Word: mickelson
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Merlyn Francis Mickelson, 38, of Minneapolis, a high school dropout and former disk jockey, has exploited a high degree of ability in a specialized technical field. He is president and 75% owner of Fabri-Tek Inc., a $16 million-a-year company that is the nation's largest manufacturer of memory cores for computers. His stock holdings in the firm are worth $47 million...
Born on a drought-stricken Minnesota farm, Mickelson quit high school in 1943, joined the merchant marine-and was sent into radio training. That led to a succession of postwar jobs as radio-station engineer, broadcaster, electronics technician. In 1953 he joined Remington Rand and was put to work designing memory cores for Univac. Computers were in their infancy, and a skilled designer could quickly make a mark in the field...
Authorities at the federally subsidized Argonne National Laboratories outside Chicago heard of Mickelson's expertise in this narrow specialty, invited him in 1955 to start building experimental computer parts, offered to supply the raw materials. Mickelson figured that the demand for memory cores would be so great that even a small firm could cash in on it. He set up Fabri-Tek in his basement, working nights and weekends while he held his daytime job at Remington Rand. His total investment in the new company was for "some wire, solder, tweezers, and a little pair of nippers-altogether...
...Argonne contracts multiplied, Mickelson taught friends and neighborhood housewives how to make the tiny (one-twelfth inch wide) cores, and private companies began buying them...
...many traits in common. Almost all of them decided early in life to be their own bosses. Most of them started earning money while still children: by the time he was 13, Arthur Carlsberg had been a caddy, gardener, seed salesman and fruit trader. Many of them, like Merlyn Mickelson, never went to college; others, like Arthur Decio and Charles Bluhdorn, impatiently dropped out of college in order to study in the marketplace. At the beginning of their careers, they lived lean, often taking shoestring salaries in order to pump profits back into their enterprises. In his first plant, Mickelson...