RANCHER

Recounts Career In Newly Released Memoir

by Managing Editor Stevie Ipsen

As individuals who face an endless number of variables – animal health to weather patterns, mechanical difficulties to natural disasters – cattle producers are notorious for their ingenuity. For the typical rancher, their inventive spirit usually comes from an education at the school of hard knocks but for Santa Barbara County Cattleman Paul McEnroe, Buellton, his mind for innovation predates his time as a cattle rancher.

While many ranchers may look back at their life’s work and see generations of livestock bloodlines, seasons of hay crops and the constant measurement of rainfall, McEnroe encounters a product of his life’s work each time he goes through the checkout line at his local Albertson’s grocery store.

The Universal Product Code (UPC), commonly known as a barcode, is a ubiquitous detail that consumers in virtually every retail outlet encounter on a daily basis. It is so commonplace that most people don’t give the barcode a second thought. But in 1969 its development engulfed the young mind of McEnroe, who was employed at IBM while completing graduate school at Stanford University.

McEnroe said at that time, IBM, which had been his employer for the past 9 years, had a lead on a major demand in the retail sector. Supermarkets had identified the essential need for faster product checkout and more efficient inventory tracking.

“IBM was one of the biggest companies in the world and their leaders were in need of someone internal that needed to meet some key requirements to head up a very specific project.”

McEnroe said.

With employment experience at Boeing in Seattle, Wash., an undergraduate engineering degree from Dayton University and advanced business and engineering education from Purdue University and Stanford, McEnroe might have been the right man with the right education in the right place at the right time. It also helped that his hometown of Dayton, Ohio, was also the home of National Cash Register, which produced check stand registers and provided valuable insight to McEnroe.

“I was selected to form and lead the team tasked with finding out how to fill the retail need IBM had in mind,” McEnroe said. “After a lot of thought and consideration, I thought ‘we could make a code that could go on documents, on labels on supermarket items to make the point of sale more streamlined’. After the approval on funding for the project, our team was off and running.”

Along side several of his team members over the course of the next year, McEnroe helped create the complex code of thin and thick black lines that would eventually become the modern convenience we call a barcode. Once the code was formulated, McEnroe recalls the implementation and business execution process to be one of the more difficult aspects of the venture.

“Even though the code worked, it wasn’t automatically just welcomed into the marketplace,” McEnroe explained. “In fact, there were 18 states who passed laws blocking the use of our technology for various reasons. But once consumers embraced it, the problems quickly scaled back.”

McEnroe’s long and successful career at IBM took him, his wife Ann and two children, Paul Jr. and Maureen, from the West Coast headquarters in the Silicon Valley and to a wooded community in the Raleigh, N.C. suburbs. He traveled extensively from Raleigh and San Jose to Texas, New York and overseas.

Throughout the duration of his storied career McEnroe also created the first commercial application of laser technology, the barcode scanner the magnetic code for Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) marking and the scanner gun, which he still holds the patent for today.

Straightening The Record

Humble like ranchers generally are, McEnroe says he can’t take all the credit for what was very much a team effort. Interestingly, if you do a Google search or inquire Wikipedia about who developed the barcode, a man named Norman Woodland will be credited. McEnroe is quick to give Woodland credit for what he did do but says not only did he not invent the UPC barcode, he wasn’t even on the engineering team that developed the code that is now an international standard.

“If you ask me, our team should have been credited with that recognition and he wasn’t on that development team, rather he worked in marketing and did a great job of helping to sell our code over his own earlier code,” McEnroe said of the award President Bush bestowed on Woodland for “his” invention. “Almost 20 years earlier, and before joining IBM in a different location, Woodland had invented and later sold the rights to a circular code which he now argued against, as we all recognized that that old circular code did not work reliably enough to be selected as the Universal Product Code.

