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 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.
Comments