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LIFT7 Lessons for InnovatorsFrom an Otherworldly Thinker

By Randall G. Hunter

With Scott Brown

Copyright Randall Hunter, 2016

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Lift


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Seven Lessons for InnovatorsFrom

An Otherworldly ThinkerThis book is printed on acid-free paper

Printed in the United States of AmericaDesigned by Tracy Hopper and Randall G. Hunter

LIFT Copyright 2016 by Randall G Hunter All rights reserved Printed in theUnited States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of briefquotations embodied in critical articles and reviews

Lift may be purchased for educational business or sales promotional use. Forinformation please write: Special Markets Department, Fine Art Estate 184041stAve #132 Capitola, CA 95010

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataHunter, Randall GLift/Randall G Hunter-1sted.ISBN Hardcover 978-9887599-2-3ISBN Softcover 978-9887599-3-0ISBN ePub 978-9887599-4-7ISBN Kindle 978-9887599-5-4


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Dedicated to people who make


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Author’s Note, by Randall Hunter

Presenting Alexander G. Weygers

Seven Lessons For Innovators

Lesson 1: Loss Is Not Loss

Lesson 2: Embrace the Power of Constraint

Lesson 3: If You Want To Learn, Teach

Lesson 4: Achieve Fluency

Lesson 5: Court the Middle Brain

Lesson 6: Tell Them a Story

Lesson 7: Live Life as an Experiment

Conclusion


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PRESENTING

ALEXANDER WEYGERS

In John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row, Mack and his famished friends depart thechilling coastal fog of Monterey and head east toward Carmel Valley, searching forsun.

Turning down a sinuous two-lane road running astride the Carmel River, theydiscover unbridled territory basking beneath crystalline blue skies. Wildflowers

burst in bloom, dotting the orchards and quilted greenery of the rugged Santa LuciaMountain Range.

The men scoop up carrots fallen from a vegetable truck. Their Model T runs over arooster. They pluck a bay leaf from a tree and turn their prize into a gourmet meal.

“Luck,” Steinbeck writes, “blossomed from the first.”

Steinbeck’s Depression-era saga was published in 1945. Exactly 20 years later, a15-year-old Monterey High student named Peter Partch made the same eastbound

turn onto Carmel Valley Road. Sitting quietly alongside his father in the cab oftheir truck, Partch hoped luck would blossom for him, too.

“My big brother was an athlete — a great baseball player,” Partch said. “He’d hitthe ball and it would take off like a rocket. He was heroic and kind of majestic, butI was an abysmal failure. I wasn’t sure of myself or my abilities, or my place in theworld, for that matter.”

Reserved and without the hard shell needed to succeed in sports, Partch found

salvation in art.

“I had an instinct that I’d have a place in the art world,” he said. “Artists seemed tohave a higher purpose. It wasn’t about the ego.

“I was particularly interested in sculpture. At the end of the school year, I felt like Iwas finally finding myself. I didn’t want that feeling to stop, so I asked my art


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teacher if he knew of any summer courses I could take. He said, ‘Oh, yes, there’s afellow in Carmel Valley who offers a workshop. If he’ll take you, I think it would

be an extraordinary experience’.”

Then the teacher added a caveat.

“There’s just one thing, though,” he said. “This teacher – he lives in a treehouse.”

Partch called the instructor, who in a voice hewn with a thick Dutch accent said,“You’re a bit young. Let’s meet each other first.”

Driving to the teacher’s house that Saturday afternoon, the Carmel Valleylandscape grew more rugged by the minute. Live oaks reached out from either sideof the road, sometimes clasping one another, and slanting shafts of light sliced

through impossibly clean air.

Ten miles inland, Partch’s dad turned the truck into a heavily wooded nook knownas La Rancheria. They rambled down a private drive before coming to an abrupthalt in front of a scene that seemed straight from Tolkien’s Middle Earth.

Set in a cluster of oak trees alongside a shrubby hillside was a perfectly circularhouse with a bubble top. Whoever built it had taken coarse, thick planks ofMonterey pine and arranged them vertically along curved lines. The knotty woodon the exterior of the house was left unfinished so that, only a few feet away, the

building blended in with the natural landscape. Lichen clung to the edge of theroofline just as it did to the neighboring trees.

From the house emerged a strapping man with a shambling walk. As heapproached the truck, Partch could see his face was lined and weathered. He hadthick gray hair and intense brown eyes. He gestured toward the young man.

“Hello,” he said. “I am Alexander Weygers. Welcome to my home.”

“Your house – it’s round,” the elder Partch said.

“Yes,” Weygers said. “When I was a nautical engineer I learned that the strongeststructure in the world is a curve, so I built it that way. Let me show you around.”

There was wonder around every corner.


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“When I get an idea, I want to prove it,” Weygers told the Partches.

Weygers told them that he built the house from materials nobody else wanted. Heframed it with scrap lumber and finished it with pine slabs discarded by the nearbyCummings Brothers Saw Mill. The plumbing and windows came from junkyards.Hinges and door locks were wrought by Weygers over a forge made from agasoline can. He made the roof from ferrocement, which he learned to mix duringhis ship-building studies. It had yet to leak.

“What I remember most about that day, though, was the art,” Partch says.

Large and small low-relief sculptures made from marble, lemonwood and teak —mostly human figures in achingly tender poses — hovered in corners and onshelves. Some spoke of innocence and play, while others communicated loss. All

were emotional, belying the tough exterior of both the house and the man who builtit.

