Man of the Year

By Otto Friedrich

SEVEN WHO SUCCEEDED FROM A SULLEN SLUM TO THE FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY, THESE NEW PIONEERS TYPIFY A SPIRIT IN THE BEST AMERICAN TRADITION: INVENTIVE, . BOLD, RESOLUTE, EAGER TO OVERCOME THE CHALLENGES THAT CONFRONT THEM. SOME HAVE BECOME WEALTHY; OTHERS FIND SATISFACTION IN A MISSION ACCOMPLISHED.

Perhaps it is all as simple as that old tale about Christopher Columbus and the egg. The explorer was being mocked at a dinner by a courtier who declared that Spain was full of mariners as bold and adventurous as he. If Columbus had not discovered the new route to the Indies, said the courtier, someone else would inevitably have done so. Columbus asked for an egg and then challenged all the guests to make it stand on end. They passed the egg from hand to hand, some trying in vain to make it stand, some arguing that it could not be done. When the egg reached Columbus, he tapped one end on the table, pressed it slightly flat, and so made it stand. Very easy, once the problem has been solved.

An apocryphal story, like most good stories, but how well it fits the discoverer of America, for Americans have always liked to imagine in themselves a special gift for confronting any challenge, rejecting any doubts, refusing to admit failure. "The difficult we do immediately," said a memorable World War II Army slogan. "The impossible takes a little longer."

It sometimes seems that the love of exploration and adventure has died in this weak piping time of fully insured this and no-fault that, but the reports of its death have been greatly exaggerated. To demonstrate its enduring vitality, TIME here offers portraits of seven Americans who exemplify the spirit that inspires this year's choice for Man of the Year.

They are men and women who have seen a problem or a public need and figured out a solution, who have successfully overcome all those familiar warnings that what they proposed to do could not be done. They come from diverse backgrounds: they are rich and poor; some are congenital rebels, others traditionalists. What all of them share is a certain quality of mind and character: imagination, boldness, energy and an iron determination.

Some made millions because they realized, as entrepreneurs always have, that there are patterns in the acquisition of wealth. One is the grasp and exploitation of new technology: the space satellite, the computer and the gene synthesizer today offer the same possibilities that the internal-combustion engine once did. Another is the grasp and exploitation of changing government rules: the deregulation of transport and telecommunications, for example.

But while this society often rewards successful entrepreneurs with fortunes, not all achievements can or should be measured by such materialistic standards. There are innumerable entrepreneurs who have solved problems, taken risks, overcome opposition, and who have never made any attempt to get rich. They did it for the satisfaction of the thing itself.

No seven men and women can represent the myriad variations of the entrepreneurial spirit, of course; such choices are arbitrary. Some celebrated and familiar success stories have been omitted simply because they are so celebrated: Lee Iacocca's rescue of Chrysler, for example, or Steven Jobs' creation of the Apple Computer empire. This selection is a sampling, a sketchbook and a salute.

Donald Burr

"The perfection imperative"

The problem: Could dependable air travel be maintained while prices were severely cut by abolishing all frills? More important, could the basic structure of the U.S. corporation be changed so that everyone is an owner, everyone a manager?

Sure, says Donald Burr, 43, founder and chairman of People Express, who has done both. Four years ago, when People Express became one of the first new carriers to go into business after the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, Burr's fledgling venture consisted of little more than one abandoned, rat- infested terminal in Newark and three used Boeing 737s purchased from Lufthansa. Today, People Express is the tenth busiest airline in the U.S., carrying nearly 1 million passengers a month. Some of its fares are one- fourth those of its competitors, but its profits for 1984 will total $23.5 million.

Part of Burr's success has been his policy of cutting amenities: passengers must pay for any checked luggage, even for a cup of coffee (50 cents). As a result, he has kept costs down to a little over 5 cents per seat-mile, vs. an industry average of 8.5 cents. One key way of keeping those costs down is that Burr hires only "managers" (even a flight attendant is a "customer- service manager"), and all 4,000 full-time employees must move around in several different kinds of jobs. Burr occasionally takes his turn as a steward. Not only are the managers nonunion but each of them must buy at least 100 shares of People Express stock, on credit if necessary.

"This is not some old company refurbishing itself, it's a brand-new idea in brand-new clothes," says Burr. "This is not a social experiment. It's a hard-driving capitalist business. We want to maximize profits, and we want to do very well at that. But we can find a better way to do it, a way that is more friendly and more conducive to people getting out of life what the hell they're trying to get out of it. You don't just want to make a buck. You want people to become better people."

