Considered Opinions

Joe Jakaby

I first met Joe in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel in Hong Kong, on the corner where Nathan Road used to dead-end into Salsbury Road at the harbor. I preferred staying there because it was right in the middle of the best shopping areas, with many great restaurants, and really convenient for suppliers to visit. The Peninsula, where all the big shots stayed, was just across the street. This is the area called Tsim Sha Tsui, which is the center of all the action on the Kowloon side of the city but unfortunately the harbor side of Salsbury Road is now built up with tall buildings, making it impossible to watch the hundreds of boats trying to miss each other in the harbor, while sitting in the luxury of the Peninsula Hotel Lounge with a Gin & Tonic.

I had flown into Kai Tak^[i]Landing at Kai Tak might have been where the term “white knuckles” originated. You could look out the window, going a couple of hundred miles per hour between apartment buildings and see people eating dinner a hundred yards away. on a Pam Am^[ii]Pan Am at that time flew east to west around the world from San Francisco (Pan Am 1), and west to east from New York (Pan Am 2) every day. 747SP that evening and taxied to the hotel. Joe was not the only dapper-looking gentleman in the lobby but he was the only one with a navy blue blazer, colorful silk ascot, and Benson & Hedges in an ivory cigarette holder – he had given me a heads-up^[iii]Telex preceded Email and Text messaging by a couple of decades by telex the day before.

This was in the early days of my experience with LCD wristwatches and Hong Kong was at the time and still is the go-to place in China for jewelry. I, having been totally absorbed by the world of electronics, hadn’t a clue about how costume jewelry or watches were made. I don’t think Joe knew very much more about it at the time than I did but he had lived in Hong Kong for a time and that was among my biggest reasons for hiring him. We spent a lot of time together after that and I learned a lot from him.

On one occasion Joe told me about the circumstances around finding his way to California. It seems that on the brink of the communist takeover of Hungary in 1956, Joe and his friends hijacked a commercial flight and escaped to Germany. There is a book by one of the Hijackers and even a movie made about the event. I remember telling Andy Grove about Joe’s adventure and Andy became very indignant, suggesting that there was no need for Joe and his friends to do that because he, Andy, had simply walked across the border, as he describes in Swimming Across^[iv]Set in the cruel years of Hungary’s Nazi occupation and the subsequent communist regime, the bestselling “Swimming Across” is the stunning childhood memoir of one of the leading thinkers of our time, legendary Intel chairman, Andrew S. Grove
– Amazon. I never knew if what Andy said was true, or if he was condemning the violence of the Hijackers reported in he News at the time, or if he was simply reflecting on the absence of excitement in his own story. With Andy, such questions were best left unasked.

By: Jim
Written: March 2022
Published: March 2022
Revised:
Reader feedback always appreciated^[v]… thoughtful commentary perhaps more so than shallow thoughts