Richly detailed prints hung on the walls, while some larger works, including amagnificent, classic torso in red marble, appeared at strategic points in the garden.They were in stark juxtaposition to the surrounding driftwood, stone, and rusty, oldiron.

“I’d never experienced anything like it,” Partch said. “I’d never seen art like that,and I haven’t since. It was extraordinarily … human, I guess you’d say. And I’dcertainly never met a human like Weygers. He was in total command of hisenvironment.”

As they circled the property, Partch says he also had the mounting sense thatWeygers was sizing him up, seeing if he was ready for the journey that lay ahead.

“He wanted to see if I was the sort of person who would see this thing through, andnot just a kid who was there to see the freak that lived in the treehouse,” he said.“All that Alex asked for was appreciation. He was big on treasuring the

opportunity to improve each day, to invent, to innovate, to develop yourself.”

At one point, Weygers abruptly stopped walking, looked squarely at Partch andsaid, “Now I have just one question for you: Are you the sort of person who’s partof the problem, or the sort of person who’s part of the solution? I need to know.”


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Many young men would have turned tail and headed home. Partch couldn’timagine leaving.

“I was totally enchanted,” he said.

***

Alexander Weygers was a man who built an entire house out of scrap materials. Hedeliberately lived a near-cashless life for almost five decades, growing or tradingfor what he needed. He created incredible art while finding no time for the artestablishment. Most importantly he was a man who, in the second act of his lifegenerated breakthrough innovations on a near-daily basis.

Weygers’ way was uniquely his. He drew people to him because they knew he had

conquered the inner agony of deciding what is really important in life anddiscarding everything else. But few realize that while Weygers eventually solvedthe innovator’s dilemma through his broad spectrum of creative adventures, he wasa long time in doing it. In fact, the first stanza of Weygers’ life was characterized

by the tension between a series of fortunate and unfortunate events.

Weygers’ early years were idyllic. He was born in Java, Indonesia, on October 12,1901, the son of colonial Dutch parents in a family of seven children. His father,Albert Weygers, owned and operated a sugar plantation and a hotel. His mother,Geertruida Van Leenhoff Weygers, was an intellectual who taught literature andseveral languages at an elite girls’ college in Surabaya.

The family lived in a rambling house with a roof made of corrugated sheet metal.Bare-footed and dressed in white tunics to stay cool, the children were most oftenfound climbing the citrus trees that sprang up around the property. When they leftthe house, the Weygers siblings formed something of a street gang, playing copsand robbers and using bamboo sticks to knock nuts from trees.

The family was unorthodox in that the father was the primary caregiver, as the

mother would leave for a week at a time for Surabaya. Albert often took hischildren on botanical explorations through the tropical jungles and mountains ofexotic Java, instilling in him a deep love of nature, design and ecology. Alexworked in a blacksmith studio and learned the trades of an early pioneer andcolonist, including forging and machining.


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At the age of 15, Albert and Geertruida sent Alex on a 30-day voyage aboard asteamship to Holland. There he received an advanced education, first at prepschool, then at college in Groningen where he studied mechanical engineering.This was followed by two years of extended studies in naval architecture at theDordrecht Technological Institute, where he resumed his study of the art of

blacksmithing, which Weygers referred to as “the Mother Craft.” Moreover, theimportance of self-reliance was emphatically impressed upon him.

“My education as a marine engineer came at the tail end of the Steam Age, whenwe were expected to be master craftsmen and experts in metalwork,” Weygerssaid. “If parts wore out, there was no one there to save you – you were alone at sea.You were expected to make and design their replacements with whatever was athand.”

Weygers returned to Java to work as an engineer in 1923. One year later, his kindDutch fiancée, Jacoba Hutter (who he called “Tose”), came from Holland to joinhim. They were soon married; however, she had difficulty acclimating to thetropics and in 1926 the couple immigrated to the United States. Working as amarine engineer and shipbuilding architect in Seattle, Weygers became anAmerican citizen, and the couple looked forward to raising a family in the coolclimes of the Pacific Northwest. Weygers spoke often to friends about his strong

paternal instinct and desire to emulate his own father.

That was when tragedy struck. Tose and the couple’s unborn son died duringchildbirth September 13, 1927. In a letter to his family, Weygers wrote that Toseremained concerned with his well-being until his final moments, telling him on herdeathbed, “When you go back to our house, there are some vegetables there foryou to cook tonight.”

The loss of his wife and child scarred Weygers deeply, marking him with grief andcausing him to reevaluate his life. In the depths of his sorrow, Weygers turned toart.

He enrolled in classes at University of Washington, studying under AvardFairbanks, the prolific 20th-century American sculptor who had three works sittingin the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. Fairbanks identified Weygers’talent immediately and mentored him in the carving of a 36-inch monument to hiswife and child that he simply called “Mourning.”


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The sculpture features a lifeless woman splayed across a jagged column. Beneathher, a man holds her limp hand, buries his head in the stone, clenches a fist, andweeps.Fairbanks brought the piece to the attention of prominent American sculptorLorado Taft, who sent Weygers a letter saying, “(‘Mourning’) appears to me to bethe most admirable sculpture that I have ever seen by an untrained hand.”

For the next 18 months, Weygers apprenticed under Taft at the sculptor’s MidwayStudios in Chicago, where he focused on the sculpture of monuments. Amongother projects, Weygers worked on a 25-foot statue of a knight that wouldeventually stand sentry at the state house of Louisiana politician Huey “Kingfish”Long.