If Burr sounds like a combination of a choirmaster's son and a Harvard M.B.A., it is because he is both. His mother, who lives near Hartford, remembers him as "a very emotional boy with great faith." His older brother, an Air Force colonel, says their father's rule was: "There's nothing you cannot do, no task is impossible." Since boyhood, Burr has been interested in aviation; he became a Wall Street analyst of aviation stocks before he was 30, rescued and took over a nosediving airline, Texas International, before he was 36.

Burr believes strongly in what he calls the perfection imperative, the desire to be better. He stopped smoking a year and a half ago; he trains for the marathon every morning; on his upcoming ski trip to Utah, his first extended vacation in five years, he plans to reflect on "life-style improvement to improve my efficiency."

Other corporations fail to follow Burr's lead, he says, because "they think humankind is lazy and bestial and won't do anything unless you beat them to death. We live with a 'boss' structure. But we've proved that if you give people space, room and freedom, you can get trustworthy behavior."

Candy Lightner

"You can make a difference"

The problem: how to cut down on drunk driving, which was killing about 28,000 Americans every year.

Candy Lightner had a horrible reason for wanting to achieve that goal. On May 3, 1980, her 13-year-old daughter Cari was walking to a church carnival in Fair Oaks, Calif., when a car swerved out of control and killed her. Police arrested a 46-year-old cannery worker named Clarence Busch and found that he had a long record of arrests for intoxication. Less than a week earlier, he had been bailed out on a hit-and-run drunk-driving charge. A policeman told Lightner that Busch was unlikely to spend any time behind bars for killing her daughter: drunk driving was just one of those things.

Lightner, then 33, a divorced real estate agent with two other children, heard that judgment as she was on her way to a dinner with friends on the eve of her daughter's funeral. She was still furious when she joined them in a cocktail lounge as they waited for a table. It was there, of all places, that she decided to do something. "I remember sitting in the bar with all these people and saying out loud, 'I'm going to start an organization.' Just like that. There was this big moment of silence, and then my girlfriend pipes up and says, 'And we can call it Mothers Against Drunk Drivers.' I didn't have a plan, a goal, nothing. All I knew was that I was going to start an organization, and I was determined to make it work."

She went to see California Governor Jerry Brown to persuade him to appoint a task force to deal with drunk driving. Brown declined to receive her. She went to his office every day, talking to anyone who would listen. After newspapers publicized Lightner's crusade, Brown finally told her that he was appointing the task force and that she would be a member. "I just started crying right there in his office," Lightner says.

Once launched, Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) proved a virtually irresistible force. Now headquartered near Dallas, where Lightner moved, MADD has 320 chapters nationwide and 600,000 volunteers and donors. In response to Lightner's efforts, California passed a tough new law in 1981 that imposes minimum fines of $375 and mandatory imprisonment of up to four years for repeat offenders. By now all 50 states have tightened their drunk-driving laws. And Lightner keeps making speeches, lobbying legislators and generally creating waves. Last July she stood beside President Ronald Reagan as he signed a new law reducing federal highway grants to any state that fails to raise the drinking age to 21. Her next goals: an indemnity fund for victims, a bill of rights for victims, automatic imprisonment for repeat offenders. (Clarence Busch did finally serve 21 months in jail for the death of Cari Lightner.)

"I believe that for every problem there is a solution," Lightner says. "We are changing the way people think about drinking and driving. But more than that, we have caused people to change their behavior, and that is saving lives. I believe in the rights of victims. And I do feel that if you believe in something badly enough, you can make a difference."

William McGowan

"Everybody said we were crazy"

The problem: Could an outsider challenge the telephone company's comfortable monopoly, offer a competitive service and cut phone rates in the process?

"Everybody said we were crazy," recalls William G. McGowan, 57, "but I didn't come from the telephone industry, so I didn't have any preconceived notions. What seemed impossible to them did not seem strange to me. We looked over the papers in the Federal Communications Commission library, and we couldn't find anything that said AT&T had the right to keep a monopoly in telephone service."

This was interesting to McGowan because he managed a company, Microwave Communications of America (now renamed MCI Communications), that had a rival technology to send long-distance messages by microwave. When AT&T balked at carrying these messages to their final destination over local wires, McGowan went to court. He also persuaded the Justice Department to start antitrust proceedings against AT&T.

After six years of litigation, McGowan won in 1980 a judgment of $1.8 billion in damages, the largest in history, and the Government's antitrust action ended in a consent decree that last year splintered the telephone monopoly into seven regional shards. Is McGowan satisfied? Not a chance. There is a new trial scheduled this spring on the amount of damages, and McGowan plans to argue that the size of his original claim against AT&T was based on a miscalculation; that AT&T really should pay him not $1.8 billion but $5.8 billion.

