Gordon Pearlman

Fuks: Let’s start with your date of birth and your early childhood.
PEARLMAN: I was born in Des Moines, Iowa, December 20, 1942, right in the middle of the war. My dad was stationed in Alaska at the time and didn’t come home until I was two years old. He was a physician. He was stationed on one of the atolls in the Aleutian Islands, the one next to the one where there was the only battle that took place on US property—in US territory during the whole war. He kept saying “nothing ever happened.” I went back and researched a little bit. There was a horrible battle there with tremendous casualties, but it was on the next atoll. They were the hospital for that. They were a field hospital, very much like a MASH unit. 

So, Des Moines was a very nice community, about 700 Jewish families, three synagogues: Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform. Growing up in Des Moines was interesting. It was a very de facto segregated community. There was one African-American student in our school and she was the daughter of the custodian at the synagogue which was across the street from the school. Other than that, none. It was a very peaceful place to grow up, no recognized antisemitism. Most of the doctors in town were Jewish and respected. It was a good place to grow up, also a good place to get out of as soon as you grew up!

Fuks: So, you were involved in which synagogue?
PEARLMAN: We were members, and my parents were very active in the Conservative synagogue. When I was younger, before I was bar mitzvahed, the cantor lived next door and the rabbi lived around the corner. The rabbi and my parents were very good friends. We socialized a lot with the rabbi. As soon as I got bar mitzvahed, since we lived a block away from the synagogue I became the de facto “tenth man” whenever necessary. I would get dragged over there on last–minute phone calls to make up the tenth man on the morning minyans.

Fuks: You made a lot of minyans. Then you got involved in USY?
PEARLMAN: I was very involved in USY, not much in AZA, but very involved in USY. I went to national conventions which was always a wonderful experience, a train ride all the way across the country because they were always on the East Coast. They were in Buffalo or New York City, train rides all the way across the country with lots of kids and lots of fun. I went on the USY Pilgrimage in 1959, and was on the national board after that.

Fuks: Pilgrimage to Israel.
PEARLMAN: To Israel, yes. I was on the national board after that. Priscilla Kostiner was the vice president of USY national when I was on the board. I don’t remember that, but I remember—somebody was vice president! So I was very involved in USY. It was fun in the Middle West. All these organizations—USY, AZA—all started in the Middle West. The story I always like to say is there was one other Jewish girl in my class and she was my cousin. So that’s why these organizations existed, and we took advantage of it. I went to conferences in Omaha, in Kansas City, in St. Louis, in Winnipeg. These went on three or four times a year, so you would travel somewhere else.

Fuks: They were enriching experiences and also opportunities to meet other Jewish kids from around the country.
PEARLMAN: That’s right, from around our area. And AZA also started in Omaha. USY started in Des Moines and Minneapolis, and AZA started in Omaha and moved quickly to Des Moines and Minneapolis. Our AZA chapter was chapter number four. These people got sent to—like my father. My father was born in Poland. He came to the United States when he was three years old with his family. The rest of the family was already in Des Moines. He had a brother who was enough older than he was to have kids older than my dad, so they had all left Des Moines already but finally his parents came last. He came with his parents and they had one more child after they were in Iowa. I think my grandmother had—there were seven kids. I think she had 13 pregnancies. She was just completely wasted by the time she was 60 years old.

Fuks: Thirteen pregnancies. That’s exhausting to even consider. These early engagements in organized Jewish activity had an impact on you.
PEARLMAN: Very much so. By the time I was getting out of high school all of my friends were Jewish; all my activities revolved around the Jewish community. It worked.

Fuks: You ended up pursuing theater as a course of study. How did that happen?
PEARLMAN: Who knows? I always loved to mess around in the theater. I had worked at the Des Moines Community Playhouse where, again, a lot of the Jewish community was very active, even the cantor. We did a production of Guys and Dolls where Ivan Perlman—who by the way is a famous cantor these days. I think he’s still alive. Ivan Perlman played Nathan Detroit—no, not Nathan Detroit, he played Sky Masterson. I was involved in that. Even when I was in high school I was doing the lighting there. Their lighting there was extremely simple in those days. In school I was really a science kind of person. I went off to Iowa to be an Honors physics student. My first experience with physics at Iowa was I go to meet my advisor, and my advisor was James Van Allen. Van Allen belts? I go into his office and he erased something off the blackboard, and I was convinced the next satellite was—they were actually building the satellites in the basement of the building where I took physics. It was just too much math for me. I love math but it just wasn’t my place. I took a theater class at Iowa, very nice, very good theater class at Iowa, and got involved there. Messed around majoring in psychology and physics and finally decided I would just go ahead and major in theater, and graduated in theater from Drake University, then went to Tulane in New Orleans for my graduate school.