Woodland approached McEnroe at IBM in Raleigh and was impressed that the bar code worked much better than his circular code. Because Woodland believed in the product and knew about code development, he was brought on as a promoter for it as it was implemented in the marketplace, McEnroe explained.

“I do credit him with having the foresight to recognize the need for a product code in the retail sector,” McEnroe said. “He does deserve that and that is a very important point. But when he was approached with a presidential medal of honor for it, I would like to have seen him recommend it be given to the engineering team.

According to IBM, the company first applied for patents around bar code technology in 1949, but the idea remained dormant for decades because laser technology was not yet a practical tool for everyday use. McEnroe says if he could credit just one individual for having the most to do with the development of the barcode as we know it today, George Laurer would get his vote. Laurer worked for McEnroe's team from 1969-1977 and passed away in 2019 at age 94.

Life After Ibm

McEnroe retired from IBM in 1984 and his family became further interested in the western industries. McEnroe and his daughter Maureen had a long love of horses and following the untimely death of his son Paul Jr., retirement from ...CONTINUED ON PAGE 22

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IBM brought the family back to the West Coast where McEnroe’s interest in horses and livestock was budding. Ann, McEnroe’s wife of 30 years was killed in an automobile accident in 1990.

They say the rainbow comes after the rain and for McEnroe, that saying proved true. Maureen introduced her dad to his now wife Tina and in 1994 the pair were married and moved to their ranch in Santa Barbara where they became full time ranchers.

Tina, the 1970 queen of the California Rodeo in Salinas and was raised on a ranch near King City. McEnroe said he feels so blessed to have found a partner like Tina who has such similar interests.

Paul and Tina McEnroe placed their ranch in a conservation easement that was started with the California Rangeland Trust and was finished by the Santa Barbara Land Trust, which McEnroe went on to be a board member of. After much involvement with the Santa Barbara County Cattlemen’s Association, Paul went on to become the group’s president and has been named Cattlemen of the Year in Santa Barbara County. Tina is a member of California CattleWomen, Inc., and was the Santa Barbara County CowBelle of the Year in 2016.

Having also been a director for the California Cattlemen’s Association, McEnroe said Organizations like CCA are critical to the longevity of the California cattle ranching community.

“It wasn’t an easy industry to break into,” McEnroe said. “It was a sharp learning curve and groups like CCA were instrumental in improving our operation and making our situation here on the ranch better.”

As a lifelong student, McEnroe said he also relied on the help of neighboring ranchers and former ranch parters Pam and Nick Ewing for helping them learn the ropes.

“We run about 150 cows here on the ranch now and we do it alone. I love everything about it. The animals and the outdoors,” he said. It doesn’t hurt that the McEnroes live in about as beautiful a region as you can find on planet Earth.

Aside from the ranch, McEnroe has a fondness for competing in rodear competitions with his favorite horse and cow dog. He was even named Rodear Champion at the Midstate Fair in Paso Robles. In 2023, McEnroe was also recognized as Santa Barbara Vaquero of the Year.

Of all the things McEnroe has achieved in life, one of the most instrumental is credited to the insistence of his father.

“My father always told me that education was the most important thing to strive for in life. He said that because he didn’t have any and wanted to make sure I did,” he said.

His father was also a lover of animals and the outdoors. “Not only was I blessed to have wonderful parents, I think they would be very proud of the course my life has taken. I often think about that as I sit on the ranch. My dad would have loved to see this,” McEnroe said.

As the 50th year anniversary of the invention of the UPC Barcode arrives in the fall of 2023, McEnroe has penned The Barcode. The book and memoir is a celebration of the digital age and the entrepreneurial spirit, “whether it occurred in a dusty garage or a lonely laboratory in a big corporate industrial park—and of the men and women who had the vision, the courage and the fortitude to take an ‘impossible’ idea and make it real. And then to change the world.”

With more details than one magazine article can cover, McEnroe’s book will soon be available to the public. More information is available at https://siliconvalleypress.net/thebarcode-book/