Goodness in creating things for Story and photos by Viviann Kuehl
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igh above Discovery Bay, looking out toward the Olympics, Gary McLuen works on very advanced machinery in a small shop. McLuen’s day is a reflection of his life. “It’s been a long, bumpy road to get here,” joked McLuen. His day begins around 8 a.m., with a short 50-yard commute from the home he shares with his wife, a nursing student at Olympic College. Quality of life is important, so the first thing he does every day is run Jake, the wonder dog, and feed “the girls,” his two horses, Rudy and Frosty. Each morning, they wait by the fence for McLuen to drive down and throw hay over the fence with his Bobcat loader. “Horses are a big part of my life,” explains McLuen. When he bought the property 14 years ago, he was looking for a place with a view and enough land to keep horses. “I could walk, with canes, when we moved here,” said McLuen, who was born with a birth defect that began to impact his walking at age 30, and by age 50 made him dependent on canes or wheelchairs. “Now my horses are like a magic carpet that lets me move around on the land,” McLuen notes. Knowing that if he fell off, he couldn’t get back on or walk back, McLuen is cautious and rides several times a week with Kim McGuire, a trainer and riding instructor. Back in the shop, his work has grown out of his life experiences. From an early age, growing up in Renton with his three brothers, McLuen was interested in building things. He took a radio repair night course at Renton Vocational School before he dropped out of high school at 16 to take up what he thought would be a romantic life hopping freights and working as a migrant laborer. “It wasn’t romantic at all,” recalled McLuen. He enjoyed the migrant labor but not the hobo jungles, and after a year and a half, he settled into a series of jobs, working with his hands and engaging his brain as an assembler, a laborer, a typewriter repairman, a machinist. As a machinist at Litton Industries, he worked with engineers who had been educated but had no experience with making things, recalled McLuen.
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“Often there were problems just with making the parts they wanted and then when I built the machines, they didn’t work anyway. I started to think about better ways to build things,” said McLuen. As a result of his persistence with improvements, his boss promoted him to designer. Doing field service work, installing and repairing computer-controlled equipment in Mexico, Montreal, Canada, Sweden and Germany, as well as in the U.S., McLuen realized that he didn’t have the background knowledge to do what he wanted, so he began taking night school classes to become a mechanical engineer. “I took every math class they had,” said McLuen. “I didn’t like math, but it’s a very useful tool.” In 1992, he started McLuen Design, his own engineering company to design and develop automated equipment and medical devices, with $6,000. He worked for clients in the daytime while working nights on development of a machine to synthesize DNA, which was key to the human genome mapping project that the Berkeley National Lab was working on. “It was stressful, but once you’re into it, you want to get done and be a success,” said McLuen. For two years he persisted and in the end he came up with a machine that for many years was the fastest and most reliable DNA synthesizer in the world. The proceeds from that machine got him his land and his current facility. Today, he’s working
Gary McLuen shows one of his most recent inventions, a spinal fusion cage.
At right: Gary McLuen’s spinal fusion cage and its insertion tool are shown in place on a life-size model of a lumbar vertebrae. The upper vertebra is out of place to reveal the cage.
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