Fuks: You got an MFA.
PEARLMAN: MFA from Tulane.

Fuks: Talk about your life in the world of theater for a while.
PEARLMAN: So the next step, I went to Tulane. It was a very good program in those days. The Tulane Drama Review which was the avant garde publication in the theater was published at Tulane. I got accepted both to Tulane and to Yale. Of course, Yale was the school to go to, but Yale was very expensive and no help, and Tulane was free tuition and a nice stipend as a graduate assistant, so I went there. It probably would have changed my whole career to have gone to Yale—I don’t know for which of the others—since in these days almost everybody else I know in the business did go to Yale.

Fuks: Including Meryl Streep.
PEARLMAN: Yes, that whole crowd. But even in the technical end, Yale was the place. Scene design, lighting design, technical direction. And they had a theater consulting major, too, which was something nobody heard of in those days. Tulane was nice. I was able to do a lot of stuff, where at Yale you’d be the third guy from the left in the chorus. So Tulane was good. Then from Tulane I went to teach at the University of North Carolina in Greensboro, which the year before had been North Carolina Women’s College. It had just changed over to being a coed institution. It had a nice department. It had had coed students for a few years because the arts had started taking coed students in Greensboro before they changed the name. It had a nice little graduate program. Almost all the students in the graduate program were older than I was. I was very young. I taught there for three years. It was a good place. It was kind of strange. It was a speech/drama, so consequently we also had Audiology in the same—I mean, it was just crazy. We built a brand-new theater the year—the year I got there they started working on a brand-new theater, and that was fun because I learned a lot about building theaters. So we built this new theater, and in the basement there was an Audiology department. It made no sense whatsoever, had nothing to do with theater whatsoever. 

I taught there for three years and then a friend of mine was teaching in Chapel Hill, a friend from Tulane. When we left and went to Greensboro, they left and went to Chapel Hill. He called me up one day and said, “We’re looking for a new TD.” So I applied for that and got it very quickly, Technical Director. I left Greensboro and went to Chapel Hill, which was a completely different institution. The University of North Carolina had the only really good theater department in all of the South except for Tulane. Consequently, there were great students there and a really good faculty. Horrible facilities, but they still got by. The theater that we performed in called PlayMakers Theatre was one of the four original buildings at the University of North Carolina, so it was a 1600s building. It had been the library originally when the University was started. Then in the Civil War it had been a stable, and things like that. It had been there for a long time. It was a very cute little theater but a horrible facility to work in. And it’s still a theater. We were just there. It’s still PlayMakers Theatre. They have now built a new building. Then again, they were building a new building when I got there and I was very involved in building their new building. It got started just as I left, but I was very involved in design of their new building.

Fuks: Before we continue further with the theater, I want to talk about your personal history in terms of meeting your wife and having your kids.
PEARLMAN: Let’s go back to meeting. That one is easy. We met through USY, going to all these conferences. We would ride on trains and get to know each other. There was always the dark car and the light car! It was fun. So that’s where we met. We met through USY. Our kids were not born until we were in—the first child, Mark, was born in Greensboro and Aaron was born in Chapel Hill. In both places, we had very little Jewish affiliation. In Greensboro there was just one little synagogue. I don’t think we ever went there. In college it just wasn’t the thing you were going to do. We didn’t have kids that were interested. We still had Shabbat and Hanukah and high holidays. I think we did in Greensboro and in Chapel Hill find a place to go to high holiday services, but that was it.

Fuks: You were in the South in the late ‘60s?
PEARLMAN: In the late ‘60s, early ‘70s. Greensboro was the South, no question about it. Chapel Hill was not. Chapel Hill was a Northern community that happened to be in the South. We had not one friend, nor did I know anyone on the faculty, who was from the South. It was fascinating. The student body was from North Carolina, except for the graduate students. They were all from other places, but the undergraduate student body was from North Carolina but the faculty was 100% Northern. The same year that Jesse Helms got elected the Senator in North Carolina, Chapel Hill elected a black mayor. So it was not a Southern community by any definition. We used to kid about it; if you are going to go to Raleigh, don’t forget to take your baseball cap. They called it a little bit of heaven, and it really is. It is one of the nicest places. The weather is wonderful, the community is terrific. When we first moved there the University owned the electric company, the telephone company, and the hotel. It was a university town like no place else. The mayor was always a faculty member. It was always a very…

Fuks: That is interesting because during that era there was so much unrest in one way or another, issues around integration, issues about the Vietnam War.
PEARLMAN: And North Carolina was in the middle of it. Jesse Helms was the worst. He was originally a TV commentator who insisted on using the “N” word in every commentary he ever made on TV. He was just absolutely a horrible person.

