My father was quite a guy
My father, Sigurd Varian, was born in Schenectady, New York on May 4th, 1901. My grandfather, John Osborne Varian, and my grandmother, Agnes Varian, had immigrated from Dublin, Ireland in 1894. Their first child Russell was born in New York in 1898, followed by my dad, Sigurd, and Eric. My grandfather decided to move his family to Palo Alto, California around 1903 or 1904 where he practiced as a masseuse, an early-day practice that would later become what we call Chiropractic medicine today. In 1910 my grandfather was offered a position to help start a community where the religion was Theosophy and the lifestyle was socialist leaning. This new community would be called Halcyon which still lives today. It’s located between Arroyo Grande and Oceano right on the Pacific Coast.
From an early age, all three boys showed no interest in any kind of agriculture but were fascinated with the emergence of the radio, the automobile, and anything mechanical. In my father's late teen years he was bitten by the flying bug, so racing his motorcycle up and down Pismo Beach at low tide was relegated to second place with his priorities. With the end of World War One in 1918 there were vast amounts of war surplus supplies of whatever it took to fight a war, one being The Jenny which was the fighter plane of choice by the army and was used for aerial combat over France. Many of them were “still in the box brand new” for $100 apiece. The thought of being able to own his own airplane became my father’s mission in life. First, he had to learn to fly. That was fairly easy to do in those days as there were WWI pilots who were available to teach a devil-may-care 19-year-old to fly. My dad told me that getting into the air was exhilarating and natural so in the course of 5 or 6 hours, he would solo and become part of a romantic group of what were called Barnstormers. By 1919 they were flying all over the country giving airplane rides, teaching others how to fly, and advertising different airplane-related things. My father soon found himself in Los Angeles where all the action was happening. I’m a little unclear how he got the $100 to buy a Jenny back then, but work in the flying industry was easy to find. With money in hand, he strode off to the nearest dealer in Jenny’s. Jenny’s all looked alike and all were new as the used ones were left in Europe at the end of the war. Knowing my dad, I can hear him saying, “I’ll take that one.” And with the passing of a $100 bill the deal was done, sort of. The dealer then informed him it wouldn’t start until you bought the ignition system that had platinum points that were worth $100. I’m sure he was disappointed, but by no means would this inconvenience stop him.
Back to work to save up $100 which took about a month while his Jenny languished in the used airplane lot. Once again with $100 in hand and taking a day to install the ignition system and check out all the moving parts he was ready for take off and into the wild blue yonder he went.
With but a few hours flying time it became self-evident that he had to figure out a way to buy gas for his new love. The quickest way was to become a flight instructor and that was done by saying “I’m a flight instructor.” In those heady days, there was no law as long as my father honed his flying skills and didn’t kill himself or his passengers. The big killer of airplanes at that time was “the stall,” which’s when your plane quits flying because you're going too slow to stay in the air and the pilot in a moment of panic pulls back on the stick instead of pushing the stick forward to gain flying speed and crashes.
My dad had been flying and trying to make a living with his Jenny but it was a struggle. He thought about his days as a boy in Halcyon. He decided that he might have better luck where there wasn’t so much competition so he returned to San Luis Obispo. Much to his surprise Cal Poly College in 1920 had courses in aeronautical engineering and a landing strip where he could land and take off and go to school and keep his Jenny airworthy for almost nothing. After two years of educating himself with the reasons airplanes stayed in the air and how to keep one running, he left Cal Poly and started a flying school in the Coachella Valley in Southern California.
In 1924, my father was bedridden for a year when he contracted a severe case of Tuberculosis, a disease that would cause him more bed rest later in life. The flying business was still a hardscrabble way to make a living so Sig, his nickname, started looking for a more profitable way to stay in the Aviation industry. While visiting with one of his pilot friends, he told my dad that a relatively new airline called Pan American World Airlines was hiring pilots to fly routes from Brownsville, Texas to the Panama Canal with stops in many of the Central American countries. He was hired on as a captain almost immediately in 1927. In those days the Tri-Motor Ford aircraft was the workhorse of the day. It had a pilot, copilot, steward, eight or nine passengers, and lots of cloudy, stormy weather to contend with.
1928 Sig meets Winnifred Hogg, who was the oldest daughter of the English Counselor to Mexico, at a party in Mexico City and in 1929 they marry. My sister Lorna and I will be raised by these two wonderful parents and we will enjoy wonderful childhoods.
