The Hare lineage — the full untrimmed record

Substantially new material, summarised here with the full document held in the archive. Principal additions:

BILL WHITSON — by family account, worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, and before and after the war at Lawrence Berkeley Labs alongside his close friend E. O. Lawrence on the original Cyclotron and the Bevatron. Public records and cover stories later described the career as rocket research or academic administration.

MILTON DIXON HARE — world-class physicist and electrical engineer. During the Second World War he worked on classified radar and radar countermeasures, including the invention of chaff, at Harvard's Radio Research Laboratory alongside Robert Buss and William Rambo. His superior and mentor was Fred Terman. In 1955 Terman recruited him to Stanford's Electronics Research Laboratory as Professor of Electrical Engineering on classified military projects; the ERL was the epicentre of the nascent Silicon Valley and Hewlett and Packard were regular visitors. His $14,000 salary supported a canvas-bodied private plane.

[Corrected 13 August 2026] On the plane: the author's father was riding in the back where the luggage was stored and stepped on the canvas floor of the fuselage while airborne. His foot broke through and stuck out of the plane in flight. No great matter — the plane flew at around 100 knots, and they patched the canvas after landing. Airplanes were simple in those days. An earlier version of this record said he had nearly put a foot through the wing on the ground; that was wrong on both counts. He died at 46 in 1960.

JUNE WHITSON — born to Seventh-day Adventist missionaries in Montana, in June. The family moved to South Africa, to the Great Karoo along the Cape Town–Pretoria rail line, the route Churchill took in the Second Boer War. At eight she severed the head of a Cape Cobra with a shovel. She sent the science kits that arrived every few weeks, ostensibly from her husband.

THE MILVIA MAD HOUSE — the family home at Milvia and Cedar in Berkeley. The author's mother took a degree in child psychology with a 4.0 over seven years, taking a year off for each birth: Milt, then Jonathan fourteen months later, then Joel twenty months after that — the original batch of what became Milton Hare's nine children. The parents separated when the author was six or seven; the boys wore Goodwill clothes.

THE CYCLOTRON MAGNET — a 65-ton electromagnet salvaged from the original Cyclotron sat outside the Lawrence Hall of Science. An eight-year-old could climb inside and vanish. He did, and stayed until sundown reading nuclear physics, chemistry and astronomy. First programming at eight, feeding punch cards into the IBM mainframes at Evans Hall, next to building T-8 where his mother worked.

THE SAUSALITO MUDFLATS — after the divorce his father lived aboard an abandoned side-wheel paddle car ferry, slowly sinking, with a drive-through carport on the top deck. The boys travelled there alone at weekends by bus, BART, train and ferry. The community included Stewart Brand; the author's family helped build a composting toilet to address raw sewage going into the bay. Aboard the ferry the author listened to his father debate Marxism with 'Perot' — an older man who had known Lenin personally and had been with Trotsky at his assassination.

THE MAGIC FOREST — a clothing-discouraged commune at Takilma; his father's cabin at Gasquet among old-growth redwoods. As the only children, no chores were required; they helped where they liked, and the reward for voluntary work was a strawberry off the vine. TJ, an outlier with a twin-engine WWII transport plane and an orange WWII German military vehicle, taught the author to drive at ten by sitting him on his lap.

PETALUMA — 8th to 10th grade at 2999 I Street. He mapped Northern California's bases, studied weather, calculated fallout trajectories, and built a shelter in the yard from a 1950s civil defence manual with a shovel, plywood and dirt. His reading was Sea Power, the Naval Institute Proceedings, and Jane's. He supported Carter, then Reagan; wrote an A+ senior paper defending SDI on deterrence-against-rogue-states grounds; registered independent as a secret Reagan Democrat; and carried a leather briefcase to Berkeley.

HEWLETT-PACKARD — first paid manufacturing job at the scientific instruments division in Santa Rosa, later Agilent. Soldering, circuit boards, instrument chassis, and authorised access to spools of solid gold wire — which he assumed was a flex until he learned gold is simply the best conductor. Three mentors taught him the HP Way. He later thanked Packard at Stanford, and Hewlett through an introduction from E. O. Wilson.