Coal Town to Mars: How Ray Winn Won

The fuel noisily ignites; a controlled explosion. The ground shakes, the gantry falls away amid billowing clouds of exhaust, birds flee the scene in panicked, sunlit flocks. The rocket rises on visible flame, gains speed and is soon ballistically tearing through blue sky on a path of its own making, attaining – and ultimately escaping – the upper atmosphere. Which is to say, Ray Winn has taken his leave. The sudden silence is disorienting. To some it is downright deafening. 

“I was in Las Vegas yesterday and I had to buy some things, and one of the things I had to buy was a hammer.” I’m sitting with Peter Kavoian, Ray’s partner of 38 years, at the Birnam Wood clubhouse. “Everything’s behind plexiglass now, so I’m waiting for someone to show up so I can buy this hammer, and I thought ‘…well, this is something that Ray and I would normally have done together–’” Kavoian’s eyes suddenly blur with tears. “This pain just comes out of nowhere,” he says with difficulty. “I just sat down in the store and started weeping. It’s ridiculous.” 

Peter sighs heavily, rallies with a weak smile and wipes his eyes. Here comes the blithe spirit for whom Ray fell so hard those years ago. “I’m just lucky they didn’t call the paramedics on this sobbing lunatic!”

Dangling Seat Belts

Ray Winn passed in December at the age of 91. Photos of Ray taken in his Autumn Years show an amiable older gentleman with kind eyes and a tranquil bearing. This is, in part, a ruse. Ray was like Halley’s Comet viewed head on. You don’t see from that perspective the celestial object’s wildly defining feature – the long vivid tail of the thing as it tears through the cosmos. Glancing at Ray across a room you can be forgiven for not seeing the kid who biked across Vegas with mobster Bugsy Siegel’s chicken takeout, or the guy giving JFK a chopper tour of a nuclear test site. 

Scientist, inventor, composer, self-discoverer; Ray’s revelatory pilgrimage reached its zenith in the early ‘70s, when what should the married father of three discover but a largely unmapped terra incognita named… Ray Winn. So it was that when a common friend introduced Ray and Peter Kavoian in 1988, stars aligned at the doorstep and 37 years of inseparable love commenced like the turning of a page. Ray was a man for whom a single lifetime was never going to be enough, and yet by all appearances he was becalmed and content. How? Two words: Peter Kavoian. 

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“My dad wasn’t this unapproachable genius. He was very approachable. And when he and Peter moved to Santa Barbara, I was so grateful because I’ve lived up here since he got transferred from EG&G here – my whole life. When he and Peter came back in the early ‘90s, it was just so cool because we had everybody here.” – Lisa Winn-Luna

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For decades Ray and Peter held court at their Rametto Road hub, and their later Birnam Wood hacienda; salons central for beloved family gatherings, chatty, martini-hoisting Montecitans, and even a rotating list of graciously hosted nonprofits. Now Kavoian summarizes his Ray – whose childhood gauntlet, later self-repair, and searching curiosity may be said to have produced a towering intellect housed in a tempered steel frame swaddled in corduroy velour. 

“He was raised in abject poverty, his four brothers and himself,” Kavoian says. “They had no money for the simplest things, like a cookie, for instance. Ray would take a piece of toast, put some cinnamon and sugar on it and bake it in the oven. And so now suddenly they had a dessert.” 

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“I remember launching Estes rockets with him on a clear day after it snowed, and not being able to find the rockets till the next fall when we visited and the snow had melted. Also meeting him over in Europe in 1985 for 12 days – and that was a blast.” – Kevin Winn

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Ray seems to have applied this can-and-will-do template to the whole of his meteoric life. “From the time he was a little kid,” Kavoian says, “Ray figured out how to look at the world, not from a perspective of deprivation, but in terms of opportunity. ‘How am I going to fix this problem?’” 

Indeed, Ray would become a terrific exemplar of the timeworn saying “From hardscrabble rural poverty comes Viking Mars Lander innovation.”

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“His pellicle really revolutionized the semiconductor industry, ended up selling to DuPont. Then he met Peter and they went on to their whole real estate venture in Texas. They’ve done very well. I’m still really good friends with Peter. He’s like, ‘Well, I’m your step father-in-law!’ And I go, ‘Uh, no you’re not. You’re more like my older brother!’ We laugh about that.” – Tony Luna

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Ray’s time – his “journey” to use greeting card jargon – was a hypersonic thrill ride whose seat belts dangled almost mockingly. Semiconductor lithography innovator / nuclear submarine planner and nuclear test site overseer / real estate conqueror / night club owner / fusion researcher / record producer / Viking Mars Lander imagist / multi-instrumentalist and composer / doting father and grandfather; Ray was fuel-injected, a barrier-busting argonaut with a blazing heart. 

If this profile of Ray seems to skip along with something of Ray’s personal velocity, please bear with it. Any attempt to apply narrative tools to the guy’s CV would be a Tolstoyan doorstop, so details of his hair-raising and manifold accomplishments will occupy a bulleted sidebar, and forgive the artless listing. Ray Winn “accomplished” everything he put his hungry mind to, but the man lived for his kids, Lisa, Kevin, and Paul, his adored grandkids, Zachary, Nathan, and Zoey – and his raison d’être; Peter.

