Ross. S. Snyder Tribute

An Obituary, a Valedictory, an Appreciation. RIP Ross S. Snyder 1920-2008

By Paul Schindler

Rest in peace Ross; you will be missed. The word gentleman was coined for the likes of you, and we'll not be seeing another of your caliber.

Ross S. Snyder, my friend for 27 years, died at the age of 87 on Jan. 1, 2008, according to mutual friends. His last residence was in Woodside, Calif. At his express wish, he was cremated and scattered and there was to be no service.

Ross, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, was a bomber pilot in the Pacific Theater during WWII, briefly an engineer/announcer at WOR, New York, an engineer and manager at Ampex, and finally a marketing/public relations/technical writing official at Hewlett-Packard until his retirement in 1985. His was an active retirement; he was a gourmet, an oenophile, and a lover of theater and opera. He was robust until a year before his death, and mentally acute as recently as Nov. 12, when I last joined him at his home for lunch. At that point, his health was clearly declining, and had been for nearly a year, in part as a result of a personal tragedy which left him feeling depressed.

As of this writing, there is no obituary for Ross anywhere on the Internet, or in any newspaper I can find. If you know of one, please leave it here as a comment.

Consider this question: shouldn't there be a celebration of Ross' life by the people who knew him? I will arrange a memorial page for him (as I have done for Edwin Diamond and Norman Sandler).

In the meantime, here are some of Ross's memories:
ROSS SNYDER REMEMBERS (past Ampex product developer)

Ross Snyder's autobiography, from recordist.com. I can tell you, this is exactly the way he talked about himself and his career, so I am certain of its accuracy and provenance.

Ancient & Retired. UC Berkeley interrupted by WWII, flew over Japan, returned UC postwar. Radio engineer/producer/classical FM station DJ, WDC, NYC, San Francisco. Founding member & Fellow, AES. Former member SMPTE, Acoustical Society. Ampex 1952-1957 as Audio Product Planning mgr., Theater Project mgr., Special (custom) Audio Products mgr. Sole technical contribution: invented Sel-Sync. 1957-1960 Video Products mgr. Then, Hewlett-Packard, Palo Alto & environs to 1987, instrumentation mktg., editor HP Journal, computer mktg.

Ross invented multi-track recording (no matter what Les Paul says) and introduced stereo sound to America's record companies. Here are some web references:

www.audio-forum.net www.audio-forum.net/pro/Les_Pa
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/sel-sync/snyder
There is an AES obituary I have not gotten permission to post; if you are a member, check with them.

My friend Richard Dalton shared this poem with me:

Heaven

If I am very good
I will die in a state of grace
that will entitle me
to live forever on a beach.

Where the sun is warm
but not hot
and the water cool
and gentle.

And I will be allowed
to throw sticks and tennis balls
for all the dogs living on
in this heavenly light.

And they will bring back to me
their joy.

I want to add a few details about Ross's life that he shared with me during our frequent lunches. I made it a point to stay in touch with retired and semi-retired friends from my days as a computer journalist, because I liked them as people. I dined regularly with George Morrow until his death, and saw Ross almost monthly for years, although the frequency of our visited dropped off in 2003 when I got a job teaching (which prevents me from going out to lunch…). I last saw him in November: mentally at the top of his game, but physically clearly distressed. Death, however, was not on his mind, nor was his memorial.

Born in Wyoming in 1920, Ross was one of several siblings. He moved to California while quite young and lived there nearly all his adult life. He never married.

He arrived at Cal (University of California, Berkeley) in September 1939. According to his own telling of the story, he simply showed up with his high school transcript and was admitted (now those were the days…).

When the United States went to war, Ross went too, joining the Army Air Corps and rising to the position of pilot in the Pacific Theater, where he flew regular missions over Japan. He did have one harrowing landing, although the details escape me.

I am 90% sure he told me he flew out of the same airbase as Paul Tibbetts and the Enola Gay (delivered the first atomic bomb). Am I hallucinating? I don't think so. I seem to recall him saying that all the other pilots were restricted to quarters while the bombs were delivered and the Enola Gay practiced "very unusual flying maneuvers." But, of course, I could be mixing up my talks with Ross with something I read. In any case, he flew either B27s or B29s, and I think he said he flew them from Tinian.

In his 70s, I took Ross to a Japanese lunch. He said it was his first time eating Japanese. I was surprised; Ross was a gourmet of considerable repute. We had known each other for 15 years, and this was the first time he every mentioned his WWII service. "People who prattle on about the great war are boring," he said. But under questioning, he described his experiences. Have you ever been to Japan since the war, I asked? "No. The last time I was there, they were shooting at me, and you can't help but take that personally." (Shades of Catch 22!)

