the authority to usurp our patents in the national interest if we’d refused to cooperate.

Reluctantly but with determination, we spun off a division to develop advanced optoelectronic chips for military use and then sold it to Lockheed Martin, to whom we licensed the technology. The royalties we received from them were then used to establish a private foundation whose mission it was to aid the victims of war throughout the world.

With military matters out of our hands, we ended up deciding on a business model that involved investments in companies that could manufacture products making use of our technology. That didn’t mean that we’d be the only ones privy to our chip designs - the last thing we needed was to become the target of antitrust investigations - but we intended to dominate a market in which we competed with the likes of Sony, Sharp and Samsung for the use of our own chips.

The first acquisition was the sole right to use the name of the long-defunct RCA brand of consumer electronics. RCA, which stood for the Radio Corporation of America, had once been the dominant maker of televisions in the U.S. and a good part of that manufacture took place in our own city. We undoubtedly paid far more for the name than it was worth but we felt strongly that the RCA brand had important symbolic meaning to our community.

Although the RCA division of Andrews came to provide a steady stream of consumer products making use of our technology, the ability to view video holographic content in the home was only one piece of the equation. Our consumer electronics products were worthless without the availability of that content.

Even all these years after the demise of photographic film, Kodak was still a household name. They were still remembered as a leading manufacturer of easy-to-use, amateur-oriented point and shoot cameras, long after they had entered Chapter Eleven and ceased production. We intended to expand upon Kodak’s reputation as a camera maker, producing not only simple cameras for the masses, but also advanced cameras for use by advanced amateurs and professional photographers. We planned to go head-to-head with the likes of Nikon, Olympus and Canon.

We also planned to expand into videoholographic equipment. Kodak already made high-end professional video cameras and we intended to rule that market, while expanding into the production of mass-market camcorders - something Kodak had always dabbled in, but never owned. Our holographic technology was a natural for products in all of these areas.

Unbeknownst to a lot of people, Kodak was still a major manufacturer of the digital movie projectors used in theaters throughout the world. With the addition of our videoholographic chips, we’d soon be dominant in the market, bringing true, larger than life, glasses-free 3-D movies to the masses.

With a full array of products for content production and content display, we could ensure a robust market at both ends of the spectrum while leaving the business of content creation itself to the studios and other established media providers, as well as consumers themselves.

However, we saw the entertainment industry as only the beginning of what could be done with our technology. Professional applications abounded in the fields of medicine, communication, remote sensing and business, and there were roles for Kodak and, particularly, for Xerox in these areas as well.

For example, Kodak was well known in the medical field. Although Olympus was the dominant player, Kodak had a line of highly regarded endoscopes, laparoscopes, bronchoscopes and similar devices for use in all areas of Medicine. This aspect of the acquisition of Kodak - the ability to apply Cathy’s inventions to the betterment of humankind - intrigued us the most of all.

Xerox, on the other hand, had truly explosive potential. At one time the Xerox name was synonymous with office copiers. Later on, Xerox was a dominant player in the manufacture of other office equipment as well. Sadly, Xerox had been so horribly mismanaged for so long that it hardly mattered in the corporate world any more. They invented the graphic user interface that dominated the computer industry yet they never managed to bring it to market nor did they even license it. They just gave it away.

We intended to restore Xerox as a major force in the corporate offices of the world.

The sound of the phone ringing came all too soon. It was our wake-up call. Grabbing a quick but hearty and delicious breakfast in the hotel dining room, Cathy and I went over our plans for the upcoming meeting. Cathy was the CEO and I was a major stockholder but I preferred to leave the professional aspects of running the company to those who, unlike me, had some training in business.

Still, Cathy claimed my background in psychology was a major asset that gave me better insight into the minds of those with whom we negotiated than anyone else in our organization. There was also the fact that the two of us together owned a controlling interest in Andrews so that, with me along, quick decisions could be made without having to convene the Board of Directors or to seek a vote of the stockholders.

As we exited the hotel, it was if anything it was colder than it had been the night before and the sky was dark and grey. The atmosphere was foreboding, which perhaps was appropriate to the subject matter at hand.

We took a limo across the Genesee River to City Hall, which was less than a mile away. We had been cautioned not to walk it due to the city’s burgeoning crime rate and, besides which, it was fucking cold outside!

Arriving at precisely ten o’clock, just in time for our planned meeting, we were kept waiting a surprisingly long time, considering what we were bringing to the region. Finally, we were ushered into a large, three-story atrium that was far more elegant than we’d been expecting. The place was lavishly appointed with marble columns and walls, and elegant crystal light fixtures.

We then entered a more modern annex and were led into a large auditorium. In the front was a table for Cathy and me with more than enough leather chairs for the two of us, our assistants and our staff. The auditorium seats were arranged in semi-circles behind tables of their own. Placards at each seat indicated whom the occupants were, including the mayor, the county executive, members of the city council and county legislature as well as the mayors and business leaders of all of the myriad villages, towns and communities that populated Monroe County. I had a strange feeling these people weren’t used to being in the same room with each other at the same time, but Cathy had been insistent that anyone who wished to do business with Kodak or Xerox needed to be there.

The first person to speak, tellingly, was the County Executive, who got up and immediately started rambling on with platitudes about how much investment from Andrews Optoelectronics would mean to the region.

After listening to his tirade for ten minutes, Cathy interrupted him by saying, “Mr. Warren, I did not come here to learn how wonderful I am.” Laughing, she said, “I already know I’m wonderful . . . my wife tells me just how much every day.” When no one in the room even smiled, let alone laughed at Debbie’s attempt to lighten the mood, I suspected we were in trouble. Still, Debbie took it in her stride and seemed to know just what to do.

