Make: Maverick Scientist

9 THE SILICON GARAGE

Thanks to the check for $10,000 ($53,996 in 2023) Howard W. Sams and Co. provided for the ITT reference book updates, during July 1976, Minnie, Eric, ten-month-old Vicki, and I left Albuquerque and moved to Live Oak, Texas, a town adjacent to San Antonio. We leased a small house for six months to provide time to look for a place we could buy. In January 1977, we moved to San Marcos, a college town in Central Texas, where we bought a home with space for a large garden.

Building the garden required removing a 10-inch layer of limestone rock with a steel wrecking bar and filling the open space with three truckloads of soil dumped in the front yard and hauled to the garden in a few hundred wheelbarrow trips. The leftover limestone ...