Chutzpah, one might say, but it comes naturally to McGowan. The son of a railroad union organizer in the coal country of eastern Pennsylvania, he worked his way through college, attended Harvard Business School on the G.I. Bill, then went to work for Mike Todd, the Broadway and Hollywood showman. McGowan subsequently launched several firms in electronics and computers, retired rich at 39 and took a trip around the world. Bored, he moved into the field of venture capital. That was how he discovered a nearly bankrupt little company that was trying to start microwave phone service between Chicago and St. Louis. For $50,000, McGowan bought half of it; his shares are now worth about $50 million. "Challenging the monopoly had one irresistible element," McGowan says. "It had never been done before."

One key to McGowan's success is that he moved the company's headquarters to Washington, for he knew that the battle would be primarily a matter of lobbying. "I didn't concern myself with the technology, just the regulation of the industry," he says. His own managerial style is fairly deregulated. He hates paperwork. "Most entrepreneurs fail, after they first succeed, because they can't really delegate responsibility," he says. "I'm always on the lookout against people who try to foist the authority for a decision back on me."

A confirmed bachelor who looks a bit like Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion, McGowan lived in rented apartments for most of his life, but four years ago he bought a house in Georgetown and converted it into a revealing kind of private playland. Pushbuttons control all manner of gadgets: lighting panels on every floor, a laser-disk stereo system that can be turned on by infrared signals from any room. And in the back patio, a Jacuzzi whirlpool bath stands surrounded by fake boulders. McGowan admired the props in the polar bear cage at the National Zoo and ordered some for himself. The whole place suits the style of the man who, on once being asked what MCI stood for, said, "Money coming in."

Bob Pittman

"You have to live life and work hard"

The problem: the whole rock music world seemed to be going nowhere, coming apart. Revenues from the sale of records and tapes sank more than 10% from 1978 to 1979, and no one seemed to have much idea what to do. Bob Pittman's solution: add television and create something new.

At 31, gray-suited and blow-dried, Pittman is executive vice president and chief operating officer of MTV Networks Inc., a joint venture of Warner Communications and American Express. He earns $200,000 a year, and has stock options valued at $1.8 million. He has the job because he invented it, because he and his audience are all what he calls the TV babies.

"These are people who grew up with television," he says, "who learned to do their homework, listen to the radio and watch television all at the same time. For these people, we needed to create a form that was nonlinear, using mood and emotion to create an atmosphere."

Pittman's father is a Methodist minister in Mississippi who taught him to "do whatever you think is right and stick with it." When Pittman wanted to take flying lessons, though, his father said he would have to pay for them himself. So he got a job as a radio disc jockey.

Pittman went off to nearby Millsaps College and became a deejay there; offered better radio jobs in Milwaukee, Detroit and then Pittsburgh, he kept transferring to new schools. Despite a strong interest in sociology, he never did finish college, but at 20 he became the program director of NBC's WMAQ in Chicago and switched it from middle-of-the-road pop to country music.

It was a special kind of country music, though, an odd hybrid called urban- country, which he pretested, like any academic sociologist, with audience surveys and focus groups. "I was ridiculed by other radio professionals and country-music experts," Pittman recalls. "They thought I was nuts. They were making primal sounds. But then the ratings showed we'd become the No. 1 country-music station in America."

By then one of NBC's prodigies at the network's main station in New York City, and outfitted accordingly in mustache, blue jeans and T shirts, he began saying as early as 1978 that "no one seems to know how to handle music very well on TV." NBC frowned on such views, so Pittman shifted to Warner. "Music is not frivolous, it is a major phenomenon," he says.

Pittman's idea for MTV was simplicity itself: get the record manufacturers to produce video commercials for their records and then use those elaborate and often fanciful commercials for most of MTV's broadcasting. After losing $50 million between 1981 and 1983, MTV made $8.1 million in the first half of 1984. It now has 24.2 million subscribers, up 60% in a year. A stock offering in August raised nearly $80 million. This month MTV will open a second channel called VH-1 (for Video Hits One), featuring romantic rockers such as Julio Iglesias and James Taylor for graying yuppies.

Pittman, now neatly shorn, sees social significance in his success. "America has done a 180 degrees turn from the early 1970s," he says. "Americans now understand that you can't drop out, that you have to live life and work hard. Families, babies and tradition (Pittman married in 1979, now has a son Bo, 18 months old). That is reality."

Ted Greene

"Fear is a very, very important factor"

The problem: two scientists in Britain had devised a complex process for manufacturing antibodies, which might ultimately lead to a cure for certain cancers, but nobody was actually making them.

