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By Root 463 0

of the short commute that took him to Lockheed. “I never intended to stay at Lockheed very long. I intended to move to the area first and settle down later.” The company kept its distance from family affairs. Lockheed was hidden behind shields of security clearances, special passes, uniformed guards, and barbed-wire fences. About the only time children glided through the company gates was when the general public was invited to watch the aerobatic stunts of the Blue Angels over the Independence Day weekend. When Jerry Wozniak had to collect work from his office on Saturday mornings, his children stayed in the car surrounded by the vast parking lots painted in flat, herringbone patterns. Lockheed was like an elderly aunt who wanted children to appear only for dinner.

When Jerry Wozniak brought his work home in the evenings and over the weekends and settled down in the family room with sheets of blue-lined grid paper and drafting pencils, he was usually concerned with designs that took full advantage of the miniaturization of electronic components. Inside the Missile Systems Division Wozniak worked on the attitude-control system of Polaris and slightly later on a proposed scheme for using computers to design integrated circuits. Later still he worked in an area known as Special Projects which, he told his children, had something to do with satellites. So Jerry Wozniak was in a position where it became part and parcel of his job to read trade journals, plow through conference proceedings, flip through monographs, and generally keep abreast of developments in the world of electronics.

While the satellites designed at Lockheed were engineered to travel millions of miles, the orbits of Lockheed families were more circumscribed. The Wozniaks never took long vacations. A holiday was usually a Christmas or Easter trip to visit grandparents in Southern California. There was the occasional dinner out, a trip for brunch to Sausalito, an outing to a San Francisco Giants baseball game, but for the most part the center of their world was Sunnyvale.

Jerry Wozniak was as keen about war games and sports as he was about electronics. He spent hours in the backyard tossing baseballs with his sons and became a coach for The Braves, a Sunnyvale Little League team. But most of all he looked forward to the Saturday morning golf foursome he played with neighbors at the nearby Cherry Chase Country Club—a grand name for a club where, to play eighteen holes, golfers circled the same course twice. Here, too, Wozniak senior and Wozniak junior won a father-and-son golf tournament. Sunday afternoons were devoted to televised football games.

And for the Wozniaks, as for thousands of other California families who raised their children in the sixties, swimming was the sport of primary interest. The nearby Santa Clara swim team earned a national reputation and swimming quickly turned into something more than a pastime. It was a sport, the elder Wozniaks thought, that could be used to instill a sense of team spirit, of competitiveness, and individual achievement. They enrolled their children in the Mountain View Dolphins.

Margaret Wozniak was a woman with very definite ideas who didn’t hesitate to let her children know what was on her mind. When she lectured them about austerity they sometimes harked back to her wartime occupation and called her Rosie the Riveter, but Margaret Wozniak was something of a feminist before the term became fashionable. (“When I realized I wasn’t a person anymore I started to branch out.”) She became president of the Republican women in Sunnyvale—“I liked having friends on the city council”—and occasionally enlisted the help of her children for humdrum precinct work.

The Wozniaks played classical records in the background, hoping that their children would be attracted to the subliminal levels of the music. But Leslie preferred teen pop magazines and the San Francisco radio shows she could hear on her transistor radio while her brothers preferred television programs with an element of intrigue like The Man from U.N.C.L.E.and I