Nothing lasts forever

Our local weekly newspaper, the Yamhill County News-Register (think McMinnville, Oregon where the fabled Spruce Goose, Howard Hughes' immense plywood seaplane, is hosted), had a Viewpoints column this week, from local historian Steve Dunn.  He begins with an interview of Don Vollum, the son of the Tektronix founder in 1947, quoting Vollum as lamenting the virtual death of the high-tech industry in Oregon in recent years.   Timely?   Intel Oregon announced this weekend that they were laying off 2,400 employees from their Oregon facilities, nearly two-thirds of their current worldwide purge (https://hillsboroherald.com/intel-layoffs-rock-hillsboro-2400-jobs-cut-across-local-campuses/.)

The thrust of the article is that 'big business' has changed the character of companies, to the detriment of local communities in many ways.   Vollum was teary over Tektronix being acquired and the headquarters moved from Oregon to North Carolina (c.f. the March announcement that the new owners of Tektronix would move the headquarters of Oregon’s legendary technology company from its Beaverton campus to Raleigh, N.C.). Here is Dunn's article (https://newsregister.com/article?articleTitle=steve-duin-exodus-of-major-corporations-leaving-barren-wake-in-oregon--1752253563--52423--commentary

Vollum’s lament is shared widely.   If someone in 1990 had said that Ted would fail, and be moved out of Oregon, it’d be like saying HP would suffer a similar fate and leave Palo Alto, or Boeing, imagine this, would leave Seattle for Chicago.   And Palo Alto, and indeed the entire Bay Area, has become a rich-kids ghetto, where the local executives haven't got time or interest to become part of local service groups, and all of the service folk are completely priced out of the local housing markets, etc.

Dunn's article cites a dozen Oregon firms who started, thrived, and then were acquired and "folded" in terms of their local impact.   He doesn't tackle the question about the Willamette Valley wine industry (which we are loving), and the probable evolutionary path that it is on, thirty years behind Napa Valley.  Ahh, progress.   Maybe we'll get lucky in Oregon, and most of the high-tech jobs will disappear, and the consequent lack of wealth will save us from 'success.'

Certainly the stories of Mentor Graphics, HP Oregon, Intel Oregon, Sequent Computer, Floating Point Systems, and so many others (most of which Dunn doesn't even list) are cautionary tales.

For me, it is a bit personal.

HP has known Tektronix (Tek) "forever.'    Or I should say, Keysight (nee Agilent, nee 'the real HP'), knew them deeply.  The Colorado Springs division of HP, competed head-on with Tektronix for years, and their derivatives still do.   

Vollum and Jack Murdock founded Tek just after WW II, after Vollum interviewed with Dave Packard at Bill Hewlett's insistence.   Some of that story is told in my essay about Melville Eastham and General Radio that has been featured at both the GR and Tek museums   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/257429741_You_Should_Meet_Melville_Eastham

Hewlett met Vollum at MIT in Bill's role as the Army liaison officer for new technologies,  Vollum had invented a major improvement for the Dumont and General Radio (GR) oscilloscopes of the day, a trigger circuit that would synchronize the signal in a repeatable way.  This allowed switching circuits to be viewed in operation analogous to the continuous wave communication signals for AM and FM radio.  

Packard and Vollum reportedly sparred; Vollum vowed to go set up his own company, and to beat HP, which was still a very small company itself, less than one-third the size of GR.  Vollum had done his thesis project at Reed College, a small liberal-arts college in Portland that would later enroll Steve Jobs briefly (that's where Jobs fell in love with calligraphy, which spurred his later interest in graphical Laser Writer products).

Tek's story, vis-a-vis HP, is told strongly in the book that Ray Price and I wrote, The HP Phenomenon https://www.sup.org/books/business/hp-phenomenon.   I won't bore you with the details here, but suffice to say that Tektronix made more actual profit dollars than HP for many years in the 1950s and 1960s on sales that were routinely about half of HP's total.

In 'scopes, Tek had something like 91% of the market when I joined that division in 1962--HP had 6%, and DuMont about 2% with Iwatsu in Japan at about 1%.   Dominant, in other words.