Fuks: And yet Chapel Hill sheltered you from that.
PEARLMAN: Yes, Chapel Hill sheltered us from that completely. It was literally up on a hill. You just didn’t know about the rest of North Carolina. Greensboro was a completely different situation. Greensboro was the South. That was that.

Fuks: That’s fascinating. It must have been really interesting in some ways to just be a Northerner and a Jew in that part of the country.
PEARLMAN: There was a pretty good-sized Jewish population in Chapel Hill, not in Greensboro, in Chapel Hill that were all faculty members. There was no synagogue in Chapel Hill. When Aaron was born we had to get the rabbi from Durham to come over and do the bris. Like young faculties are, there was very little religious activity, but we still had lots of friends who were Jewish and did meals together and holidays together, things like that.

Fuks: Getting back to theater, it sounds like much of your interest was in the technological aspect of theater.
PEARLMAN: Always. I was never an actor, ever. When I was an undergraduate student you were forced to be in shows, and I hated it. I just have no desire to be on stage. I’ve always been a backstage person.

Fuks: Talk about how those interests grew for you and ultimately what that took you to.
PEARLMAN: Like I say, I started at the Des Moines Community Playhouse and had a good technical director there and he kind of took me under his wing. I did a lot of stuff. I changed the theater around quite a bit, put in some new lighting equipment for them. It was all very crude in those days. I kept their systems running for them. Then when I came back to Drake to finish my undergraduate school I continued to light their shows for them. I lit three or four shows there while I was at Drake, which was very good experience. Most people don’t get to go to graduate school having already lit five or six shows. They do their first show in graduate school. Tulane was a very good experience, too. It was interesting to live in New Orleans. New Orleans was a fascinating place. We had no money whatsoever. We lived on $125 a month. Sondra was accepted to Newcomb but again we couldn’t afford it. Sophie Newcomb is the women’s school of Tulane. So she went to the University of Louisiana in New Orleans, LSUNO, which is now the University of New Orleans. In Louisiana in those days—it may still be true—residents did not pay tuition, so she didn’t need housing, so she went to school for $49 a semester which was the student fees. That really was a great boon. We had Jewish friends. A horrible story about—we went to high holiday services and Yom Kippur services with friends whose parents also lived in New Orleans, so we had dinner at their parents’ house and we went to Kol Nidre, and the rabbi died on the pulpit! That makes the whole counting issue very interesting!

Fuks: That’s fascinating, that’s really powerful. For what it’s worth, my grandfather who was a rabbi died on Yom Kippur; it’s very powerful.
PEARLMAN: We did keep up a little bit of Jewish activity even in New Orleans. New Orleans had just beautiful synagogues. New Orleans had a very nice Jewish community. This was the Orthodox, thank God, where the rabbi died. The Reform synagogue, Touro Synagogue, was the first synagogue building built in this country, so it was a very interesting congregation.

Fuks: On top of the transition from being in the world of theater in tech into what you did in terms of technology and where that took you.
PEARLMAN: Being in the right place at the right time is wonderful. I was teaching in Chapel Hill and one of my students, a crazy trust-fund kid, comes up to me one day. He wants to do his thesis production—he was a graduate student—wanted to do his thesis production, and he wanted to use 35 slide projectors. This is the days of Kodak slide carousels, but there was no control mechanism around anywhere. So I went over to—the State had a surplus warehouse over in Raleigh and I went over to the surplus warehouse and I dug around and I found an old paper tape reader. I don’t know if you know what paper tape is, but in the early days of computers there were punch cards, then there was tape that was about an inch wide. It had eight holes across it. So that made a byte, a bit byte, and you would punch the holes out to make ones and zeros. That’s how you loaded programs into early computers or stored data off line, whatever? They had a high-speed paper tape reader. I then got hold of an old pinball machine, because old pinball machines in the days before electronics were great because they had hundreds of relays in them, and relays were the only way you could do any kind of logic. So with that pinball machine and that thing, I built a thing to control all 35 of these projectors. But it quickly became obvious that you had to have some way to punch the paper tape. You couldn’t sit there and actually punch a different pattern for each cue in the thing by hand. 