The solution was for someone to finance a business, someone like Howard ("Ted") Greene, 42, who boasts a Harvard M.B.A. and lots of financial connections. But Greene had no idea what he would have to face. "Fear," he says now, "is a very, very important factor in entrepreneurial success."

What the two medical researchers had discovered in 1975 was that if a cancer cell from a mouse is fused with a white blood cell that produces a specific antibody, then the hybrid cell can be cloned indefinitely and the antibodies separated from it. At the least, these monoclonal antibodies could be used for diagnosis of many ills; if proved safe, they might cure them. That all seemed a little remote to Greene, who was a successful marketing executive at Baxter Travenol Laboratories, but it stirred a response in Ivor Royston, an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Diego, who saw possibilities and began searching for someone to take charge. A venture- capital executive brought him together with Greene.

When Greene became chairman of Hybritech, Inc., in January 1979, it consisted of little more than a name and some rented lab space in La Jolla. "We had a cell biologist, a protein chemist, a secretary and somebody to clean the animal cages," says Greene, "and that was about it. We had $300,000, but it looked like we were going to run dry by August."

In June, after Hybritech's scientists proved they could fuse cells commercially, Greene found three venture-capital firms to invest $1.6 million, which then seemed "an astronomical amount of money." By the end of the year, the scientists produced the world's first commercially manufactured monoclonal antibody, which acted against hepatitis. Licensed just for research, Hybritech sold only $10,000 worth of the first batch, mostly to inquisitive rival labs.

By mid-1980, having grown to 20 employees, the company was going broke again. "We got to the point where our net worth had gone negative," says Greene. "We were borrowing from the bank just to meet our payroll." But Greene thinks those hard times were a blessing. "Our staff has never been as productive as during those days when we had run out of money."

When the U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave Hybritech clearance in May 1981 for its first commercial product, a diagnostic test for allergies, the firm was still "losing money like crazy." But Greene decided to go public, hoping to sell 2 million shares at $20. In the two months it took to organize the sale, the market plunged; Hybritech sold only 1.2 million shares at $11. "A window was slamming shut," Greene recalls.

He spent the next two years keeping that window open. A new federal rule allowing tax breaks for investments in research helped lure prospective backers. Sales climbed, the stock rose, and Greene launched another offering that sold 1.4 million shares at $26.75. Today Hybritech produces 40% of all the monoclonal antibody products on the market, notably diagnostic kits to test for allergies, pregnancy, prostate cancer and thyroid deficiencies. The company's sales went from $6.9 million in 1983 to an estimated $14.5 million in 1984, and its profit for 1984 will be $1.3 million.

Looking back, Greene is not sure he would have taken so many risks if he had known how big they would be. But he adds, "When you're doing something like this, you have to keep charging at it, telling yourself it's going to work. Somehow it does."

Bill Lindsey

"I'm cleaning it up for you"

The problem: one of those hopeless disaster areas known as a ghetto, an inner city, a slum. This particular one, on the northwest side of Fort Lauderdale, bore the cheerful name of Citrus Park, but it was a sullen collection of two dozen four-family stucco houses, dilapidated, garbage-strewn, crime-ridden.

Raised as an Army brat, the son of a major, Bill Lindsey was 25 and wore a beard and ponytail when he first came to Citrus Park twelve years ago. The civil rights movement had convinced him that, "you know, you're supposed to be doing something." So he had joined VISTA, the domestic Peace Corps, which assigned him to Fort Lauderdale, just to "observe." A passing policeman questioned him about why he was living in a tough black neighborhood and added a warning that he would "be dead in three days."

Lindsey joined a group of four tenants trying to organize a rent strike, using their rent money to make repairs. One of the first steps was to install security fences and better lighting. Such measures irritated the thieves and drug peddlers who ruled the streets. They tore down the fences. Lindsey and some neighbors put the fences up again, then stood guard. One thug attacked Lindsey with a knife, slashed through his windbreaker and cut his stomach. Lindsey whipped out a .38 and shoved it under the knifer's nose. "I told him to get on his knees and beg," says Lindsey. "I could have killed that guy."

The rent strike, which Lindsey by now headed, began working. When the strikers cited 200 building-code violations in one block, the city authorities did nothing, so the strikers got the state to bring the landlord to heel. To get more trash collections, the strikers trucked garbage downtown and left it to rot in the sun. Says Lindsey: "People were taking things into their own hands, and that generated a lot of excitement."