Ray moved through life like a jet engine moves through air, drinking it in as both medium and propellant. How the guy made it to 91 without a heat shield is anybody’s guess. 

Flatware Pries Open Pandora’s Box

1934. Ray was born in Price, Utah to a coal-mining father and indomitable mother. When his father abandoned the family, the mining operation locked Ray’s mom and his six sibs out of their modest company housing, and one of Ray’s infant brothers died of exposure in the night. In time, Ray’s mom moved him and his five siblings to a pre-neon Las Vegas of some 8,200 souls. Legendary mobster Bugsy Siegel had yet to build the iconic Flamingo Las Vegas but plans were afoot. Though the erstwhile Mrs. Winn worked two jobs, the family’s privations nevertheless obliged them to live for a time in a Salvation Army tent. 

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“He would discuss with me different projects that he got interested in doing. At one point he was developing a way to keep a heat sink cool by making a little fan out of a piece of nylon.
He also invented an illuminating walking cane that works with a photosensor. He built his own recording studio. He was a self-taught pianist…” – Russell Lew

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Unquenchably curious from day one, little Ray simply had to know how everything worked – a harbinger of Ray’s later Renaissance free-for-all. At five years old, the exploratory little guy carefully inserted a knife into an aperture that appeared designed to accept it. When the flatware entered the wall socket, Ray (per cartoon canon) presumably spent a spread-eagled instant in mid-air, skeleton aglow with voltage. In the wake of that jolt his rattled grandmother bought Ray what she thought would be a pacifying little toolbox. If the dear woman thought this corralling of his energies would direct him to a more calming adulthood, she made a terrible mistake. 

Clara Bow and Bugsy Siegel 

The young man’s conjoined gregarious and entrepreneurial natures evolved in parallel, the nascent desert getaway’s unique assortment of blue-chip escapees the perfect network. By age 9 Ray had a paper route in one of the tonier parts of town. Rather than pitch the daily news from his passing bike à la Dennis the Menace, Ray would park his wheels, walk the paper up the drive and politely hand deliver. The delighted founder and CEO of Las Vegas carrier Bonanza Airlines saw something in the kid’s mannered determination and showered him with appreciation in all its forms, tipping Ray with company stock which the grown paperboy would one day redeem to buy his first house. 

Another charmed customer was early film goddess and desert retiree Clara Bow, if you can imagine. She introduced Ray to her immense record collection and let him have the run of it. Under the misunderstood screen siren’s euphoric canonical guidance, Ray was infused with the love and innate grasp of music’s structural and melodic beauty, an enthusiasm that would emerge rhapsodically as he matured, Ray teaching himself six instruments and composing at the piano. And yes – it was during this fruitful Winn on his Schwinn period Ray would grab takeout at the Red Rooster chicken joint in town and bike it up to Bugsy Siegel and his mob pals. It was a hungry enterprise, overseeing construction of Vegas’ foundational tent pole, the Flamingo. 

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“All of us just get together and we do every Easter, every birthday, everything, 4th of July, we go to dinners and Christmas and Thanksgiving and Halloween. We love to be all together, and Peter was always there to make sure all that happened. He’s quite the organizer. My dad would say, ‘Oh, let’s do this.’ And Peter would be like, ‘Okay, it’s time to organize it all!’ But my dad – he did all the games and things to make everything extra special for people.” – Lisa Winn-Luna

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Coal Miner’s Yachter 

Success lay ahead – but first Ray sailed through high school, several teachers confessing in parental conference with his mother (and through strained smiles) that they could scarcely keep up with the guy. Following graduation, a conspiracy of helpful adults, up to and including a state Senator, believed it in Ray’s best interest to skip college entirely and work with the PhDs at Los Alamos Nat’l Laboratory in New Mexico. This was arranged through defense contractor EG&G, through whose offices and historically relevant expertise Ray, initially hired as a technician, would rise like the aforementioned rocket. He would later gain a security clearance and ascend the ranks of the cold war nuclear weapons R&D realm, ultimately directing major U.S. nuclear weapons testing operations and overseeing some 14,000 personnel. If Ray’s pacific nature seems at odds with weapons systems expertise, there is on his personal website a telling anecdote. 

He remembers it being a Tuesday. Exiting the underground instrumentation bunker in full hazard suit and oxygen, Ray heads up the metal stairs and out through the blast doors to drive the 12 rutted, radioactive miles to the Control Point, where he will pick up supplies and head back. In the contaminated craterscape outside, he’s horrified to stumble upon a blinded, hideously dying coyote. With every dreg of merciful energy he can muster, Ray euthanizes the tormented animal with a length of rebar. In his unvarnished telling, the moment was one of searing heartbreak and self-reflection, as he eloquently explains in the essay.