He returned after the war, finished up at Cal, and moved to New York City, where he worked for several radio stations. One of them was WOR, one of America's oldest and most respected radio stations; at the time it was the flagship of the Mutural Radio Network. Ross served as a remote engineer for big band broadcasts; he set up the microphones, connected the remote line and announced the program. He told me he had broadcast Duke Ellington several times, along with a number of other big names that were not quite so big when Ross heard them the first time.

At Ampex, Ross was an engineer, with a variety of titles. He gave a demonstration in the early 1950s that was the impetus for the conversion of the American recording industry from monophonic sound to stereophonic sound. In 1955 he set up a demonstration in San Francisco Symphony Hall with the best speakers and tape recorders money could buy, and with the symphony. The players played live, and then they mimed while the tape played. Virtually no one in the audience could tell which was which. Another triumph for Ross. He

I rarely saw Ross mad--it was rare, even for him to be irritated. One thing that got his goat was Les Paul taking credit for inventing multi-track recording. He was the first artist to use it, and made it popular, but Ross Snyder invented it. He called it Sel-sync. Technical details are here:
http://www.aes.org/aeshc/docs/sel-sync/snyder

If I could set the record straight single-handedly I would. Suffice it to say that Ross Snyder was an engineer and Les Paul wasn't.

During the 1950s, Ross became quite familiar with Hollywood mogul Mike Todd, whose Todd-AO projection system competed with, but lost out to, Cinerama. Ross went around the country installing Todd-AO sound systems in theaters. Eventually, Todd-AO evolved into 70mm, a now defunct high-resolution film format. Sometimes the technically best system doesn't always win (eg. home Beta recorders--although apparently Blu-Ray is about to win, a rare exception to the rule).

Ross joined HP in 1960 and held a number of writing posts there, including editor of the HP Journal. When I met him in 1980, shortly after my arrival in Silicon Valley as a reporter for Computer Systems News, he was in marketing and PR. Among his employees was, briefly, the now-famous Michael S. Malone.

I knew a fair amount about wine at the time (having been to the Napa Valley Wine Library class twice). Most press lunches served swill wine out of a box or a jug. I was at an HP luncheon where the food was amazing and the wine very impressive. I asked one of the PR people in attendance who knew enough to order a good wine. "Oh, that would be Ross Snyder. He knows all about that." I made it a point to meet him, and we became good friends. He came to my house for three black-tie dinners over the years, and innumerable other lunches and dinners. Always with good wine.

In 1984 or 1985, Ross suffered a heart attack and missed some weeks of work. On the day he returned, I rented a limo and took him to lunch, toasting him with "welcome back to life." I was flattered that he remembered this gesture years later. It was from the heart.

Ross was a huge fan of opera and Broadway. He had been to the Bayreuth Festival, the holy grail of Wagner, on several occasions (black tie on cold wooden benches with lousy food and wine, he said), and probably saw the Ring cycle, in various places, a dozen times. Since we were both interested in Broadway, we would eagerly discuss his annual trips to New York (he could not go the last few years because of his health). He also took an annual trip to see several operas at the Met, and was a subscriber to the San Francisco Opera for decades.

Ross, of course, knew both David Packard and Bill Hewlett, although, of course, he always called them Mr. Packard and Mr. Hewlett. He often briefed Packard for product announcements. He thought the world of both men and was disappointed by what he felt was HP's renunciation, in recent years, of the HP Way.

Finally, on a personal note, Ross had a temperature and humidity controlled wine cellar in his home. My friend Clark Smith advised me to buy a case of "birth wine" for each of my daughters; 12 wines whose vintage was the year of their birth. He selected them for me. I stored them at home for a year or two, but Ross told me they'd never make it to 21 years without proper storage; he kept them for 20 years. (1981 was a great year that held up well; 1984 not so much). I was always grateful to Ross for his generous decision to hold the wine for me. He stopped drinking wine as he grew older, and the last few years he was keeping the refrigeration and heating going just for my case. In both 2002 and 2005, he threw in a bottle of wine when I picked up the cases for my daughters.

Brilliant, humble, funny and witty, entertaining and well-informed. Ross Snyder was all this and more, and there is a gap in my life where he used to be.

John Minck's Recollections of Ross

John Minck spent a 37 year career with Hewlett-Packard, mostly in marketing communications. He worked with Ross Snyder during that period until Ross' retirement in 1985. He admired Ross for all those gentlemanly qualities during their association at HP and was stunned to learn AFTER those years that Ross was a B-29 aircraft commander during WWII. John's life and times at HP are described in 150 pages of narrative  here

He passed along this additional tribute to Ross:

HP Oldtimers will be saddened to hear that Ross Snyder passed away on New Year's Day, 2008. I don't think a memorial service was planned. During his more than 20 years with HP, Ross was the consummate PR professional and high-tech wordsmith. He retired about 1985. He was a fine food gourmet and wine connoisseur person with a legendary wine cellar. I seem to recall talk of several thousand bottles, with an annual trip to France to resupply.