By 1935, Sig was struggling with a case of Amoebic Dysentery and my mother was pregnant with me. My father had always kept in contact with his brother Russell. Russell had earned a doctorate in physics at Stanford University. Their correspondence mostly centered around if there was some way that Sig could see a mountain that was hidden by bad weather and had already taken the lives of passengers and crew in a Pan-American crash. Russell replied that there was no law of Physics that would prevent some sort of device. My father answered, "Let's meet in Halcyon and make it.” Shortly after my father left Pan American and arrived back in Halcyon he had to hurry my mother to San Luis Obispo General Hospital where I was born on 9/7/35.
For two years Sig and Russell tried many different ways to solve their problem, which was how to bunch some radio waves and have them not diffuse their energy so they can hit an unseen object and return this radio wave to the sender then measure the elapsed time, and that will tell you how far away the hidden mountain was. To make this invention possible, it was necessary for my family to move to Palo Alto. Russell was able to make a deal with Stanford University that the brothers could use the University Physics Laboratory and receive $100 to buy materials. In return, the brothers would give half the patent rights to Standford for the Klystron tube that made Radar possible.
It’s 1940 now and I find myself, my sister, and my mother on a train to New York City where we meet my father. He had gone ahead to work on the manufacturing of Klystrons for the war effort that had engulfed most of Europe and in London, England bombings were happening daily. The US Government hired my dad and Rus to work for the Sperry Gyroscope Company and help them manufacture klystrons.
The British had a very good fighter plane called the Spitfire but it burned a lot of gas and could only stay in the air for about one and a half hours. This meant it had to stay on the ground until the German bombers were visible. What the Spitfire needed was about 15 or 20 minutes of lead time to get to altitude above the German bombers and this new Radar device gave them that chance. Soon the German aircraft were being shot from the sky so often that the Battle for Britain ended. The evacuation of 300,000 British soldiers from Dunkirk spelled the eventual end of the Third Reich and the German Empire in 1945.
It’s now the summer of 1948 the war has been over for three years and my dad, Russell, and families are all now back living in or near Palo Alto. They have just started a new company called Varian Associates that is going to build Klystrons and do research work into different types of electronic equipment. The company was an instant success helped along by the Korean War that needed all the new uses that a Klystron tube could provide. My father was a very hands-on type of person who would rather be in a machine shop inventing and building things that Varian Associates might decide to manufacture.
The company went public in the early 1950s and my father was put on the new board of directors. That was tolerable because he knew that it was just a figurehead position to add validity to this new startup company. But the board of directors went on to make matters worse when they decided that he should be president and he said to me, “It’s just for window dressing.” He was moved farther from a useful position in the trenches with like-minded people who used drill presses and lathes to build things. By 1960, my mother and father decided to leave Varian Associates and move to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico to retire. They built a nice house right on the beach, brushed off their rusty Spanish, and settled into a lifestyle that allowed them to help refurbish the local hospital that was badly in need of some remodeling.
My father was an excellent pilot but one stormy night Dad and a friend were returning from Guadalajara with some things Dad needed for their house. Leaving Guadalajara the weather was starting to cloud over but Dad was a very good instrument-rated pilot and the weather was good in Puerto Vallarta. He called ahead to tell whoever was in charge of lighting little Kerosene lamps the length of Puerto Vallarta’s dirt landing field. Upon Dad’s arrival there was nothing but darkness and calling the airport to get the lamps lit nobody answered the phone. When he first learned to fly, he would often land his Jenny on Pismo Beach at low tide and then take off before the tide started to come in. The tide was low as my father decided that the safest thing to do was a forced landing on a white sandy beach rather than guess where an unlit airstrip was located. He was turning toward shore and then would make one more turn to line up for his final approach but he misjudged his height above a wave and his left-wing hit the wave and the plane landed hard but right side up. Dad’s friend was able to get out and swim a few hundred yards to shore but my father, they said, broke his hip and was unable to swim and drowned. I know that this was exactly how my father would want to leave his life. Once he realized that he had a problem all fear left him and he would become this very cool man who enjoyed moments of danger.
My father was a very brave man under fire, who taught me how to drill holes in metal and run a metal lathe. He always encouraged me to build something from my imagination like a rocket ship with wings. He said to make my word my bond. He and my mother always showed that it was better to give than receive. The list could go on and on so I’ll close by saying, I was very lucky to have such wonderful parents.
See Ya,
Jack
The Varian Family