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“He could be very funny. He was very loyal to friends. He interwove his interests and his love of technology. He loved flying airplanes and sailing, and I don’t mean little lake boats, like a Sunfish or whatever. His first boat was a 56-foot ketch.” – Mike Weber

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EG&G was principally, though, Ray Winn’s long initiation into a technologically varied career as uncategorizable as the man’s profligate imagination. His forward motion fed on discovery. “Ray Winn was the smartest man I’ve ever met,” says Russell Lew, who worked alongside Ray at Advanced Semiconductor Products (ASP). “He was knowledgeable in so many areas, and he was always looking for something new.” 

It was at ASP that Ray would secure a revolutionary patent in the semiconductor space. His game-changing invention (patent # 4378953) was a brilliantly optimized new means of manufacturing a pellicle – a membrane less than 0.1% as thick as a human hair – which perches above the semiconductor wafer to prevent minute specks of debris from drifting onto and fouling the precisely stenciled lithograph that is a printed circuit. Ray’s ASP colleague, Russell Lew, explains the significance of the invention.

“Today we’re able to see laptops, cell phones, today’s smart cars… all because Ray’s invention allowed the semiconductor industry to expand and continually shrink their geometries.” This windfall would be one of some 33 patents Ray would secure – many of them classified – over the course of an avid and fulfilling career in tech. This is to say nothing of the stunning real estate successes of Ray and Peter once they combined forces, a part of the portfolio Ray largely left to Peter, a successful and beloved designer in his own right. 

And just 10 days ago at this writing, a commemorative mob of Ray’s friends and family gathered at Birnam Wood clubhouse to see him off to that farther shore. Knowing Ray, as they were just beginning to pour the champagne around he’d probably already dropped anchor, backstroked in and made an offer on the beachfront condo. 

Ray Winn was a soft-spoken, even-tempered man whose quietude was a drawn curtain behind which lay a mind like a sun-soaked, verdant canyon, and a spark-throwing heart. 

Reunited

Ray had first seen Santa Barbara when his work with EG&G brought him here with his young family, who rented Fess Parker’s house in Hope Ranch. Years later, when Ray and Peter began their relationship, they built a home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When they decided to return to Ray’s old stomping grounds in Santa Barbara, a new chapter began.  

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“My dad brought his family back together, and he loved his kids and his grandkids. He loved his friends. And that was what was really cool. Peter and my dad brought so many people together. And you know…” [long pause] “…my dad had that sense of humor. Sometimes I would see that mischievous smirk at the other end of the dinner table. And I’m like, ‘What the heck are you up to Ray Winn?’” – Lisa Winn-Luna

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Restless Summiting

Here is a mildly edited rendering of Ray’s arc. There was one Ray Winn, and one was more than enough.

• 1953 – Begins his career with EG&G, a physics and energy company and U.S. government contractor. Soon he’ll have a security clearance. Ray is 19 years old.
• 1960 – Escorts JFK on a helicopter tour of the weapons test site.
• Worked across numerous advanced scientific fields including nuclear weapons testing, nuclear submarine planning, fusion research, nuclear rocket reactor operations.
• Participated in space probe sensor and imaging development including the Viking Mars Lander program.
• Worked at highly classified government sites including Area 51 and Los Alamos.
• ca. 1963 – buys a little V-tail Beechcraft Bonanza, commuting from Santa Barbara (where he lived with his wife Lorraine and three children at the time) to the nuclear test site in Nevada where he worked.
• 1974 – Meets Mike Weber who was going to graduate school and renting a room in Ray’s rooming house in Chestnut Hill near Boston College. Ray builds a recording studio in the basement of the rooming house for his enjoyment.
• 1976 – Founds Condor Coatings Company and hires Mike Weber.
• 1978 – Phillip A. Hunt Chemical acquires Condor Coatings Company. Ray and Mike stay on with the company for about a year.
• 1978 – Purchases first sailboat “The Condor,” a 56’ ketch rig, teak and brass, affectionately known as “The Taiwan Turkey”
• 1979 – Founds Advanced Semi-Conductor Products in Santa Cruz, California, developing and patenting a special type of pellicle. ASP became a primary supplier of pellicles to the early semiconductor industry.
• [Exact Year Unknown] – Founds a nightclub called Edge.
• 1988 – Meets Peter Kavoian in August, beginning a personal and professional partnership lasting nearly four decades.
• [Exact Year Unknown] – Co‑founds K+A Design Group which develops, designs, and builds high‑end residential real estate. Together they develop and manage approximately one million square feet of commercial real estate in Texas.
• 1989 – Founds Geronimo Restaurant in Santa Fe on Canyon Road. When dissatisfied with the restaurant’s bread quality Ray purchases a local commercial bakery.
• Early 1990s – Ray and Peter relocate to Montecito, California.
• 1994 – Purchases and restores a historic estate on Rametto Road, transforming a derelict property into a major architectural estate.
• 1995 – Sells Geronimo Restaurant to employees. The restaurant remains one of Santa Fe’s most respected dining destinations.

A CV in Short
1957-1980: Chief of Staff to President @ EG&G, Inc.
1981-2002: President and CEO @ Advanced Semiconductor Products, Inc.
2006-2010: President @ Nano Life Sciences, Inc.
1987 to passing: Real Estate investor and developer @ ‘Self-Employed’
2011 to passing: President @ Alexandros, Inc.