Over the years I've worked for a number of companies in the electronics industry, including Western Electric Hawthorne Works in Cicero, Ill., and the IBM Military Products Division in Kingston, N.Y., where I worked on the Sage vacuum-tube computer.

After I got out of the service, I took a job with Kellogg Switchboard & Supply in my home town-Chicago. And when we moved to California in 1960, I switched to sales and joined the Systems Division of Beckman In-

struments. At this point, it should be noted that the Beckman Systems Division, the Hawthorne Works, IBM Kingston and Kellogg Switchboard have all been shut down. Job security was an issue even in the old days. Leap before you get canned.

But I did manage to find work with a few companies that are still in business, as a product manager with the Systems Division of Fairchild Semiconductor and as marketing manager of a startup, Precision Monolithics, which has since been acquired by Analog Devices.

Then in the mid-70s, I got an offer to join an advertising agency in Palo Alto as vice president. The agency, Regis McKenna Advertising & Public Relations, was doing great work for Biomation, Intel, Measurex, Spectra Physics and half a dozen other companies. In the summer of 1976 a 21-year-old Steve Jobs asked us to become his first agency to help him build a computer business. At the time his computer was selling for $666.66. Those were fun days. Turns out my grandmother Alice McKenna's father was one of seven brothers from County Monahan in Ireland. And one of those brothers was Regis' grandfather. Small world indeed.

I left Regis in 1979 after a San Francisco agency put big bucks on the table to open an office in Silicon Valley. Nine months later the entire operation went down the tubes. One of my buddies reminded me, "You may have an Irish grandmother but you ain't no Regis McKenna." Fortunately, I was rescued by Gerry Leeds, who offered me a job as publisher of EE Times. George Rostky was editor.

The advertising and publishing assignments have been the most fun. It's been a life filled with great memories indeed. And a life enriched by a young girl named Barbara, from the Back of the Yards neighborhood in Chicago, whom I met in a saloon in Chicago on August 19, 1954. Thanks for that.

When Frank isn't struggling to remember which pill he's already taken, he can be reached at fburge@cmp.com.