Today the patent office is obsolete. You just take whatever you do, tool up, and start production for six months. At the end of the six months you put the data on all the computer inputs all over the world and you got your business. You can make all your money, and then people can steal it, but by then it doesn't matter because you've made the money up front and you avoid wasting money in lawsuits. [My father] had all these kinds of ideas years ahead of others.
Paul LaffoleyEventually, to get through school, I would make good meaningless blobs if I had to. And so they thought I was falling in with them and stuff like that. But on the playground, kids would come up to me and say, "I need three Supermans and a Captain Midnight by four o'clock because I'm going to sell them to somebody else." So I'd take all their lunch money and whip these things out, and they'd have to stick them in their underwear to get the pictures home, because if the teacher ever found out about that.
Paul LaffoleyMy father would conclude his dissertations by saying, "Of course, [Albert] Einstein never believed in gravity. It was a distortion of space." And so my father couldn't believe that an attraction at a distance was a reality.
Paul LaffoleyAt one time in the mid-'70s I became the president of the Boston-Cambridge chapter of the World Future Society. Because I'd been in my studio by myself since 1968 on up. And the thing is that my social life consisted of being involved in organizations like that. I would get people to come and speak, and speak myself and that kind of stuff.
Paul Laffoley