Graves had Sanders and Vaughn pull the whole system out of the test aircraft, unhook all the aircraft wiring cables, and hook it back up in the lab. When he fired it up, it aligned as it should have. Gordon turned it off, let it cool down, and tested it again after reconnecting the aircraft cables. And again, it aligned perfectly. Graves scratched his chin and said, “Yep, just what I thought.” At that moment, he had no idea why it had happened, but he packed his bags and told the NADC to call him if they had any more problems, and went home. The problem never recurred.
Later, Graves said it was probably a corroded connector pin in the aircraft cabling that caused the issue. Disconnecting and reconnecting those aircraft cables likely cleaned the pins and solved the problem.
On the way back to Los Angeles, Gordon flew out of Philadelphia. Dick Clark, having finished a series of American Bandstand shows, was on the same flight. The stewardess asked Graves and Clark to come to the forward cabin and play Spades with them at a little snack table. Everyone had a good time.
Years later, MGAM had a consultant who lived next door to Clark in Malibu. He set up a breakfast meeting for Skip Leonard and Graves at Clark’s home to discuss his investing in MGAM. Graves said, “I was expecting something like eggs Benedict because, after all, we were at Dick Clark’s home. Instead, his wife Cari served us fruit cocktail right out of the can. Needless to say, Clark never invested.”
Graves’s boss, Sid Shapiro, left Litton and went to work with Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky, who had resigned from Litton and were starting Teledyne. Graves had begun working for Charley Bridge by then. Charley had come to Litton from Autonetics and brought with him a bunch of new ideas on how to control inertial instruments. He assigned Gordon to work with Pete Mesquita. Pete taught Gordon how to generate a computer-flow diagram and write simple programs. At the time, Graves was twenty-four.
A few months later, Gordon received a call from Teledyne, and they asked him to join them. Graves was excited about the opportunity and knowing he’d be among the first five Litton employees Teledyne recruited. Gordon was, in fact, the youngest among the group of brilliant peddler-scientists. Graves was involved in building new systems and innovations, and, according to him, everything worked well enough that he thought they had the smartest team of people in the world.
Graves was in awe of both Dr. Singleton and Dr. Kozmetsky.
“Our culture has changed a lot in the past forty years,” said Graves, “since I was working for Henry. When I learned Henry Singleton had died, I was sad. What follows is the obituary published in the LA Times on September 2, 1999.
Henry Singleton, Co-Founder of Teledyne, Dies Obituary: Man who led the conglomerate for three decades was known for his technical skills and prowess on Wall Street.
By STUART SILVERSTEIN, TIMES STAFF WRITER. COPYRIGHT © 1999. Used with Permission
Henry E. Singleton, the pioneering co-founder of Teledyne Inc. and leader of the Los Angeles-based conglomerate for more than three decades, died Tuesday of brain cancer at his West Los Angeles home. He was 82.
Singleton, known as soft-spoken and extremely private, gained a mystique on Wall Street as one of the nation’s leading corporate merger whizzes from the 1960s through the 1980s.
He launched Teledyne in 1960 as a semiconductor maker but turned the company into one of America’s biggest and, for a time, one of its fastest-growing business empires. It controlled billions of dollars in assets and owned big stakes in many other companies.
Singleton specialized in finding companies whose stocks were undervalued, gobbling them up and turning them into big profit-makers for Teledyne shareholders. Eventually, Singleton amassed a fortune, estimated last year by Forbes magazine at $750 million--ranking him as one of the nation’s 400 richest people.
“He was way, way ahead of his time in lots of things, both technically and in business,” said Marvin H. Fink, president of Teledyne Electronic Technologies, a Marina del Rey subsidiary of Singleton’s old business empire and an executive acquainted with Singleton since the late 1950s.
Fink pointed out that Singleton designed what for years was a leading missile and aircraft guidance system. In addition, he said, Singleton was quick to embrace such corporate financial maneuvers as spinning off businesses and using extra cash to buy back stock.
“He was the first one I knew who used his own cash to buy back his stock and, for a while, people laughed at him. They thought he should do other things [with his cash]. Nowadays, just about every company understands the value of that,” Fink said.
At the same time, Singleton was reserved both in his personal and professional life. “He had very few interviews,” Fink said. “He was not the kind of guy who would talk a lot to analysts about his company’s stock. He was not the kind of guy who would tout his stock on TV.”
In 1960, Singleton launched Teledyne with his partner George Kozmetsky. Their first venture was building digital computers for military and commercial aircraft and space exploration projects.
Later, the company went on its acquisition binge, acquiring everything from other aerospace companies to metals concerns to WaterPik.
But in the mid-1980s, after conglomerates had fallen out of favor on Wall Street and after Teledyne’s stock began slumping, Singleton turned around and began working on slimming down the company. He and his successor as chief executive, George Roberts, eventually spun off two insurance companies, Unitrin Inc. and Argonaut Group.
Singleton then increasingly yielded management control of the company, and finally relinquished the title of chairman in 1991. He continued, however, to keep a close eye on the company as its dominant shareholder.
Meanwhile, the company’s problems mounted as it was investigated for a range of crimes in its defense business. Teledyne settled charges that it submitted inflated bills to the government, and it also pleaded guilty to falsifying tests on electronic components.
Then, in the mid-1990s, Teledyne found itself in the unaccustomed role of corporate prey--it was the target of a hostile takeover attempt by WHX Corp., parent of Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. Singleton responded by lining up a deal with a friendly buyer, Allegheny-Ludlum, and a new company was formed, Allegheny-Teledyne.
Singleton was born in 1916 in Haslet, Texas, on a ranch where his father raised cotton and cattle. He attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and later went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he majored in electrical engineering and earned his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate.
In 1951, a year after finishing his studies at MIT, Singleton moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for Hughes Aircraft, North American Aviation and then Litton Industries, before launching Teledyne.
After stepping down from active management of Teledyne, he pursued diverse interests, including cattle ranching in California and New Mexico. He also was a student of Western folklore and the Pueblo Indian culture, a wine collector and a chess and poetry enthusiast.
Singleton served on various boards, including those of Caltech, Apple Computer and Union Bank.
He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Caroline, and by five children and four grandchildren.
Gordon said, “George Kozmetsky had a more significant impact on my life than Henry. He taught me to work hard and work long. He had a reputation of being the man who made his first million at a dollar an hour. J. Paul Getty said the way to get rich was to get up early, work hard and strike oil. Luck helps, but it is not enough. I always liked what Lee Trevino said: ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’”
“George