In this issue, we tell the story of two men whose foresight and ingenuity helped turn this once-quiet Valley of Heart’s Delight into the epicenter of the world’s high-tech economy. It is fitting, then, that we bid farewell here to the Alumni Association’s own visionary, a woman who leaves Bowman to, natch, join a Silicon Valley start-up.
Edie Barry would be the first to shriek with laughter at even the teensiest comparison to the pair of moguls on our cover, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. (Of course, Edie is always the first to shriek with laughter.) But the truth is that in many ways she embodies the style and spirit of the Valley’s founding fathers.
This notion occurred to me as I read David Jacobson’s story just a few days after Edie told me she was leaving. Hewlett and Packard, Jacobson argues, stand out not so much for the calculators and computer printers that they made but for the way they made them -- for their management ethos and values. Likewise, Edie will long be remembered for the HP-like values she brought to Bowman House -- teamwork, curiosity, innovation -- and for a beneficent management style that produced unstinting loyalty and uncommon results from those who worked with her.
A Bay Area native and UCLA graduate, Edie nearly passed on the chance to work at Bowman. It was 1983, and her prospective boss wanted a two-year commitment. That seemed unfathomably long to a 25-year-old consumed, then as now, by a restless energy. Though she ended up staying 15 years, she never stayed still. When she decamped in May, Edie was SAA’s head of business development, marketing maven and chief morale officer.
She was also a stalwart friend to this magazine. Edie was hired, in fact, to sell ads; she soon rose to advertising director and, in 1991, publisher. With her relentless drive, she brought dozens of national accounts to these pages. Even the ideas that backfired were good. She once pursued a high-profile vodka account by sending its New York ad agency a message in a bottle from a desert island. (Message: advertise in Stanford.) Unfortunately, the bottle broke en route, and the big-deal executive ended up with sand all over his desk.
Edie knew how to mix work and play – and encouraged her staff to do the same. “On sales trips, she’d say to me, ‘If you don’t have an appointment, go shopping,’” recalls Kim Carlisle, ’83, who worked in ad sales from 1987 to 1991. “She knew this fabulous earring store on Montana Avenue in Los Angeles.” Edie sent another ad sales rep, Meg Michaels, on a boondoggle to Hawaii, where Meg’s husband was on a mission as a Navy pilot. (Meg says she ended up selling so many pages for a “Best of Hawaii” section that the trip proved a brilliant decision.) A few years later, when Meg was putting her husband through business school, Edie loaned her a few hundred dollars so she could buy Christmas presents. “She took care of her people,” says Michaels.
In recent years, Edie was the business guru at Bowman, ensuring that SAA earned enough money to pay for its alumni programs and services, from reunions to regional activities to our website. She supervised a business development team known on campus for creativity and entrepreneurship. She was the brains behind, among other things, those backyard benches made from old bleachers at Stanford Stadium. (Trouble assembling your bench? Call Edie at her new job.) Outside the office, she was a utility infielder on the Bowman softball team, where she was known as “The Hammer” for her unorthodox swing. Fellow Bowsox gently suggest that the best part of her game may well have been her 10th-inning storytelling over beers at the “O.”
Edie’s most valuable role, however, was as friend and counselor to many of us. In a bogus issue of the magazine that we produced as a farewell gift, SAA staffers wrote a page for the “Letters to Edie” section. Thumbing through the finished product, I couldn’t help but notice that so many of the 90-odd Bowman hands referred to Edie as their mentor. We also presented her with a cassette tape to an answering machine. On it, each Bowmanite was to have answered the question: What did you learn from Edie?
I confess that I never got around to leaving a message. So, Edie, here it is: You taught me that good people can do great work – and have fun doing it. Since you left, though, we’re not having quite as much fun.