Weygers was now prepared for extended studies at prestigious European art

centers. First, he spent a year at the Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague, Holland,specializing in studies of human anatomy, life drawing, and modeling.

Maintaining his quest to study under artistic masters, Weygers next traveled toParis, where he studied end-grain wood engraving under the watch of Paul Bournetat L’Ecole Esthetique Contemporaine. Even in the 1930s, wood engraving was

becoming a lost art. Weygers developed his skills to a level few could equalrequiring him to be registered with the U.S. government as an engraver capable ofcreating printing plates for currency.

At Taft’s urging, Weygers moved on to Florence, Italy, where he studied sculptureunder Ettore Massi, who schooled him in the arts of stone carving and bronzecasting. At the end of his apprenticeship, Massi challenged Weygers to do asMichelangelo had done and attempt to carve a rendition of his own hand in Carraramarble. Massi was so impressed with the result that he nicknamed Weygers“Maestro.”

In 1936, Weygers decided it was time to return to America. Settling in Berkeley,

California, his work received a tremendous critical reception. Within months hewas recognized with a solo exhibition at the Cliff Hotel in San Francisco. His workwas featured at the Oakland Museum. Soon his sculptures were accepted into

prestigious San Francisco Art Association exhibitions. In 1940, he was recognizedas an artist of national significance and his work was included in a collection at theSmithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.


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Weygers attempted marriage again with an American named Emma Gene, asocialite who his niece, Sheri Weygers Tromp, describes as being “gorgeous, awork of art with bright red nails and beautiful clothes. We were in awe of her.”

The Oakland Tribune wrote a brief article about their marriage, with the couplesaying they thought marriage would be a “barrel of laughs.” This would not be thecase. In 1938, Alex and Emma sailed aboard the Empress of Asia to meet hisfamily in Indonesia. On the return trip, she fell in love with the ship’s captain andthe couple parted ways when they arrived home.

Difficult times continued to beset Weygers. The country was still reeling from theGreat Depression and commissions were few and far between. Weygers haddifficulty making a living and maintaining his studio.

More significantly, he was also burdened by the fact that several of his familymembers were interned in Japanese-run concentration camps in Java and Thailandin the early days of World War II. Ironically, Tose’s intolerance of the Indonesia’swarm weather may have saved Weygers from the fate that befell the rest of hisfamily, as he was safe in the U.S. when the Dutch East Indes was occupied byJapan in 1942.

Desperate to work toward his family’s freedom, Weygers, now 41, shuttered hisstudio and joined the military, where he served in Army Intelligence.

Weygers was valued for his remarkable language skills (he was fluent in Malay,Dutch, Italian, German, and English), as well as his intimate knowledge ofIndonesia and its culture. Sadly, he was unable to reach his family.

In 1943, Weygers received word that his sister had lost a leg and his elderly motherhad died in a camp in Java. Meanwhile, his brother Wyk spent the entire war as aslave laborer in Thailand, working on a railroad that was to connect Thailand withBurma so the Japanese could transport goods and personnel back and forth.

“The jungle was so thick there that you can’t imagine building a railroad with nomachines, but that’s what they did,” said Tromp, who was Wyk’s daughter. “They

built it by hand. It was hideous work.”

Tromp and her mother, Riek, were in a camp of their own. When they werereunited with her father, she did not recognize him because he was so emaciated.


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Just before the occupation, Riek’s father died. Weygers created a death mask andsculpted a bust of the man. When the Japanese put Riek in a concentration camp,she was allowed one personal possession. She chose the sculpture, which she totedwith her wherever she went.

It was during his period in the Army that Weygers met Col. Arthur V. Jones, whoowned three acres of undeveloped rural land in the wilds of California’s CentralCoast. He so admired Weygers’ talents that he wanted him as his neighbor — somuch so that Jones deeded him half his land. They agreed to both build homes onthe property when they returned stateside from the war effort.

Weygers was discharged from the Army in the winter of 1943. He went straight toLos Angeles, where his future life partner, Marian, waited for him.

Alex had met Marian in Berkeley prior to his departure for the Army. A tall,handsome woman, she was a third-generation San Franciscan and a graduate of theUniversity of California, where she studied art and worked under Japanese-American artist Chiura Obata, who taught her ink-wash painting and design. Bythe time they met, Marian was highly regarded in the art world and had developeda printmaking process that she named “Imprints from Nature,” using naturalmaterials such as flowers, leaves, and grass.

Soon after his return to the United States, Weygers received word that his friendCol. Jones had been killed in a plane crash, leaving the entire Carmel Valley

property to him.

***

Ironically, it was when Weygers was virtually alone that he found his voice.Scarred from his personal losses and professional disappointments, he was eager tostart anew in the coastal wilderness.

First, Alex and Marian had to get themselves 300 miles north. In Los Angeles, they

purchased a 1928 Chevy Coupe they named “Boxie,” as it seemed to be comprisedentirely of right angles. The car burned oil furiously and was so powerless it couldscarcely climb hills, even in low gear. Plus, there were few cars on the road at thetime, as gasoline was still being rationed due to the war effort. Weygers put hismind to work and overhauled the engine so Boxie could run on kerosene.


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“From the time we left Los Angeles to the time we turned down the dirt road to ourhomestead, we never saw another car the entire trip,” Marian said. “We were theonly ones on the road.”

With only a tent to shelter them, Alex and Marian lived off the land, raising theirown food, and getting most of what they needed from bartering, scavenging, ormaking it themselves.