I had another friend in the city planning department, which was early into computers. They had some minicomputers and they had a technician there that serviced their computers. This guy said to me, “Well, the only way you can possibly do this…”—another Jewish guy, coincidentally, who we’re still in touch with. He lives in Vancouver, BC. He said, “Well, you’ll have to punch the tape on a teletype.” Computer terminals in those days were teletypes, 55 baud teletypes, and they had a little paper tape punch on the side of them because that’s the way you stored the data that you got back from the computer. So I learned Basic which was the program that was the simplest language to learn, and I wrote this little program where you could write cues and edit the cues. Then you’d stand back and this thing would take an hour to punch the paper tape. But that was a lot easier than doing it any other way. It introduced me to the computer center which was free and had lots of fun things to do in it. 

I started playing around the computer center quite a bit as a faculty member. I wrote another program that actually did three-dimensional drawing on a terminal so you could get rid of the invisible line. In those days that was the big issue about three-dimensional. Oh, yeah, you could draw a cube but you remember those lines in the back you’re not supposed to be able to see. Getting rid of the invisible line. I even demonstrated that at a trade show in late ’69, ’70 in San Francisco, using a dial-up line from San Francisco back to Chapel Hill. In those days that was really so crude it was unbelievable. But we did it and it worked. I got involved in the computer center. The problem in the theater in those days was that we’re getting more and more lights on shows. For every time you had more light, you had to have another operator. Every time you had about 12 fixtures you had to have an operator for those 12 fixtures because you’ve got 12 handles to move. He’s only got two hands. Computerized or automated lighting systems were being developed. They were all hard-wired logic. They weren’t computers, they weren’t stored-program computers. They were mainly coming out of England. They were very expensive. The first ones were $200,000 or something like that. They were very simple-minded but it dawned on me that you really could do this with a minicomputer, and minicomputers were—this was ten years before the PC—but minicomputers were around. Digital Equipment Company was the king, DEC. They made little minicomputers and it turns out that in my neighborhood, a nice little ranch-style neighborhood that we lived in, our next-door neighbor was an IBM guy, because IBM had all their stuff at the Research Triangle. The next guy down the street was the local salesman for Digital Equipment Company, and the guy across the street was the head of the faculty grants committee. We were talking around one day and I said to John, the DEC guy, what would it cost? I figured out what it would cost, then I went to Dan who was the faculty grants guy and said is there any chance I could get a grant for—I don’t know what I wanted, $20,000 or something, even less than that I think, and he said well, apply. What the hell? I filled out the applications, gave them to my chairman who was a guy who thought technical theater was only there to make their actors more comfortable. He really had no time for technical theater whatsoever. But he signed it, and he told me later, “I only signed it because I was sure you weren’t going to get it.” Of course, he didn’t know that I had an inside track. I got it instantly. Not only that, they gave me more money than I asked for, and then six months later they called me up and said, “We’ve got some more money. Do you need more money?” They gave me more money; it was a very nice thing. 

I got this Digital Equipment minicomputer and I taught myself how to program on it. It was very, very crude. We talk about gigabytes and megabytes and kilobytes. This thing had 8K, eight thousand bytes—not even bytes, words—of core memory. Core memory was little magnetic circles with three wires sown into them, by hand, by women sitting there by hand. There were 16,000 little doughnuts on these PC boards that were all sewn together so they could store. And that was it, 16K. You had to store the program there, you had to store all the data for the show. Everything was stored in that. They were very, very by today’s standards, extremely, extremely slow, but it got the job done. I got it working and had made arrangements—in those days software belonged to the owner and hardware belonged to the University. This was all software, there was no hardware designed into it at all, so it belonged to me. So when the University decided they weren’t going to renew my—weren’t going to promote me to associate professor—technical directors don’t get associate professor. Technical directors are assistant professors and then they’re out, because you can get another young guy for no money, especially with the particular chairman we had who had no love of technical theater at all. 

So my contract was not going to get renewed the next year and I decided, “I’m not going to stay around for that dead year.” and started looking to leave. Kliegl Brothers in New York, who in those days was the king of the industry, offered me a job to come to New York, and that they would manufacture this product and we’d sell it. I quit my job and about three months before the end of the semester I got a call from Kliegl Brothers saying the deal is off because John Kliegl had gotten himself into a domestic hang-up and nothing was going to happen at Kliegl’s. Kliegl was a very, very strange company. 

Then a little company out here in Portland called Electronics Diversified—they were out in Hillsboro…. Their rep came by and saw what I had and he told them about it, and I came out here. They had maybe 30 employees; they were a small company. I came out here to be vice president and sales manager for them, and to bring this product along. I was supposed to go to work on July 15. We drove across the country, as you do, stopped in Des Moines for July 4 and got out here a few days later. 