Within a year, Citrus Park underwent some remarkable changes. Houses were painted and repaired, gardens were planted, crime rates fell, garbage was , collected. So Lindsey went downtown in his blue jeans and ponytail and applied for the vacant job of city housing-authority director. The housing commissioners at first "freaked out," he says, then listened to his ideas and astonishingly gave him the job.

One of Lindsey's notions was to concentrate on what he called oasis areas. Another was to spend about half his time working with repair crews in the streets of such areas, even in private yards. "I wanted the people in the projects to see the man in charge," he says. "When people asked what I was doing, I'd say, 'The first time, I'm cleaning it up for you. The second time, I'll be cleaning it up for the new tenant.' " Lindsey had remarkable authority not only to evict tenants while he renovated buildings in oasis areas but also to permit only "good people" to move in. "A good person to us was someone who made some contribution to where he was living, someone who would respect the rights of his neighbors," says Lindsey. "The bad people are the people who don't do those things."

It worked, both because Lindsey had won a lot of neighborhood support and because he used a variety of methods to make each oasis grow. He started a tutoring program, for example, that now teaches 150 youngsters reading and arithmetic, plus a variety of "coping skills." He started a plant nursery in what was once a junkyard, where tenants can pick out trees for their yards. With the help of Ronald Range, a black detective from Boston, he organized "X-ray units," small tactical police squads that worked closely with community leaders to protect each oasis.

Having doubled the amount of housing for the poor and reduced crime rates to the same levels as those of rich white districts, Lindsey now presides more or less benignly over some 2,000 housing units. Washington is putting up $200,000 to try his oasis system in another city, possibly Houston. But to Lindsey, who now has a $52,000 salary and no beard or ponytail, the big danger is that Government still tends to favor what he calls a failure model, imposing expensive programs on the poor and then blaming them for the predictable problems. "Public housing must be a privilege," Lindsey sums up. "You don't get in just because you're poor. You get in because you're poor and willing to accept responsibility."

Kathy Kolbe

"If it's good, people will pay"

The problem: how to educate gifted children when their own teachers seemed interested mainly in ordinary children.

Says Kathy Kolbe, whose children, Karen, 8, and David, 6, were feeling bored in grade school in Scottsdale, Ariz.: "It was just obvious to me that they were being dragged down because they were being made to feel it was almost an impertinence to know the answer to every question, or to read a book that was above their grade level, or to draw a picture that went out of the lines and into their own imaginations."

Kolbe, 45, had a special reason for feeling angry. She was born dyslexic, and even today she has difficulty in telling left from right, or in reading the time on a clock. "Almost every day of my life," she says, "I will do something that puts me at right angles to the world." She insists this is not a handicap but a help. "My disability is one of the greatest advantages I have," she says. "It helped me become a student of the thinking process before I was even in kindergarten. It now helps me understand the way other people think."

Strongly encouraged by her father, Chicago Personnel Psychologist Eldon Wonderlic, Kolbe went to Northwestern, tried journalism, then moved with her husband and two children to Arizona. Dissatisfied with their education in Scottsdale, she decided to start a summer school of her own. "It has been written for centuries that thinking is important," she says, "but that is a lot different from saying, 'I have a method of showing how to do that.' " She wanted to teach children how to think creatively and critically, to use both the analytical left side of the brain and the more intuitive right side, to improve both verbal and nonverbal communication. In five years, her school swelled from 40 students to 200, at $60 per week each.

But by now she had encountered a new problem: the lack of special materials for gifted children. So she decided to produce her own. Several major publishers rejected her ideas, telling her that the market was too small to be profitable. In 1979 she took $500 from her savings and launched a firm called Resources for the Gifted. She wrote what she calls Think-ercises. One typical example requires pupils to make a series of logical deductions to figure out how many points were scored by various members of a basketball team. Another tries to get children to think critically about language in terms of slang. How has the computer changed the meaning of common words like memory or menu? What might become slang terms of future technology?

Though her only office was a spare bedroom and her only warehouse the closet, Kolbe wrote a catalogue and sent it to 3,500 teachers and parents. Orders began to trickle in, then to flow. The first years were hard. She bought a warehouse, and it caught fire. An employee embezzled money. She divorced her husband. "I never, never feel overwhelmed," Kolbe says, a little grimly. "I enjoy a challenge."

She is now grossing about $3.5 million per year, and she is proud of never having received either government or corporate grants. Says she: "I'm a believer in the concept that if it's good, the way you'll know it is that people will pay. The bottom line is crucial because it's my report card."

With reporting by Joseph N. Boyce/Fort Lauderdale, Steven Holmes/Los Angeles and Adam Zagorin/New York, with other bureaus