They ate dandelion soup and gopher stew. They also captured wild bees andinstalled them in scrap-lumber hives, where they produced white sage honey to eatand trade.

“Those early days we were like Adam and Eve,” Marian said. “We had no

neighbors. It was so dark at night, and we’d just lie there and watch shooting starafter shooting star go past.”

Weygers quickly set about building the house that someone later referred to as “ageodesic dome gone wild.” It was an organic structure made entirely of recycledlogs and glass, along with local Carmel stone and ferroconcrete. All of its hinges,handles, nuts, bolts, and kitchen tools were forged from cast-off metals usingWeygers’ blacksmithing skills. Window frames, bathtubs, and sinks wererepurposed from the dump in nearby Salinas.

To the unschooled eye, the finished product appeared slap-dash and primitive.County officials would visit on occasion, complaining Weygers had not sought

proper permits or submitted plans for approval. Time and again, he would sendthem packing after a demonstration of his home’s structural integrity.

Weygers’ studio was adjacent to the main house and also built of heavy pine planks with a curved design. It was an even more extraordinary structure than thehouse. one angle, the studio’s roofline resembled a mushroom hat. Sculpted arounda large skylight, it let in copious amount of Northern light, which Weygers said

was ideal for perfecting the subtle relief in his marble sculptures.

As with the house, the heavy door of the studio blended with the exteriorsurroundings and was easy to miss. A bent-branch handle was the tip-off. Onceinside, the eye was drawn upward from one level to another. Weygers had

balconies at five levels to enable him to view a sculpture from multiple perspectives.


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Built for multiple purposes, the studio had several compartments within it, like ahoneycomb.

Walking into his blacksmith shop was like stepping back into the 19th century.Several anvils, which Weygers made himself out of train rails, shared space withforges, sledgehammers, prongs shaped for different tasks, band saws, tabletopsaws, an automatic hammer, lathes, and other equipment. All were built byWeygers himself and customized for his unique needs.

“Lots of men play sports,” Weygers said. “But blacksmithing is a real man’shobby.”

More tools hung on the walls, where they were both handy and ornamental. Wood

gouges, chisels, fire tools, and kitchen cleavers were all simultaneouslyimplements of work and works of art. As an engineer, he built them for strength; asan artist, he created them with an eye toward aesthetics. They all awaited work inthe semi-darkness of the blacksmith studio, which Weygers said was necessary for

proper visual judging of the steel’s heat.

The nerve center of the studio was a tiny room built especially to house Weygers’ prize possession: a 19th-century printing press, on which he would hand print hiswood engravings. The shiny black “acorn-style” press, one of only two in thecountry at the time, was originally shipped around Cape Horn at the time ofCalifornia’s Gold Rush. Weygers speculated that it printed some of the nation’sfirst newspapers. In the press, Weygers’ blocks could withstand a pressure of asmuch as 2,000 pounds.

Below ground was a perfect darkroom that Weygers scooped out of the hillside sothat he could develop his own photographic prints, a complete novelty at the time.

The countryside immediately outside the studio abounded with every imaginablecategory of scrap, which Weygers stored in shacks and lean-to’s concealed among

the bushes. Under his inspired touch, they would eventually become objects ofusefulness: Auto springs became spatulas; a truck headlight evolved into a charcoal

brazier; a discarded dentist’s chair was reconditioned to allow Weygers to raiseand lower heavy marble with the pump of a toe.

“The tremendous waste of our society has made my way of life possible,” Weygerssaid. “Americans throw out things because they have a compulsion for newness.”


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He went so far as to say the cast-off objects kept him company.

“I’m surrounded by things with meaning, with their own stories,” he said. “Theyare not quiet. They talk to me.”

Weygers balanced the time and energy required for survival with the time andenergy needed for his art, which he believed was his reason for existing. Creativity

became oxygen. Working relentlessly from dusk until dawn, and only resting onSundays, his artistic output was stupendous.

After visiting the Weygers property, Jonathan Root of Pageant Magazine wrote,“Weygers lives on no man’s terms but his own, beyond all social pretense, andwith the artistic productivity worthy of a Picasso, with the inventive resources of

an Indian scout, with the endurance of a frontiersman, and with an innovative,visionary mind that is somewhere in front of the Avant- Garde. He is a contentiousmonument to self-honesty and an endemic rash under the saddle of complacency,hypocrisy, and other communal afflictions.”

In addition to his artwork, Weygers was an author, writing and illustrating four books: The Modern Blacksmith; The Making of Tools; The Repair and Recycling ofTools, and Sculpture, Form and Philosophy, which was published posthumously.A fifth book, The Complete Modern Blacksmith, is a compendium of Weygers’written work from his first three books. Even today, each is considered a definitivework among practitioners of these respective crafts.

Written in clear, direct prose, each is logically designed, elegantly made, andillustrated with Weygers’ own lucid pencil drawings, many of which can standalone as fine art. Through the books, Weygers said, “I’ll leave my track.”

***

Published late in his life, the books were so popular that their success threatened to

force Weygers into paying income tax for the first time.

Weygers’ infinite abundance as an artist and innovator was matched only by hisHerculean effort to avoid selling as few of his creations as possible.

Many first came to know him not as a versatile genius of art and science, but ratheras the man who outwitted the economic system. To some he was most remarkable


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for keeping at bay the wolves of commerce and governmental bureaucracy, allwhile living in enviable serenity in a pastoral region of one of the world’s most

beautiful places.