We bought a nice house in the West Hills, in Northwest. The house had been rented to a bunch of young guys and they just destroyed the house. So we had the toilet all torn out and the bathrooms all messed when my new boss shows up at the door (we don’t have a telephone yet). He shows up at the door, knocks on the door. He says, “Well, we promised this show in New York” He didn’t know the name of the show. “That we would deliver to them a new computerized system.” They were building one of these hardwired systems, not a microprocessor-based system (trying to anyway; they never did finish it). “We promised that we would deliver one of those, but we can’t, so we’re going to have to deliver one of your systems.” They’d never really ever built one. They’d built a demo one to take to a convention that didn’t actually drive dimmers. It just put data up on the screen. So in three days (this is before FedEx) we rounded up all the equipment to build one, and built it. The president of the company was an old Tektronix guy. In those days, Tektronix spinoffs basically had the use of Tektronix to do their prototypes, so we prototyped all the boards, we ran them in Tektronix’s board shop. People were literally getting on airplanes and flying stuff up, bringing parts, because there was no FedEx. Three days later we had built — an absolute miracle, I cannot figure out how it ever worked. I got on an airplane with this thing in the cargo hold—now remember, it’s the size of a dining room table, this thing we’re talking about here—and fly it to New York. That unit ran for the next 15 weeks without a flaw—well, one little flaw, somebody shorted out the power supply, the one and only time I’d ever been to New York and back in the same day. I took the red-eye, spent the day in New York, and flew back that night. But it ran, and in the meantime we built another one.

Fuks: So this is a very large board that was basically controlling the entire Kliegl light system—
PEARLMAN: It wasn’t Kliegl. This was Electronics Diversified. It was their dimmers. It was not only the first show in New York to use a computerized system but also the first show to even use electronic dimmers. Before that, there had been guys back stage pulling handles on these great big circular resistor dimmers.

Fuks: This was a massive event in the world of theater.
PEARLMAN: Oh, a massive event in the world of theater. It completely changed the lighting business forever. Frank DeVerna, who owned Four Star Lighting who was the big rental company in New York, took me down in the basement (not a pleasant guy) took me down in the basement of Four Star one day and said, “See all this?” He had hundreds and hundreds of these great big rolling racks weighing a thousand pounds apiece. They each had 12 dimmers in them. He says, “It’s all trash. You just completely wiped out my entire inventory! Nobody will have them anymore!” And that was true. The Shubert Theatre, where this show was, had to convert it to AC. New York theaters were all DC. They were all still on direct current. They had to convert it to AC to do this show, to do Chorus Line. I didn’t mention that. The show was Chorus Line!

Fuks: Not a shabby first—
PEARLMAN: Not a shabby place to start. But it had to be somebody like Chorus Line because it had to be somebody who had the leverage. Chorus Line had already opened at the Public. It was the Hamilton of its day. It was a phenomenal hit Off Broadway. So they went uptown knowing it was going to be a million-dollar event; they had leverage. They had leverage to say, “We don’t want conventional dimmers; we want electronic. We had electronic dimmers down at….”

Fuks: What an astounding thing for you.
PEARLMAN: Like I said, being in the right place at the right time, I was able to change the whole industry.

Fuks: So you patented?
PEARLMAN: No, none of this stuff is patentable, and even if it is, the industry is so tiny that you can’t defend a patent, because defending patents is such as expensive thing to do, and the volume of business you do isn’t great enough. Although there have been a lot of patents in our business, there is very little in the way of patent defense. There was in this case but there was somebody who did sue us, and it turned out to be stupid. So there isn’t much—there aren’t a lot of patents and none of them are defended. I did later have a really good patent in the theater business that did last us for quite a while. But no, none of it was patented. To be exact, this unit didn’t really sell. There was one on Chorus Line, there was one at the Geary Theater for ACT in San Francisco, and there was one in [Arvada?], California. Those were the only three that were ever sold. It had a lot to do with the fact that eight months after I came out here, I left Electronics Diversified. They just weren’t a big enough company for what I was doing. They couldn’t keep their promises, they couldn’t build the equipment, so I left and then went back to work for Kliegl finally and ran an R&D department here. John Kliegl said to me, “Well, now you’re moving to New York.” I said, “Only if you double my salary.” He said, “Well, okay, stay in Portland.” So I stayed in Portland and I hired a person away from Electronics Diversified, and we built then four more systems for Kliegl over the years. Finally, Kliegl had a rule that said no one could make more money than John Kliegl could, and I was getting a royalty on all these products. That was the deal I made with Kliegl, and I was making much more money that he was, so we had to spin the business off and it became an independent business that did contract work with Kliegl. So that was the way to keep John Kliegl….