I led two groups, the Large-screen X-Y-Z displays group and the Logic Analyzer group, that bested Tek in the 1970's, and in the process I got to know some of the Tek folk pretty well.  I only knew Vollum from a distance, along with Norm Winningstad (Norm ran their displays business, then left Tek to set up a wide-word computer company, Floating Point Systems).

I got to know Oregon three ways--I wrote the 77 page Oscilloscopes chapter for Barney Oliver's tome on Instrumentation https://www.amazon.com/Electronic-Measurements-Instrumentation-Inter-university-electronics/dp/0070476500, and worked with Tek engineers to do it; I used Portland wholesale nurseries to stock my first garden center; and I demo'd Tek's new 7000 scope at the New York IEEE show when their own sales folk didn't know what it did.  

As a consequence, I did get to know a number of Tek employees very well, including Merle Kaufmann who helped design their 7000 series "do-all" 'scope; and Jack Grimes, who led their first computer entry, and then their graphics displays group.  Jack died a few years ago from leukemia, but his resume shows an outstanding contribution (https://www.roundtablegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/JackGrimesCV.pdf).

I knew Bill Walker at Tek, Engineering VP, and Doug Strain (founder and CEO at ESI) very well.  And later I taught at OHSU Engineering School with Jack Raiton and Jim Huntzicker.  Jack was Tek's controller for awhile, and later CTO at Planar Systems.   I never worked at Tektronix, in fact I was probably their chief thorn, and that led Bill Walker to tell Gifford Pinchot III to meet me when I became HP's chief engineer in 1982.   That meeting led to the picture of the "Medal of Defiance" that Gifford published in Intrapreneuring.

Don’s article is timely.  Let's consider some of his points:

The idea that Tektronix, once the state’s largest employer, would leave Oregon is as daunting as the possibility that Nike, or Columbia Sportswear, would someday give up on its home.

That’s because the Portland-born founders of Tek, Don’s father Howard and Jack Murdock, were deeply rooted in Oregon when they created it in 1946, some 700 patents ago.  “Tek was in Portland because my dad and Jack Murdock were from here,” Don Vollum says. “It had nothing to do with economic development, lower taxes or a better work force. The same is true with Phil Knight [and Nike].”  Microsoft? “They were in Albuquerque, and [Bill Gates and Paul Allen] wanted to go home [to Seattle],” Vollum says. “Businesses begin in a place because they have a connection. The better question today is if and why they stay.    “That next generation of professional managers is when people look at education and taxes and workforce.”    And in Oregon, today’s view and tomorrow’s forecast are bleak.

“The combination of high taxes, poor services and poor schools isn’t a winning one, and that’s where we are,” Vollum says. “You put those pieces together and you have a place that’s not desirable for people if they’re starting or running a business.”   That’s not all you have.   You have Dutch Bros, the state’s second-most-valuable company, moving its corporate headquarters from Grants Pass to Phoenix.   You have REI closing its Pearl District co-op, Adobe abandoning its Southwest First Avenue digs, and KEEN Footwear shuttering its Swan Island factory.  You have a 35% office vacancy rate in Portland’s central city and its tallest ghost town, the U.S. Bancorp Tower, burning money.

You have door-maker Jeld-Wen — which founder Dick Wendt built into one of America’s largest privately held companies — moving its corporate headquarters from Klamath Falls to North Carolina after a change in ownership. And in May, Jeld-Wen announced it would dead-bolt its Chiloquin factory, adding another 128 people to the ranks of the unemployed in that Southern Oregon county.  You have distant, detached ownership of several of Oregon’s largest companies: PacifiCorp, Precision Castparts, Teledyne FLIR and The Standard.   You have Intel, currently Oregon’s biggest employer, on the ropes.

And you have Oregon ranked fifth in the nation for total tax burden. As ECOnorthwest’s Michael Wilkerson told the Oregon Legislature in April, the ongoing migration of high-income households out of Multnomah County alone has produced, year after year, “over $1 billion in income loss.”   That’s the equivalent of a cool 1,000 millionaires departing annually, leaving someone else to fund the Oregon Symphony and Preschool for All.

