Young Man in a Hurry

In California's burgeoning electronics industry, the news ordinarily would have gone unnoticed: Palo Alto's Allen Manufacturing Co., freshly moved into a new and larger plant, was about to be incorporated. What made this unusual was the company's president: 19-year-old Joseph Stevens Allen, who founded Allen Manufacturing at 17, has turned it into a rapidly growing firm that this year expects to do a $250,000 business, has an order backlog of $150,000. Said Steve Allen last week as he sat behind a large desk in his paneled office: "I'm trying to set aside all the traditional milestones. I'm in a big hurry to get somewhere."

Saved from Shock. Steve Allen's hurry began when, at the age of four, he started experimenting with dry cell batteries and electromagnets, both given him by nonscientific parents (his father is a construction executive), who thus hoped to keep him from electrocuting himself in precocious experiments with their house's electric outlets. He assembled a radio before he could read, at seven built a TV set, by 13 was making $1,000 a year from his own TV repair business.

Steve was so bright that high school proved a frustrating experience. Though he passed a final geometry exam with an A only three weeks after entering the course, and had read textbooks for the sophomore year before he entered it, school authorities refused to move him along faster than other students. "The school just wasn't going along with what I intended to do," he says. "I could see I was accomplishing more on my own, so I quit." He now studies advanced math and physics, takes a University of California correspondence course that will eventually net him a high school diploma.

Regardless of Tradition. With $4,000 he had saved, he set up Allen Manufacturing in his parents' garage. Says he: "I felt that regardless of what tradition said I should do, I was just going to take things into my own hands and learn some things that people ordinarily don't learn until they're much older." One of the first things he developed was a cheaper and more efficient device to delay electric impulses in TV tape recorders to eliminate picture distortion. Ampex, the biggest producer of recording equipment, had not yet made one, so it handed Steve a big order that put him solidly in busi ness. He leased a plant, hired a few young employees (mostly students) to turn out his products.

Allen does much of his business with about a dozen electronics companies, including Ampex, International Telephone & Telegraph, and Lockheed's missiles di vision. Firms often give him small but difficult projects for which they can spare neither time nor men. The company is developing a specialized product line of its own, including transformers and various electrical filters, has raised its work force to 15 (now all adults) in a new plant. Since Allen has had to finance his business out of profits, he has been care ful to see that whatever he made was certain to sell, draws only a teen-ager's pocket money for himself.

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