Fuks: This made a massive reputation for you in the theater world.
PEARLMAN: Yes. It was a real fun time. The whole Chorus Line experience was phenomenal because I got there the first day they were moving into the theater. I figured I’d be there two days and I’d come home. Well, Tharon Musser who was the lighting designer, would not let me leave. So three weeks in, now Sondra’s here, two little kids, knows no one, bathroom’s all torn up, and I’m in New York, staying in a really crummy hotel, only because I didn’t know better than to say no. Two or three days before opening, a week before opening, I said Tharon, “I’ve got to go home. This is just crazy.” Tharon said, “I’ll tell you what. We’ll fly your wife out for opening night if you’ll stay through opening night.” I said opening night? Chorus Line? The hottest opening ever? So Sondra flew out for opening night. We watched the show standing in the back. We didn’t have seats. We were just standing in the back watching the show. After the show, Tharon took us all to Sardi’s. We sat at the table with Michael Bennett and Tharon and George [he means Marvin] Hamlisch and all the people who were involved in the show, waited for the reviews to come out. It was one of those experiences you just don’t ever have again. That was great fun. The sidelight to that story is they never did pay for her ticket to come to New York. I would run into the guy who didn’t pay for it, years and years afterwards, and I said, “Frank, you know you still owe me for that!” In those days, we had no cash. That was a horrible big deal, but we did have a wonderful time.

Fuks: I remember one time, Gordon, walking into a theater with you and it was during a rehearsal or something, and you walked in and somebody said, “That’s the guy that invented the Kleigl [inaudible].”
PEARLMAN: I’m a very big fish in a very little pond, or I was. Now I go to these shows and the 18 guys who are still there that are my age know who I am. All the young kids have no idea. But they did honor me last year with a life-time achievement award. It was very nice.

Fuks: I remember an event that took place for you. You were on vacation in Mexico and they were having trouble lighting the Academy Awards.
PEARLMAN: Yes, I do remember having some—but that was years and years later when we were building the boards for Morpheus Lights which was one of the two big moving light companies at the time. They had some kind of problem. There were always little problems. I remember going to—shortly after we released the first Kliegl board I went to Paris for a trade show. We were staying at the Hilton in Paris with Kliegl. I think we ran up like a $5000 phone bill before we got out of Paris—because in those days when you made a phone call in a hotel they quadrupled the price, especially an international call. Because we had a show opening in the States and we had to get something resolved. As my partner Steve Carlson always used to say, we weren’t really on the leading edge, we were on the ragged edge of technology. We were really out there doing stuff that nobody had ever thought about doing before. It was fun. The first thing we built for Kliegl was (this is again before the PC and even before Wozniak and Jobs had built their little box) we built a box that we had written software for that other people could use, was a much better product than any of the products that they came out with using a TI microprocessor. It was quite a remarkable little project. It was a fun time. It was doing a lot of crazy stuff, and kept doing it for years. I’m still doing it right now. I just came up from downstairs. I’m writing an iPhone app that’s basically a lighting controller that runs on your iPhone.

Fuks: It’s wonderful that the interest is still there, the passion is still there.
PEARLMAN: It’s just for fun.

Fuks: Here’s what I remember about this Academy Awards story. I just want to make sure it’s true, that you were on vacation with Sondra in Mexico. The Academy Awards were having difficulty with their lighting. They called you. You said, “I’m on vacation.” They flew you and Sondra up so that you could consult with them, and you sat in the light booth watching the show, and then they flew you back to your vacation.
PEARLMAN: I don’t remember that. I do remember showing up at the Academy Awards. I did go to the Academy Awards a couple of times, mainly just for the fun of it. But there were always problems with everything. As you bring out these new products and people try to do things you had never thought about and you have to figure out some way to get them to—

Fuks: So it’s at least a plausible story.
PEARLMAN: It’s plausible. It could have happened. That’s possible.

Fuks: What a fantastic career in the world of theater.
PEARLMAN: For technical theater, I’ve had a great time at it.

Fuks: Obviously, it rubbed off on your family. Sondra created the Oregon Children’s Theatre.
PEARLMAN: I don’t know if she mentioned this. When Sondra went—Sondra has no theater experience whatsoever. That hasn’t been rubbed off, but it happened to her once before when she got her first teaching job in Greensboro. They hired her as the theater person. She’d never done any theater, never directed, never been on stage. So yes, it rubbed off. I was actually on the board of Portland Civic Theatre when it was dying. They had a grant to do a children’s theater program and had no idea what to do with it. So Sondra come in and did that.