“Why does this matter? That part seems to be missing for the political class, just what this is costing us,” Vollum says. “You see it in philanthropy. We don’t have the next generation or donors for the arts and our cultural institutions.  The older generations created a lot of wealth, and then gave a lot away, which supported all those institutions. There is not really a younger generation of wealth creators coming along behind them in Oregon, and some of the few who are promptly leave for other states, taking their charitable contributions with them.”

Vollum, co-founder of Vista Ridge Capital Partners, is well familiar with how philanthropy serves the region.  The estate of his father’s partner, Jack Murdock, launched the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, which has given more than $1.4 billion to Northwest nonprofits since 1975.  And Vollum, over the years, has chaired the boards at OMSI, the Portland State University Foundation and the Columbia River Maritime Museum, and served as president of the Providence St. Vincent Foundation.

When you live in a city, be that Hermiston or Coos Bay, you are much more likely to invest your time, energy and discretionary income in the upkeep of the neighborhood. Oregon has struggled to attract major sports franchises over the years, but Portland landed an Indy car race in 1984 because Norm Daniels, CEO at G.I. Joe’s, and Bob Ames, president at First Interstate Bank, believed their hometown deserved the upgrade.

When Daniels died in 2021, his wife, Rickie, illuminated that connection. “He loved to work. He just loved the company,” she told The Oregonian. “It was his baby because he grew up there. That’s where he wanted to spend his time. But he also cared deeply about what the company could do to service the community.”   It’s one helluva lot harder to care about Oregon’s universities, museums, foundations or communities when company owners are parked in Texas, Omaha or Florida.

Carrie Hoops is executive director of the Miller Foundation, which provided $12 million in arts and education grants in 2024. Recipients included the Painted Sky Center for the Arts in John Day and the Britt Music & Arts Festival in Medford.   As Hoops notes, corporations accounted for just under 7% of charitable giving in the United States in 2023. But, she adds, there’s an “economic ripple effect” when a corporation moves on:   “Many employers encourage their employees to volunteer. When a corporation leaves, it can lead to job losses, which then affects individual donations. People are laid off, and those people don’t have the money to contribute to their favorite charities.”

The slow vanishing of Oregon-based companies may be picking up speed. A January 2025 report by the University of Oregon’s Institute for Policy Research & Engagement found that Oregon businesses are routinely recruited to expand outside the state, leading to a loss of “thousands of potential jobs and billions of potential private investments in the past five years.”

That two-thirds of those recruited businesses have reported “moving or expanding outside Oregon” isn’t surprising.

How much faith can one retain in the local workforce when Oregon’s fourth and eighth grade test scores for reading and writing are among the nation’s worst?

Ponder that for a moment. Even as spending per pupil has soared, Oregon’s test scores have bottomed out. The state is dead last in fourth grade reading and math scores and — thank heaven for West Virginia — the numbers are almost as discouraging at the eighth-grade level. Those scores are terrifying forecasts of economic growth and stability.

How does one recruit talented tech workers to Portland’s central city, where they will be forced to pay the highest income tax rates outside the island of Manhattan? And how long will entrepreneurs continue to believe Oregon is fertile ground on which to build or keep their companies?   “We have so many regulations [that] it is very difficult to do business here,” Jordan Papé, the president and CEO of Eugene-based Papé Group, wrote in an e-mail. “[We] need a public policy agenda that wants to lure, rather than lose, business investment.”

Our cultural institutions may not otherwise survive.

Is that panic in the wings?   “Panic? Panic is the wrong word,” Vollum says. “We’re long past the panic stage. We’re in the stages of grief.”

Denial? Anger? Bargaining? Depression?   Cratering test scores. Self-defeating tax policies. Empty office towers. And the lingering exhaust fumes from the Oregon companies that are moving on.

"Can't happen here?"  That's what Palo Alto said about HP.   That's what Seattle said about Boeing.