Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [166]
Wozniak rented a plush office suite in a glass building in San Jose and recruited an unlikely team. The man he chose to organize the festival offered credentials that included some references to management consultancy and experience of est. Before long they were spitting out press releases announcing the formation of the UNUSON Corporation, an acronym for “Unite Us in Song,” and took to preaching a loosely woven gospel that sounded as if it had been lifted from some freshman papers turned in for Mod Psych 101. They said the purpose of the festival was to “refocus national attention on the power of working together.” For this, they observed, marked the change from the Me decade to the Us decade. They promised a large technology fair that would show how man and machine could work together.
Wozniak took a small office for himself where he installed an Apple II and some game paddles. Every now and again his hired hands appeared and addressed him in the tones of older brothers arranging a birthday treat for the youngest, slightly spoiled member of the family. He invariably nodded or agreed to their requests. As the US Festival organizers started to place orders for equipment, the only numbers they seemed familiar with ended in strings of zeros. The concert soon turned into a sump for—depending on the month and the mood of the speaker—$8 million, $10 million, or $12 million of Wozniak’s Apple fortune.
The people who knew Wozniak treated the US Festival with everything from sadness to alarm. Jobs, who was fond of repeating that it was easier to make a dollar than to give away a dollar, talked about setting up a charitable foundation and did little to conceal his contempt for the enterprise. Jerry Wozniak watched some of his son’s television interviews and said that the figure on the screen struck him as “manic.” Mark Wozniak treated the shenanigans skeptically: “My brother gets attracted to people who play up to him. People are using him. He’ll get screwed over and over. It’s the story of his life. Most of the people he gets involved with wind up screwing him.” Wozniak’s friend Chris Espinosa thought, “As a child and student he was innocent and isolated from the ways of the world. As an adult and millionaire he’s still isolated.”
For months yellow bulldozers and earthmovers scraped and crushed the mesquite near Devore into a gentle hill. A couple of streams were diverted and underground pipes turned part of the desert bowl into green palmetto. Landfill for parking lots was poured onto the laterite riverbed. Nearby canyons were organized into 100,000 campsites. Scores of turquoise-colored portable toilets were trucked in to serve as mobile sewers. Shower trucks, with boiling water and little shelves for the shampoo, were brought in for the press.
Tiger-striped marquees crammed with army cots housed security guards and the concession-stand workers. By the time the festival got under way and thousands of cars and buses began to peel off the specially constructed freeway exits, there was an example of every means of locomotion that had ever been seen on El Camino Real. Apart from automobiles—heavy on the Hondas, Datsuns (the official car of the US Festival), and Toyotas—there were motorcycles, sidecars, two-wheel dirt bikes, three-wheel dirt bikes, Cushman golf carts, flat bed trucks, Winnebagos, six-pak vans, Airstream caravans, bulldozers, backhoes, tractors, forklift trucks, semis and water dumpsters.
From the start Wozniak wanted to make sure that nobody had to wait more than five minutes for food. So the grounds were turned into an outdoor suburban shopping center. Beer gardens