Fuks: Let’s move to talking about the Jewish community. You moved to Portland which has a somewhat more substantial Jewish community than……
PEARLMAN: A much larger Jewish community, a much different Jewish community. The Jewish community in Des Moines was all Middle European. There was a Reform synagogue that did have a few—that was I assume more Germans than—but you got here and Beth Israel was this kind of high church thing I’d never seen before. It was organ music and choirs.

Fuks: And very German Jewish.
PEARLMAN: Very German Jewish. There was a tremendous, in those days, segregation between the German Jewish community and the Middle European Jewish community. The Middle Europeans were at Neveh Shalom, the German Jews were all at Beth Israel. The problem was that Neveh Shalom was all much older people and they didn’t have much in the way of youth programming at all in those days. It was a much smaller congregation. We lived over in Northwest so we decided to join Beth Israel. We were never happy there. We had to fight with them not to use the organ at Mark’s bar mitzvah and again at Aaron’s bar mitzvah. It wasn’t our place. 

The kids got into it, really liked it. Aaron was active in NFTY. Once they were having a NFTY meeting, and they served pepperoni pizza and Aaron went crazy. We didn’t keep kosher but that’s not what you do in a synagogue. Manny backed him up on it. Manny put up a sign in the kitchen that said “no treyf.” It was a strange place. Then Havurah came along, and Havurah was nothing but the younger, more liberal people from Beth Israel who just couldn’t stand Manny, who just couldn’t stand the pompousness and the high church, so they started their own congregation. Alan had been the junior rabbi for a couple years. I mean, he wasn’t there when we first came here, but for a couple years Alan Berg had been the junior rabbi. Then he left and was the rabbi at Havurah. So we left the Temple and went to Havurah. We were founding members. Havurah was great. Havurah was really wonderful in those days. I got to the point where the phone would ring and I would say, “Don’t answer it, it’s Havurah.” It was, and I think it probably still is, but it was a member-run congregation. 

We were active in Havurah for a while. Then Alan went back right before Mark’s bar mitzvah. Havurah wasn’t paying Alan and he was young and needed money, so he went back to the Temple. Then Havurah (because they couldn’t afford to pay Alan they couldn’t afford to hire a rabbi either) didn’t have a rabbi for three or four years, and we needed a rabbi. We were going to be the first bar mitzvah at Havurah, so we went with Alan back to the Temple, and again didn’t like it but as long as Alan was there it was fine. We had both bar mitzvahs there. Alan’s last bar mitzvah was Aaron, before he left. Then we stuck it out until they graduated from high school because they were involved in the youth groups. Then we immediately left and went to Neveh Shalom, which was very much like our congregation. I think we probably would have joined Neveh Shalom when we first came here except I walked into the building and I said this is the ugliest thing I have ever seen. In those days, it hadn’t been fixed up at all, it was still a concrete block with acoustical tile. The pulpit was ugly and everything. I said I just can’t stand this. And Beth Israel was so gorgeous, being a theater person. I think that’s the main reason we didn’t join Neveh Shalom in the first place, was that the building was so atrocious. It still is, but at least it’s been fixed up a little bit. The latest remodel especially makes it at least welcoming. Then we went back to Neveh Shalom and have been there ever since.

Fuks: What about the organized agencies and the community federations?
PEARLMAN: I have this friend, David Fuks, who keeps getting me involved in things! I was on the allocation committee thanks to David Fuks. Then I was on the board at Cedar Sinai, again thanks to David Fuks, and was even their representative to the Federation for several years, which was an excruciating experience! I was never fond of the Federation. As anybody in Portland knows, I think, it doesn’t service the community the way it should. It services a small group of the community quite nicely but the general community at large—especially now that a good 50% of their budget goes to the school. I’m not a fan of parochial education and I’m certainly not a fan of funding parochial education for other people who can afford to go there without me helping them. So Federation has never been a favorite of mine but a lot of the organizations are. Cedar Sinai is a great organization. I was on the board. Before I was on Cedar Sinai’s board (without your influence) I was on the Jewish Family Service board for several years, and I was the chairman of the education committee at Beth Israel for a few years. I’ve always been involved in the Jewish community but now Sondra’s involved in the museum, we’re both involved in the museum, a good project. Belonged to the J [Jewish Community Center] on and off. When we first came here the J was still pretty active, then the J turned into nothing. Then I belonged to it because it was a decent athletic club for a few years, but I don’t belong to the J anymore.