“I have nothing against money,” Weygers said, “and I certainly have notrepudiated it. But I am unwilling to pay the price — to trade my life for it.”

Weygers often said that the greatest failure of 20th century man was to recognize“when enough was enough. My goal is to have enough and nothing more.” ToWeygers, the threshold at which he would have to pay income tax served as asimple demarcation of when he had enough.

The temptation was to associate Weygers with movements happening nearby.Some equated him with Big Sur beatniks of the 1950s, including Jack Kerouac,

who said, “If you own a rug, you own too much.”

Later they equated him with the alternative movement of the 1960s, whichemanated 45 miles to the south of Weygers at Big Sur’s Esalen Institute and spunoff New Age teachers like Aldous Huxley and Joseph Campbell. Others simplythought Weygers was a hippie like those who launched the Summer of Love at theMonterey Pop Festival.

Weygers resisted all of these categorizations. In fact, when a group of pacifists protested the use of income tax revenues for armaments, Weygers wrote a letter tothe editor of the Monterey Peninsula Herald that called them “imitationChristians.”

“If tax expenditures for war weigh on your conscience,” he wrote, “then stopmaking money. Christ did not belong in an income tax bracket. You have to makea choice somewhere.”

Weygers subsisted first and foremost through bartering, trading things like honeyand hand-carved tobacco pipes for goods and services. He also haggled knowledge.

In one case, a few evenings working out the engineering on a gear drive for anexperimental vehicle manufacturer earned him a pickup truck, which he keptrunning by spinning his own parts from recycled materials.

When money was absolutely necessary, he worked as a consulting engineer, sellingillustrations to government agencies and private firms like the Schlage LocksCompany.


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Weygers innovated at a rate that would be the envy of industry’s best-fundedresearch-and-development divisions. The fertility of his artistic mind was unrivaled

by any known contemporary. Yet he refused in all but a few cases to be paid forhis work. He declined to trade in his lifestyle for “what we think is security andtwo weeks of freedom once a year.”

“I am a free man,” he said. “My way of life is out of the ordinary … but it’s mine.If money is your aim, you’ll quickly find out what sells. Then you begin repeatingthe same idea, and a once-creative person stops being creative. This is where thegenius that is inside all of us often dies. Instead of pursuing the art we’re capableof making — whatever that art may be — we chase the badges of status thatsubstitute for inner security. We should all be creating for the sake of bringingsomething into the world and not for what that idea will buy us.”

One writer described Weygers as a man full of contrast: “He is a little-knownsculptor of national repute who has acquired a dedicated following despite hisdistaste for the hype of the gallery scene and the marketing of art as aninvestment.”

Paradoxically, when word of the enigmatic hyphenate living in a “treehouse”spread during the mid-1960’s, he became must-see. He opened his studio forinstruction in form theory, sculpture, and blacksmithing. Soon his home was anoasis for the creatively inclined. Artists and thinkers the world over began makingannual pilgrimages to the Weygers property, sleeping at nearby campgrounds andworking on their feet 10 hours a day, all for the privilege of being in his presence.

Weygers would stand in the middle of his studio, his large, strong hands always inmotion, chopping the air to emphasize a thought, probing a chunk of local stonecarried up from the river, gripping a sledgehammer, tinkering with a piece of junkand turning it into a humming machine. As they worked, Weygers would tellstories, from the comical to the spellbinding to the profound. They spanned fromthe wild jungles of Java to the streets of Chicago.

Despite his best efforts, it seemed Weygers’ destiny to belong to the world.

Weygers helped reveal to his students the voice hidden in the stone, the clarity ofthought that one feels in the ring of the anvil, and the validation that comes fromtesting one’s limitless spirit against the limits of the materials in one’s own hands.


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One thing is for certain: they took more from him than they could ever use at theforge.

“Young people come here and seem to find something they are hungry for,something they approve of,” Weygers said. “And I tell them, ‘Never be in debt,never harm anybody, and never be in (debt) to the government. That way nobody,

but nobody, will ever have a right to complain about you or to interfere with yourlife.’ I tell them to simplify things – find out how little they can get along with.Then they can be free.”

***

When Peter Partch first went to the Carmel Valley house, Weygers asked theyoung man if he was part of the problem or the solution.

“I don’t remember what I told him,” Partch said. “But I think he saw in me anintention to spend my life creating things. I think he saw a restlessness in me thatwas also present in him, as well as others he liked. I think he knew I had a desire tocontinually be moving forward and improving. To him, that was the ‘solution’.”

Weygers was clearly satisfied with Partch’s answer, as the young man became his premier student and surrogate son.

“The versatility of Alex’s mind is still astonishing to me now,” Partch said.“People liken him to an athlete who is equally outstanding at football, basketball,and baseball. I say no, it’s not like he played all those games. It’s like he invented them.”

Partch says it’s misguided to focus on Weygers’ aversion to commerce.

“Alex didn’t have extremist views at all,” he said. “He wasn’t anti-money, anti-tax,or anti-government, so long as that government functioned well. Alex simplywanted to be around people who had a desire to create for the sake of creation,

irrespective of material gain. He wanted to be around people with an interest inseeing ideas take flight.”

Partch remembers that on that initial visit to the Weygers house, he happened upontwo framed drawings that seemed out of context with the rest. Whereas Weygers’other pieces were timeless, these two — which looked like blueprint renderings —were futuristic. One was a drawing of an articulated flying saucer that looked very


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much like something from a science fiction novel. The other was a vision for theEmbarcadero in San Francisco, with different types of discs landing and lifting offwith the Golden Gate Bridge looming in the background.

