It's usually the guys who get to tell the tale in the semiconductor industry, so the recollections of Carole Skipworth, Dick's wife, who started Memec with him, and was a director for many years, are particularly interesting.
Memec became the third largest semiconductor distributor in the world before being sold to Avnet.
One evening in April 1974, Dick returned home from his job at GDS Marketing, a franchised distributor.
“Dick came back one night and said: ‘I think I'm going to do this’. At that time we were living in a bungalow with three children and it seemed a bit of a flyer,” remembers Carole, "but I have absolute confidence in the man, and had complete faith in whatever he wanted to do.”
Later that month, Dick and Carole formed Memec, and engaged the company's first employee, Ed Sturmer, a former colleague of Dick's at GDS.
“I always thought of Memec as like a snowball going down a hill - it gathered momentum", recalls Carole, "it just sort of set off. There was just Ed Sturmer, Dick, and myself. We ran the company from the bedroom of the bungalow. I typed all the invoices, boxed up the goods and took them to the post box, and chased up the money.”
“Dick and Ed were a wonderful combination they went about the job in totally opposite ways", says Carole, "Ed was more of the software man and Dick was a semiconductor man. They looked at the problems from two very different viewpoints.
“I didn't have time to worry about it with three children and a business", recalls Carole, "I had almost no time to think about anything.”
“In the early days I used to get to visit Harris (Memec's first franchise) and Silicon Valley", recounts Carole, " I remember one guy in the States who when we went in for a meeting looked like the Sun Dance Kid, wearing cowboy boots with his feet propped up on the desk”.
Fortunately, Carole warmed to the semiconductor industry, and liked the often larger-than-life characters who inhabit it.
“I've always found the semiconductor people a highly interesting and obviously very intelligent group of people, different from most people," says Carole.
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