The Sound of a Generation Goes Silent

This isn’t about photojournalism or even journalism, I suppose, but it touches me a bit: Amar G. Bose, the founder of the Bose Corporation, has passed at 83.

When I was growing up in Massachusetts, everyone revered Bose for the high quality, realistic speakers they made. Their 901 Direct/Reflecting series speakers were an aspirational item for everyone I knew and, in the late 1990s, I worked at a newspaper that sat in an industrial park below what we called Mount Bose – a hill that had the company’s glass paneled headquarters at the top.

Mr. Bose never sold shares in his company, something that is pretty admirable. At its peak, it was worth a fortune (and is probably still worth a ton of money now). Why? Because he wasn’t interested in money as much as innovation.

In a 2004 interview in Popular Science magazine, he said: “I would have been fired a hundred times at a company run by M.B.A.’s. But I never went into business to make money. I went into business so that I could do interesting things that hadn’t been done before.”

I kind of wish Mr. Bose had taken an interest in journalism – we need people like him now.

(Thanks to Tim Rice for the link.)