In the lower-right corner of these drawings were the inscriptions “AGW — 1943.”

To Partch, Weygers seemed to be a man in extraordinary commune with the earth.He would never have guessed that for a period of his life, the thing Weygerswanted most of all was to soar above it.

***

Twenty years into his remote existence, Weygers became famous despite his bestintentions. For the first time he was faced with the threat that he may have to payincome tax. It was in the mid-1960s and two of his books -- The Making of Tools

and The Modern Blacksmith -- had helped save the art of blacksmithing fromextinction. Suddenly young students came from all over the world to meet themaster, see his shop, camp near his property, and study at his forge.

“When you took his blacksmithing course, you were in for a week of hard work,”said Joseph Stevens, who traveled to Weygers’ property from Canada three timesin the 1970s. “You were on your feet in his studio for 10-12 hours a day. He was agreat teacher – very encouraging – but he had high expectations. He wanted tomake progress every day, and he waited for no one.”

At the end of each week, Weygers would finally invite his students into his homefor lunch.

“There would be about a dozen of us,” Stevens said. “We would sit around thismagnificent, kidney-shaped, cantilevered table made from redwood that pivoted toaccommodate his guests. We’d eat food he and Marian grew in their garden, on

plates he’d made on his forge.

“It was a time when technology seemed to really be accelerating. But when you

were at their house, time really stood still. It could have been any time – anycentury, even.”

Weygers’ thrived on the captive audience.

“His stories were absolutely incredible,” Partch said. “He was enthralling.”


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Weygers’ students describe those Friday sessions as having an orchestral quality.

“He would start slowly, then build, build, build,” said Polly Brumder, who came tothe Weygers home twice from Arizona for classes. “He’d start by telling us aboutthe simple times when they first moved to Carmel Valley, living in a tent andsurviving by bartering leaf prints and bottle bells Marian made. One Christmasthey bartered some bottle bells for Scotch. He said, ‘That was living the Cadillacway we weren’t used to!’”

Then came the crescendo. With the room properly spellbound, Weygers would pullout a well-preserved, leather-bound portfolio with his name and address printed inthe lower-right corner. From it he would remove a half-dozen photo-realisticsketches and spread them out across the table.

The largest of the images was an artist’s visualization of San Francisco’sEmbarcadero shoreline. Sleek, circular vehicles spun over a chunky, low-risecityscape. Tiny, one-person machines floated gently to their moorings atop

buildings. In the foreground, on a wide promenade jutting into San Francisco Bay,a giant, trans-oceanic disc loaded passengers. In the background, mid-sized discswhisked cargo above and beyond the Golden Gate Bridge.

The discs looked very much like the images from a dozen flying saucer B-movies.

“But the drawings weren’t scary or menacing,” Brumder said. “They were practical, purposeful. Alex would say, ‘This is the first flying saucer.’

“The first time he showed it to me, it took me a second to realize that the reason hewas showing these drawings to us was because they were his drawings. Alex wasknown as the guy who was one of the last masters of things like wood engravingand blacksmithing – trades that were nearly dead. It seemed impossible he couldalso be responsible for something so much from the future. You wouldn’t havethought anyone could straddle two worlds like that.”

With his plans displayed before them, Weygers would go on to tell them aboutthese incredible visions of the future from his long-gone past.

***

Alexander Weygers, a man born two years before Orville and Wilbur Wright tookto the air, had always had a fascination with flight.


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“My belief was that man had copied the bird under the erroneous impression thatthe most obvious way to fly is to copy the bird’s flight,” he said. “To me, it was asimpractical to make a plane like a bird as it would be to make an automobile looklike a horse or a motorcycle like a man.”

Weygers first got the idea for his flying machine in 1927 when he was working asa nautical engineer. The concept was inspired not by a bird, but a dolphin.

It was early one morning at sea when he observed with fascination a dolphin thatappeared to swim effortlessly in front of the ship.

“He kept it up for at least 10 minutes,” Weygers said. “I asked myself, ‘How couldthe dolphin keep up that pace?’”

Putting his engineering training to work, Weygers soon had the answer. Thedolphin wasn’t swimming at all. It was actually riding on a cushion of water. Theship, as it moved through the ocean, pushed a wave of water ahead of it, and thedolphin was riding that wave.

The idea of riding a wave lingered in Weygers’ brain, even as his life went throughan abrupt change. A shattered man after his wife died in childbirth in 1927, heturned back to his first love: art. He gave up engineering, studied painting inHolland, wood engraving in Paris, and sculpture in Italy. He apprenticed under thegreat Chicago sculptor Lorado Taft, whose “beauty is everywhere” philosophyappealed to him greatly.

Weygers eventually settled in Berkeley, renting a studio on Shattuck Ave. andmeeting Marian in a drawing class. It was the heart of the Great Depression andartists – even ones as skilled as Weygers – often starved.

World War II came and Weygers – with his native country of Indonesia occupied by the Japanese and Holland conquered by Hitler – volunteered for the Army in

1941. He knew that his family was in dire straits. His mother was dying in aJapanese prison camp and his sister had already lost a leg to infection. His brothermanaged to survive as a slave laborer in Thailand while building The BurmaRailway and bridges for the Japanese.

Desperate the help them, Weygers was told it was nearly impossible to access the prison camps due to Java’s rugged terrain. With this news, the flame for Weygers’


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flying machine The Discopter was lit anew. World War II was the first all-out airwar, and there was a clear need to develop short or vertical take-off aircraft.

