Czatch-up on previous news--John Doyle

 A year ago, I posted a small note about John Doyle's passing (c.f.  March 20, 2024)

And I vowed to pen a few words in that note, but time intervened and that never happened.

Given the recent passage of John Young, I thought about that, and I found Doyle's obituary notice   https://www.mercurynews.com/obituaries/john-l-doyle-portola-valley-ca/

John, as the obit notes, was an engaging, incredibly smart, curious, adventuresome sort.   Like, the one-liner about becoming a outside window washer on the 19-story Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco.  

Nor did it mention that his sponsor in America was George Young, in Omaha, NE, which among other things led to George's son Richard and daughter Nancy both working for HP at various times.  So, irony--Richard Young and Nancy Young each consulted for HP CEO John Young (no relation).

I first met John when he came to Colorado Springs along with Bill and Dave and Barney Oliver to review what became the Logic Analyzer line, circa 1971.   John had just returned to HP after leaving to become CEO of a Hexcel Corporation division launching a new ski and a line of ski equipment.   The experiment didn't last long, and Packard offered John a 'new products' overview role to return to HP.   Later, he became HP's VP of Personnel, and then still later the VP of HP Labs, where he was instrumental in hiring Joel Birnbaum and launching the RISC computer architecture.   Still later, he became VP of Computing Systems before retiring.  His obit omits all of these titles and roles, simply saying "HP provided John the chance to wear many hats as engineer and manager."

In 1978, I got a phone call at HP from "John Doyle" who did not introduce himself (assuming that I remembered him from years earlier), but asking "are you the Chuck House who signed the cairn at the top of Hunewill Peak in the Sierra?"    Which, yes I was, and I'd done so twenty years earlier while working as a wrangler in Bridgeport, CA (population 324).   We 'bonded' over mountain climbing stories.  It also turned out that John and his family had stayed at the Hunewill Ranch multiple times over the years, and it was just total coincidence that he had climbed that mountain and found my name.  Four other names had been entered in the intervening twenty years--not exactly as popular as Mt. Everest.

Still later, I moved to Palo Alto to start Corporate Engineering, working directly for John, one desk away.  It was a fabulous learning experience, from a sagacious fun-loving 'graybeard by then (at HP, turning 50 was 'ancient' but John never let that slow him down).  Our start date was April 1, 1982, a date that I objected to, but he said, "NO, NO, that's the day the Royal Air Force (Britain) was founded."

I got to know John a bit differently as well.  I had married Nancy Young, mentioned above (met her when she consulted with HP Colorado Springs), and when we separated, John offered me time to 'settle' by moving into his Portola Valley guest home, which was wonderful because I got to know his wife Judy as a result.   The two of them were a wonderful couple, and they were very supportive at a tough time.

John and I continued to meet long after we had both retired from HP, and he and Bill Terry were the two most thorough readers of the 2009 book that Ray Price and I produced about HP (The HP Phenomenon).  He offered pages of corrections and amplifications, including that "Personnel" was really "Human Resources" which has an altogether different ring to it.  His last note to me, just a newsworthy catch-up note, was lengthy, hand-written, about six months before he passed.   Indeed, an elegant man.