The last project my husband worked on before he died was the contract to build the Salesforce Tower. Sadly, he didn’t live long enough to see it built. It is serendipitous that both his daughters work there now and sit drinking espresso on the 60th floor on a daily basis. For many years, he was the leading concrete guy in the Bay Area. At one time, he wanted to build a house for our family out of concrete with matching concrete furniture. He went to the Concrete World conference and came home and told me he could pour a Persian carpet out of concrete in our backyard. Luckily, he lost interest in these projects, but concrete was something he was passionate about.
Once in a while, he would drive the kids and me around and show us all of the things he had built: part of the Bay Bridge, BART stations, Costcos, Parking Garages, and so on. When he built the Caldecott Tunnel’s 4th bore, he told me the men that did gunite were all related: fathers, sons, and grandsons. That kind of work, spraying the thinnest layer possible of concrete on a curved wall, was an art form and passed down from generation to generation. Toward the end of his life, he also built the Apple Headquarters 2,000-square-foot prototype. It was made out of, you guessed it, concrete.
At the same time, I was building things you couldn’t see, like wireless networks, Voice Over IP software, music equalization software, the infrastructure for the debit card. I worked in the cloud, and he worked in the real world.
After he died, I started Ocean SF, making clothes sits solidly in the real world, but I have also stayed near tech, working with the leadership team at TSMC for the past two years as a consultant.
As we wait for our new line of Ocean SF merchandise to arrive from Canada I am working with my interns on their marketing plan. I would like them to begin telling more stories about our brand and just stories in general. My favorite part of running the brand is working with the interns. They are so capable I could almost let them run Ocean SF without me, which I will eventually do because the Ocean SF brand is made for the Z generation. They care about the environment, they care about what they wear, and they prefer all-natural fabrics.
My team of five has agreed to stay on through the fall, leaving me with time to return to my other work in the virtual world.
My late husband lives on in our children as well as the many structures he built in the Bay Area and especially the one he didn’t get to build but began when it was just an empty lot and an idea.
Sydney 