Every now and then, and probably more often than others, I come down with a case of the whatever-happened-to’s.  Whatever happened to Ellen, the little girl up the street who had ice-cream stains on her tee-shirt?  Or to the kid I shared the paper route with?  Whatever happened to my high-school calculus teacher?  To my college creative-writing professor? And, in the most recent case, whatever happened to Al Ray?

Al (real name Elbert) Ray was a co-worker of mine in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I was cutting my teeth in Kodak’s membrane technology lab.  He was a tall and wide man with thinning hair, a sandy, baritone voice and a quirky sense of humor.  I remember Al as a creative but agitated individual, always somewhat off-balance.  He was fun to be around and he was tiresome to be around.  In the early days we shared an office, which proved to be my front-row seat to the workings of Al’s mind.

It wasn’t long before I was inspired to write a short piece about Al for my self-published, low-circulation, bio-literary magazine.¹  When I shared it with Al, he seemed baffled by the magazine and why I wanted to include him in it.  But here it is, verbatim, from 1976:

____________________________________________________________

Al is a thirty-six year old dissatisfied industrial chemist.  He has wanted to change jobs for years, hoping that a transfer would help him obtain an adequate salary ($50,000 a year ² would do, he says).  So far, all of his applications have been turned down.  Feeling trapped, Al has developed the attitude that it is man’s fate to get screwed.

But all is not lost for Al, for he considers himself an inventor who will someday beat the system with that million-dollar idea.  Thus Al sits in his office, chain-smoking low-tar cigarettes and writing down anything that comes to mind.  His notebooks are filled with the scraps of paper on which he records his ideas and inventions, usually accompanied by rough sketches.  Al believes that the contents of these notebooks will, in effect, assure him a future of total satisfaction.

According to Al, his idea factory dates back to his childhood.  Even then, he says, Al observed many systems which he knew he could improve, although he cannot now recall what those improvements were.  His more recent ideas do, however, provide a good indication of his lifelong thrust.  The following is a brief compilation of Al’s most notable efforts.

Make-It-At-Home Kits — Noting the popularity of home wine-making kits, Al proposes cheese-making, sausage-making, pickling, beer-making, candy-making, candle-making, sake-making, champagne-making, soap-making, perfume-making, cigar-making, meade-making, mushroom-growing, honey-growing, tobacco-growing, soul food, maple syrup and cosmetics kits. As with most of his ideas, Al is aiming for a broad consumer market, with potential for high volume and even higher profits.

Convenience Items — For instance, a pipe with preformed tobacco slugs, as easy to smoke as cigarettes. Or an ultraviolet beach screen, which would allow a person to tan while sitting in a cool and shady spot.

Energy Conservation — Another area of high market interest which Al plans to tap. He proposes wind-up cigarette lighters, wind-up flashlights, and yard lights powered by small windmills. For large scale energy needs, he extends the “bobbing-duck” toy to mammoth proportions, with electricity being generated by the continuous dipping of the duck’s beak. Al also claims to have independently discovered the principle of nuclear fusion.

A Better Mousetrap — The Sonic Mouse Evictor, as Al calls it, would emit a high frequency sound intolerable to mice, driving them from the premises. For simple mouse-catching, bait contained in his Electric Mouse Trap would lure the rodent to a trap-door box. In attempting to reach the bait, the mouse would fall through the trap-door and be electrocuted by hot wiring inside the box. Al admits that obtaining UL approval for this device would be difficult.

Far-Reaching Theories — In order to explain why 0! equals 1, Al has postulated a negative zero smaller than negative infinity and greater than infinity. In the field of cosmology, Al holds that matter is merely perturbations in an etherous time-space. And on the subject of reality itself, Al writes:

There are but two basic realities, existence and nonexistence. If there is but one existence, there is no reference. If there are two existences, there is reference, and a third basic reality emerges . . . reference.

Al considers no one idea his best, but the most notorious of them is certainly his concrete-wheel, rubber-road highway system. This is the standard used by Al’s fellow employees in assigning merit to his newest proposals. Al usually ignores outside opinions of his ideas, confident that he is on his way to a better world.

____________________________________________________________

Most of Al’s ideas have come to pass in the 35 years since this piece was written (as you can see in the various links above).  No doubt many of his ideas existed well before he “discovered” them.  Either way, Al didn’t follow through on any of them, as far as I know.

Eventually, Al came to be regarded as a malcontent.  Our supervisor suspected that Al was trying to cook up a reason to file a lawsuit against Kodak.  The supervisor called me into his office and asked me to “keep an eye on” Al’s activities in the lab.  It was disgusting that my boss would ask me to spy on a co-worker and it was sad that I did it.  I was 25 or 26 then.

I don’t recall how that particular situation ended but, some years after we parted ways, Kodak fired Al along with two other employees, claiming the three were using proprietary information to set up a membrane technology business to compete against Kodak.³

According to the newspapers of the time, Al threatened to file a countersuit against Kodak.  But there the internet trail goes cold.  I found nothing that suggested how this case ended, or what Al or Kodak decided to do next.  I lost track of Al until now.

Searching some obscure internet sites, I found that Al died in 2000, at age 57.  I have not been able to locate his obituary.  I wish I knew what happened to him.

I have now outlived Al in terms of years but not in terms of life’s labors.  Al packed a lot of drama into his days here.  I doubt he planned it that way, but that’s who he was: a man who wanted more from his life than what it delivered.  A troubled man, asking for trouble.

_______________________________________________________________

¹ The name of my so-called underground magazine was Reader’s Disgust — borrowed from the pages of MAD Magazine back in 1964.  I wrote the final issue in 1980.  For all intensive purples, Reader’s Disgust was the precursor of this blog, but it was lightweight by comparison.  [Return to Text]

² A $50,000 salary in 1976 would be equivalent to $204,000 today. [Return to Text]

³ From the Syracuse Post-Standard, Syracuse, New York, November 27, 1985.  According to the article, “…one of the former employees [Al] said … that he and his colleagues had only informally discussed the products they would make — including a children’s riding toy, stained-glass windows and faucet filters.” [Return to Text]