In the last couple of years I had visited Ross at his house in Woodside about 3 times as his health deteriorated. Ross was a quiet man, and it is hard to imagine that during WWII he was a B-29 aircraft commander. In all his years at HP, he never told me or even his direct manager, Dave Kirby, about his dangerous service. He flew 35 missions over Japan, out of Guam, a grueling, 3000 mile, 14 hour round trip mission all over water. Later, the Marines took Okinawa which became an emergency base. He said if you lost one engine, return was problematical, two engines and you were going to ditch, hopefully near one of the picket ships. He earned 7 air medals and 2 Distinguished Flying Crosses.

In the immediate post WWII, I can recall flying the 4-engine Lockheed Constellations or the DC-4s or DC-6s for cross-country trips before jets. They roared and vibrated and at the end of an 8 hour cross-country flight, you were just as fatigued as if you ran 20 miles. Imagine doing that day after day, with the very real danger of dying in the ocean, with little possibility of rescue.

About a year ago, I asked Ross to join me on a day trip to Castle AFB in Merced, because I wanted him to walk with me around the aircraft museum and share some of his experiences. The base is closed now, but there are still about 50 of those old warbirds on display, from WWII bombers, freighters and fighters to the B-36, 47 and 52. There is even a nasty looking SR-71 displayed out front. It was a day for me to remember. We started with the B-17 which he had trained in, it had engines made by one of the two major manufacturers, Pratt-Whitney I think, but those engines were "bulletproof" and never stopped running.

As he stood by the B-29, he recalled their continuous problems with those 3800 hp Curtiss-Wright R-3350 engines, 2 ranks of cylinders, and a lot of parts made of magnesium, not the best material for fire. The superchargers were unreliable yet they had to be used at high altitude. The B-29 featured a new K-band radar which allowed them to fly high and bomb with modestly good precision through bad weather.

Several interesting anecdotes. Ross bragged about his flight engineer who could nurse those Wright engines at full power when needed or be miserly on fuel when cruising to and from. Hundreds of aircraft took part in those daily raids. Ross told of requesting a gallon of silver polish from one of his friends in the states. He put his ground crew to work on polishing the aluminum of the whole fuselage and wing’s structures. The upshot was that his aircraft flew about 10 knots faster, which apparently made just enough of a speed difference in their bomb runs that he felt it upset the mechanical calculations of the anti-aircraft gunners in Japan. He thinks it had something to do with their better survivability. It also gave them increased margin in fuel management for those long flight times.

On another occasion due to serious headwinds they were very low on fuel, so he requested an emergency direct approach and landing. In his final they waved him off, so he aborted, up landing gear and went around. On the next pass, as he touched down, the landing gear collapsed and the B-29 belly-landed and ruined one airplane, but all the crew were safe. He faced a court martial, since it was considered pilot error. Luckily, a technical investigation discovered that the design wiring of the B-29 had a fatal flaw, if you aborted a landing, pulled up the gear in that condition, upon re-landing the gear wouldn't lock. So his near fatality resulted in a needed modification of all aircraft.

 

***
Excerpts from a narrative history of HP:

In the 60’s, the product division's marketing staffs worked through central groups in the corporate offices to accomplish our product advertising and technical publicity objectives. All of our new product and technical applications output was funneled through a professional PR wordsmith, Ross Snyder. As divisional contacts, Dean Abramson and myself had a long working experience with Ross, and we always found him the consummate PR man.

Ross had previously worked at Ampex Corp in Redwood City during its post WWII days of great product innovation. These were the years of the early video recorders that created a huge new paradigm in broadcast television. I recall that one of our technical seminar lectures during my 1957 Stanford master’s program was given by the project manager from Ampex whose group had just introduced the new video recording machine, using cross-scan and 2-inch wide tape.

At HP, Ross was a workhorse of publicity output. His demeanor was self-effacing, almost to a fault. We who knew him well, always thought that he never took enough credit for superb word-smithing of our PR output. The procedure was that the divisions would write the product or application release, then Ross would edit or re-write as needed. His abilities for professional composition were legend. And in his personal presentation, he was the gentlemen’s gentleman. His relations with the global trade magazine editors were the highest, and you could tell it when watching such interactions at places like trade shows or conferences. The editors all respected him, and in turn, HP and further in turn, our divisions and products.

Ross made us all proud of our connections with HP. When editors visited the HP factory in Palo Alto, since there were only a couple of manufacturing divisions left in town, we in the Microwave Division would often get called to give a factory tour for the visitor. In all the 25 years that I knew Ross professionally at HP, I never knew his real background, until long after he retired from HP in about 1985.