When he returned to the United States, Weygers joined Marian in Los Angeles,where he wound up working for Northrup Aviation. The helicopter was just beingdeveloped and Weygers was attracted to the project.

Instinctively Weygers realized that helicopters were highly vulnerable. They hadungainly boxlike shapes and their exposed rotors were clearly a weak point.

“There was a lot of interest in helicopters in those days,” Weygers said. “It seemedto me they were doing it all wrong. It was like trying to convert a horse and buggyinto a car. Helicopters have a vulnerability that will never be improved. I thought,there had to be a different, better way.

“It also seemed to me the helicopter was an unfinished piece of engineering. Youcannot just lift it up. It must move like a pendulum, which makes it very limited inuse. I remembered back to the ship pushing the dolphin. I wondered, ‘What wouldhappen if that pushing force were internalized like a jet?’ A ship like that could

become a fish of the air.”

Weygers began working on his invention in earnest. He chose a circular shape forthe design, because as an artist and engineer, he liked the strength of the circle. Tohim, the sea urchin’s body, which was built to withstand the pounding of waves ofthe tidal region, seemed like the ultimate form. He wanted to create a craft withsuch ideal weight distribution that it could land on terrain or sea. Its criticalmachinery had to be hidden and be impervious to both enemies and weather.

Resembling an athlete’s discus, the circle provided a shape that could enclose thecraft’s rotors. He envisioned a pilot sitting in a bubble-like pod above the maindisc. The rotors would be beneath the pilot at the top of an enclosed shaft.

The rotors would turn, sucking up huge quantities of air and then emitting an

enormous down force. The ship would rise on a wall of energized, concentratedair, just as the dolphin rides on a wall of water. The shaft on which the rotors turnwas eliminated, instead turning around a whole central compartment, therebysolving for the helicopter’s greatest weakness.

Weygers even conceived of a steering mechanism operated by a series of rings thatwould slide into and out of the column of air being sucked up by the rotors. The


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rings would divert the force and direction of the air, allowing the machine tomaneuver.

The ship’s natural gyroscopic balance could be assisted with other stabilizers whenhauling cargo or shifting loads. Because the craft would essentially be a roundwing, Weygers felt that it could be made to fall like a leaf, backwards andforwards, if the engines failed. He also designed small jets that would help in anemergency.

It was around this time that fate intervened. Weygers’ Navy pilot friend was killed.In his will, he bequeathed Alex his Carmel Valley acreage. He and Marian movedto the property in 1942, ate the occasional possum, raccoon, or gopher, and keptsix hives of bees they caught on their property. They obtained manure for theirgarden by offering to clean out other people’s stables, and subsisted on less than

$50 a month, which they obtained through the sale of driftwood arrangements and prized honey.

Working in a tent situated on a property without electricity, Weygers completed hisDiscopter design. In the summer of 1945, he received confirmation of his 18-year-old dream: Patent No. 2,377,835, the first flying saucer.

Weygers didn’t just imagine the Discopter; he also created cityscapes shapedaround the concept. To him, the Discopter wasn’t just an aircraft, but a vision of a

possible future. It was part of an entire ecosystem that lived in his mind’s eye.

One of his drawings, “Discopter Port and Harbor Facilities,” showed flying saucersneatly parked atop every building on the San Francisco Embarcadero. LargerDiscopters at the water’s edge contained promenade decks, bars, shuffleboardfacilities, and other amenities reminiscent of ocean liners.

He referred to the largest ships as “Discopter Transoceanics,” while the ones atopthe buildings were “Discopter Transcontinentals,” and so on down to the urbanworkers’ single-cabin ships in the distance. Another drawing showed Discopter

tugs moving a cabin, built in town, to a remote foundation in a mountain retreat.

Weygers enclosed his plans in leatherbound portfolios and spent the remainder of1945 sending them to the nation’s leading aircraft manufacturers.

In these presentations, Weygers pointed out that he realized the propulsion systemrequired to power the Discopter did not presently exist. Though there were no jet


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planes when he engineered his plans, his drawings featured a jet-poweredDiscopter. Like Leonardo DaVinci’s winged ship, Weygers had created a flyingmachine that could not yet fly.

“In my patent application,” he said, “I realized there was no point in specifying thesource of power. I knew the technology needed wasn’t available yet.”

Weygers received polite “No thank you’s” from several of the individuals who hadreceived his plans.

In April 1946, the Consolidated Vultee aircraft corporation sent him a letter thatread, “It is the consensus that your invention is too advanced for the present day.Obviously, a true analysis of an invention as revolutionary in its scopes as yourswould require far greater study and experimentation than can be afforded at this

time. We are advising you that its magnitude is beyond our present capacity.”

Another large company sent Weygers a form letter asking him to sign over his patent. When he refused, the firm sent his plans back, stamped “Not opened.”

Each time Weygers sent his designs to a manufacturer, he simply requested thatthey be returned if the company was not interested. He mailed dozens of packages.Only a handful came back.

***

Rejected and ignored, the Discopter seemed destined to fade away.

Then came 1947.

The first highly publicized sighting of an unidentified flying object came on June24 of that year when private pilot Kenneth Arnold claimed he spotted a string ofnine shiny objects flying past Washington’s Mt. Rainier at speeds he clocked at1,200 miles per hour. Although Arnold never specifically used the term “flying

saucer,” he was quoted at the time saying the shape of the objects he saw was likea “saucer,” “disc,” or “pie plate.” Arnold described them as a series of objects withconvex shapes, though he later revealed that one object differed by being crescent-shaped.