“Seriously,” she went on, “I may be an engineer and a businesswoman but, underneath it all, I’m a plain Midwestern girl with Midwestern sensibilities. I did not come here to be wined and dined, nor am I interested in getting to know all the people in this room. Frankly, I hardly see the workings of regional cooperation here. There must be a few hundred people here. How am I supposed to build my business if I have to deal with all of you?

“Sixty years ago, Rochester and my home town were about the same size. Now you’re only about a quarter the size. You lost population while we grew. That should tell you something. We’ve had metro government for . . . sixty years. When I want to build a new plant, I need only approach the mayor, who happens to be a childhood friend of ours, by the way, but that’s beside the point. Occasionally I need to go before the city-county council but the process is so streamlined that the only real concern is filling out the environmental impact statement . . . something our lawyers can do in their sleep.

“Knowing what I know about how easy it is to deal with a metropolitan government . . . how conducive such a government can be to business opportunities and economic growth, it’s hard for me to imagine building, or re-building a corporate empire here. It’s bad enough that your taxes are so high, but I can live with your taxes.

“How many people will I need to talk to before I can build a new plant here? How many entities will I need to consult before making decisions? How many of you will outright compete with each other for my attention? How many roadblocks and delays will I face? How many people will I have to hire, just to deal with all the bureaucratic waste?

“If that is what it means to do business in your fair city, I have half a mind to sell off the assets of Kodak and Xerox, take what I can back to our corporate headquarters and start over from scratch.

“On the other hand, my wife and I believe strongly in the value of communities and the responsibilities that corporations have to the communities of which they are a part. Neither of us wants to destroy Rochester or Upstate New York. We believe we could make a huge contribution to the local economy, not only in terms of the money we pour into Kodak and Xerox, but in terms of our private philanthropy and the vast sums we are prepared to pour into the regional infrastructure in the tradition of George Eastman himself.

“In order for these things to happen, however, you have to want to help yourselves. You have to be willing to put aside your differences for the common good. You have to learn to work together and to restructure yourselves such that I need only call one person to get things done.

“I’m not telling you to implement metro government here, although I think you’d find there are tremendous benefits in doing so, not the least of which is the elimination of duplication that, by itself, will allow you to lower your taxes . . . dramatically. How you sell government waste to your citizens is your business. What I do insist upon, however, is that there be a single entity in Monroe County that businesses need to deal with. Otherwise there’s not much point in making plans for a future that will never be.”

Cathy spoke for another hour, outlining her vision for the future of a combined Kodak-Xerox were it to remain in Upstate New York. Our plans would literally transform the region, creating hundreds of thousands of new jobs that, through the multiplier effect of collateral business growth, would more than double the city’s metropolitan population within a decade. A spillover effect would likely lead to similar growth throughout the area, including in Buffalo, Syracuse, Ithaca and the entire Finger Lakes region.

No one in the room wanted to walk away from such a deal but making the gut-wrenching changes Cathy considered to be a prerequisite would be hard. No one wanted to cede their own little fiefdom of power, even if it were an essential step toward serving the greater good.

As we worked through lunch, the various people present in the room asked numerous questions, helping to flesh out the changes Cathy had in mind. The Mayor of Rochester, who had apparently long been a supporter of metro government, suggested convening a panel to explore options for government consolidation. There were groans throughout the room - his idea apparently was far from new - but then Cathy pledged to provide a ten million dollar grant, and more if needed, for a study into the ramifications of metro government if only such a panel were formed.

We didn’t get immediate agreement but I strongly suspected agreement wouldn’t be long in coming, particularly with the news media being present in the room that day.

As we prepared to exit City Hall and take a limousine to the airport to take a flight home that evening, we were greeted by an amazing scene of pure white and howling winds. We were in the middle of a freaking blizzard - in October!

“I’m sorry about this,” the mayor told us. “I’ve never seen a snowstorm like this before Thanksgiving, let alone before Halloween.

With the airport closed, all flights grounded and no place else to go, we headed back to the hotel and enjoyed another gourmet meal before retiring for the evening.

The next day, the mayor offered to serve as our tour guide and take us around to see some of the sights of Rochester. It would not be until Sunday at the earliest that we’d be able to get a flight out of the city and so the mayor took us around on freshly cleared roads to see the community. I was amazed that the roads had been cleared so quickly but that was apparently par for the course here.

We toured the George Eastman House, seeing the enormous home the founder of Kodak had built for himself alone. The attached International Museum of Photography was the finest of its kind anywhere in the world.

The mayor took us to Corn Hill, a heavily gay, urban neighborhood of quaint Victorian houses and newer townhomes. He took us back across the river to an area known as the South Wedge, an area of funky shops and restaurants that were largely gay-owned. The mayor explained how Rochester had a long tradition of accepting its gay citizens, which made us feel much more at home than we had initially felt. Indeed, he explained, it had long been accepted that George Eastman, who never married, was himself gay.

That evening we were the mayor’s guests at a Pops concert by the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in the beautifully restored and elegant Eastman Theater. This being the Halloween weekend, the concert had a ‘haunted’ theme and it was outstanding. Many members of the orchestra were on the faculty at the renowned Eastman School of Music and the professionalism of the philharmonic was quite evident. Although the symphony back home was excellent, it wasn’t in the same league as the RPO.

We did get a flight out the next day but this was far from our last trip to Rochester. After much political posturing and a general referendum on the matter, Monroe County did end up forming a metropolitan government and we consequently poured more than a hundred billion dollars into the local economy. We spent so much time in Rochester that, in many ways, it came to represent a second home to us and we ended up buying a loft downtown to stay in when we visited. Much to our surprise, we even got used to all the snow.