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