Newsweek was the first magazine to report a saucer outbreak. On July 14, 1947, themagazine’s headline screamed, “Flying Saucers: Spots Before Their Eyes?” A


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week later, a Life magazine headline told the story of the summer: “Flying DiscsBreak Out Over U.S.” By that fall, respected publications like Science Digest were

publishing long features on saucers, and the flying saucer craze was off androaring.

In the spring of 1950, the Monterey Peninsula Herald ran an article about aworking “flying platform” created by the Hiller Helicopter Company in nearbyPalo Alto. The next morning, Herald reporter Ritch Lovejoy received a phone callfrom a Carmel Valley man who spoke in a voice chopped with a Dutch accent.

“Twenty-seven years ago,” the man said. “I began working on an invention thatmakes the flying platform look like a Model T.”

Weygers invited Lovejoy to his property, where for the first time he revealed to the

media his vision for the Discopter. On April 13, the Herald splashed Weygers’Embarcadero drawing across its front page beneath a banner headline that read,“Carmel Valley Artist Patented Flying Saucer Five Years Ago: Discopter Patentedin 1945; May Be in Production.”

In the story, Weygers implied that his designs may have been appropriated byother manufacturers.

“I am puzzled and surprised that no one has approached me,” he said. “I would behappy to make it possible to use any of my ideas. Why they circumvent me, I donot understand.”

As for why he chose that moment in time to reveal his designs to the public,Weygers said, “There is no use to push an idea ahead of your time. The day comeswhen a need is shown, a gap is made, and then the gap is filled. It might now be ofvalue to come out of hiding.”

News of the Herald’s story was picked up around the world. An Italian newspaperwrote of Weygers’ “City in the Air.” Stateside, a front-page story in the Idaho

State Journal expressed skepticism over Weygers’ claims:

Weygers said his flying disc, which he calls a ‘Discopter,’ was patented(two) years before the first flying saucer report came out of the Northwest.Weygers, a Dutch-born engineer and sculptor, admits his saucer is still in the paper-design stage. He has never made a model of it. But the design, heinsists, is aeronautically sound.


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Blueprints show a craft that resembles a percolator top or a covered shallow bowl with a bubble on top. The bubble would be the pilot's compartment,which Weygers said could be enlarged for "unlimited passengers." Enclosedin the circular metal frame or rim are gasoline engine-driven rotor blades,similar to the rotors of a helicopter. The push of the rotor would propelWeygers' craft just like the helicopter. The rotors and power-plantcompartments are enclosed in the Discopter, the designer said. The craft hasholes on its top through which air is drawn by the rotors, giving it the neededthrust out of the bottom expulsion holes. Weygers said he believes jets can

be used in place of the rotors.

He said his design was rejected by at least one manufacturer as "tooadvanced."

***

Weygers’ students would listen to his Discopter saga with mouths wide open.

“At first you’d think, ‘This is outrageous,’” said Marty Oppenheimer, who studied blacksmithing under Weygers in 1972. “Then you looked around. His house andstudio were round. He told us at the beginning that he learned as a ship’s engineerthat a curve was the strongest shape. And then you looked at his sculpture aroundthe house. It was all low-relief with no protrusions – exactly like the Discopter.There was total continuity between his art and his science when you looked at itthe right way.”

Weygers had been rejected by the establishment, then suffered the additionalindignity of watching from the sidelines as his concept consumed the globalconsciousness. He explained to his students that he’d retreated completely from thefast-paced technological world. The future had caught up with him, and it was notquite how he’d once pictured it.

“At first, I – like a lot of people – saw technology as a savior of civilization,” hesaid. “Then I began seeing it as a mixed blessing, or at least more realistically.”

Weygers did get some manner of satisfaction in 1984 when his waterfront drawingand Discopter schematics were featured in a traveling Smithsonian Institutionexhibit called “Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future.”


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Weygers went to his death bed believing his design was simply too advanced forthe period. “They told me I was too far ahead of my time,” he said. “But I thought,‘An inventor always is, isn’t he?’”

As it turns out, Weygers’ Discopter design might have been right on time.

Fifteen years after Weygers’ death, a document titled “Project 1794 FinalDevelopment Summary Report – 30 May 1956” was declassified. The paperdescribed how in the 1950s, a small team of engineers set to work on a secret

program called Project 1794, which was a supersonic flying saucer.

There was a pervasive belief at the time that the Germans had developed someform of saucer-like aircraft – a belief that likely stemmed from stories andnewspaper articles that appeared in the early 1950s. The stories turned out to be

bogus, but they seemed reasonable. During World War II, Hitler’s engineers hadoutpaced the Allies’ on several forms of aeronautical aviation. Fearing that flying-disc technology was being developed in Moscow, and worried that North Americamight fall behind, the American military commissioned an aircraft that could takeoff from primitive airfields to intercept Soviet long-range bombers.

The premise behind the Project 1794 – which was shuttered when a prototypefailed wind-tunnel tests - was that engine exhaust could be routed across thefuselage to the area just beneath the saucer, where it would form a cushion of airon which the craft could hover.

In other words, Project 1794, which was pursued by a Canadian aviation firmcalled Avro Canada, relied to a suspicious degree on science very much like thatwhich was detailed in Weygers’ Discopter patent.

“Alex always existed on a higher plane,” said his niece, Sheri Weygers Tromp. “Isuppose the Discopter literally proved it.”

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