Fuks: You and Sondra created a remarkable circle of friends in the Jewish community. Maybe you could talk a little bit about that.
PEARLMAN: Early on a lot of our friends were people who were in the same situation we were. We moved to Portland before the whole world moved to Portland. When we moved to Portland, you had moved to Portland, a couple of other young couples had moved to Portland, and we kind of gathered together and made our own thing because we didn’t have family here and we kind of made our own little family. Then it’s grown. Now we have lots of Jewish friends in Portland. Havurah was another—in a situation like Havurah you make lots of friends, where you’re so active. We’re not very active in the synagogue [Neveh Shalom]. We go to services at High Holidays, and participate a little bit but we don’t have kids any more. We do have a great group of friends in Portland. It’s been very nice. Sondra loves to entertain, as you probably understand, so we do the High Holidays and we do break-fast, a great crowd of friends at break-fast; it’s always fun. And then this house helps a lot, too. We have a house that’s easy to entertain in.

Fuks: It’s fun seeing all the generations of families.
PEARLMAN: We like to do that. We do that summer party, which you’ve come to all the time. We do it three generations and that’s fun. I don’t know of any other party where there’s three generations of people that go on. It’s an annual event.

Fuks: Your extended family includes a lot of Portland at this point, and your immediate family is also here and in San Francisco.
PEARLMAN: I’m now known in the Jewish community as Aaron’s father! Oh, you’re Aaron Pearlman’s father!

Fuks: And Sacha’s father-in-law.
PEARLMAN: And Sacha’s father-in-law. Well, they don’t associate that one so quick because her name is Reich. But they do. Oh, you’re Aaron Pearlman’s father, because of course everybody in the community knows Aaron. So that was an interesting transition. It was all of a sudden. He went to BB camp….Actually it happened at PSU, when he went to work at PSU. The BB camp thing is where he really found his niche and is really having a great time and doing a lot of good for BB camp, too.

Fuks: They do tremendous good there. A significant part of my life I was Fuks’ boy. It was interesting becoming Fuks, and of course, my kids are Fox so they’re spared some of those difficulties.
PEARLMAN: It’s fun. Mark and his family are in the Bay Area, and Aaron and his family are here. It’s just wonderful to have them here. We’re involved with them constantly. Lev was here, spent the weekend with us. He’s about to get his driver’s license so that’s the end of that! We have a wonderful family and I have a very big family in the country and in Australia. We get together a lot. When my mother was still alive we would get together really regularly. Now we’re very, very good about everybody showing up for every family affair. There’s a bar mitzvah, there’s a wedding, we’re all there. That’s my mother’s family. My father’s family is very diverse. Of course, the age differences were enormous. My dad and his younger sister were the only two that went to college, so it made for a completely different relationship, but I did notice in the invitation list to Ravit’s bat mitzvah that my cousins on my dad’s side are coming to Ravit’s bat mitzvah. It’s very nice to see them returning back into the group of people.

Fuks: Sondra mentioned, when I interviewed her, her struggle with cancer in 2009 and subsequent struggles. I wondered if you wanted to reflect a little bit about that.
PEARLMAN: Well, it’s certainly been our life for the last eight years, now nine years. Sondra was diagnosed eight years ago with lung cancer and the prognosis was horrible. She went through treatment, chemo and radiation, and lived much longer than they thought she would. And two years after that she got her brain tumor, where the prognosis is zero. Nobody survives, and now we’re five years past that now, or just coming up on five years past that. And she’s still with us.

Fuks: Which is remarkable.
PEARLMAN: Remarkable. She’s healthy. As far as the disease, there’s no disease whatsoever. She does suffer a lot from the treatment. Had a lot of treatment, and the treatment has had a big effect, but we’re doing fine.

Fuks: What are your hopes for the future?
PEARLMAN: I don’t know. Live and be comfortable. I’m not out to do any…. This little project I’m doing right now with the iPhone app was really just a gag to see if I could do it. I don’t think it’ll make money. But I tried to limit my expenses, assuming my time is worthless, because it’s just a hobby. I think I’ve spent $150 so far on the whole project. I’m trying to keep it that way. I’m trying to not get attorneys involved, not get salespeople involved. It’s just fun. I’m extremely healthy, very luckily, and we’re just going to live our lovely lives. We have a great life here in Portland. Of all the little right-time, right-place accidents that happen to you in life, the Kliegl deal falling through and us having to move to Portland I think was the best. It changed our lives completely, because the Chorus Line thing came out of it, Portland came out of it. I think Portland is just the most wonderful place there is, a great city. Weather, the people, liberals. I think we’ll probably have to secede, but that’s a different story!

Fuks: Let’s hope not. Gordon, thank you so much for this time.