20 | JUNE 17 • 2021
I
loved my father, and he
loved me,” said writer,
producer and media pio-
neer Harvey Ovshinsky. “I
knew that, and he knew that.
“But that doesn’t mean it
wasn’t always an easy rela-
tionship.”
You might call that a dra-
matic understatement.
Life has seldom been easy
for the sons of fathers with
outsized personalities, espe-
cially if they are famous —
and Stan Ovshinsky was, to
put it mildly, both. The son
of Jewish immigrants from
Lithuania and Belarus, he
came to be recognized as
one of the greatest scientists
and inventors of his time,
although he barely earned a
high school degree.
The elder Ovshinsky, who
founded Energy Conversion
Devices in Detroit in 1960,
invented the nickel-met-
al-hydride battery that
powers your cell phone and
laptop computer; rewritable
DVDs and CDs; hydrogen
fuel cells, the flat screens
used in modern TVs, mod-
ern solar cell technology
and more. He was awarded
more than 1,000 patents;
fought the scientific estab-
lishment for recognition and
won. World-famous scien-
tists, from I.I. Rabi to Linus
Pauling to Edward Teller,
came to see him.
Nor was Harvey any
slouch.
When he was just 17, he
founded the Fifth Estate, one
of the nation’s first and soon
most famous counterculture
newspapers, went on to help
reinvent radio at WABX-FM
later in the 1960s, and then
became a renowned and
award-winning producer
of documentary films for
several Detroit television sta-
tions, before writing his own
screenplays and founding his
own production company,
HKO Media.
Yet, he wasn’t his father. “I
wasn’t a genius. I didn’t want
or need to be a genius. Stan
was, and he was, frankly, a
narcissist. I loved my father,
but I did not worship him. I
didn’t know how. He needed
to be worshiped.”
Harvey’s relationship
with his father is one of
the themes in his fasci-
nating memoir, Scratching
the Surface (Wayne State
University Press, 2021),
though the book, well, mere-
ly scratched the surface.
For Stan Ovshinsky, his
work, his creative genius,
was everything. As his son
noted, “he was extremely
generous to me. His goal was
to save the world.”
While he was an atheist,
he took his Jewish identity
seriously; his values had
been molded by the left-wing
culture of the members of
the Workmen’s Circle group
in his native Akron.
His ultimate hero was not
Albert Einstein or Henry
Ford, but Eugene V. Debs.
But Stan always put his
own needs first. He met biol-
ogist Iris Miroy at a party
when his own children were
little, and left his wife and
three young sons for her,
apparently without much
thought about what that
would do to them. Harvey,
who has been with his wife,
Catherine Kurek Ovshinsky,
since they met in their early
20s, was emotionally battered
by what he calls “the seven
years’ war” between his bio-
logical parents.
He came to prize stability
and happy monogamy, but
for years was haunted by the
fear — no, conviction that
he, too, would have the same
thing happen to him.
“It took six years of ther-
apy” to overcome that, he
said. Over time, he learned
how to have a healthy rela-
tionship with this complex
man who he indeed deep-
ly loved. “I learned in the
course of writing the book
that I was more like my
father than I realized.”
But only up to a point.
“My father was a true
believer. He needed to be
adored. He needed to call
the shots. He literally had no
self-doubt.” When it came
to scripting his life, “He was
very good at it — but there
was a price.
Harvey Ovshinksy looks back on a complicated
relationship with his famous dad.
JACK LESSENBERRY CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Fathers & Sons
OUR COMMUNITY
Fathers & Sons
Stan and Harvey
Ovshinsky
WSU PRESS