Left, Jan Krieg, alias Dr. Technology, alias Eco-Man, tinkers with the engine of an electric car in the garage of his Palo Alto home. Evidence of his handiwork is apparent throughout the house. Above, Krieg airborne in his persona as Eco-man. Twenty years ago, he skied in Tahoe as the ecological do-gooder. Today, his Eco-man costume still fits him. Right, Krieg holds up a model of a tiger fang. He has made fangs for big cats, teeth for monkeys, and tusks for elephants.

Tinker, maker, jester, sage

by Diane Sussman
photographs by Renee Fadiman

In his first incarnation as a persona, Jan Krieg skied down Tahoe mountains in black tights, yellow trunks, a gas mask-type contraption and a yellow cape emblazoned with the ecology symbol. "I was Eco-man," he said.

He skied directly into a generational rift of misunderstanding. "The kids all knew I was Eco-man. The mothers all said Zorro. Imagine that," he said, snorting in indignation. "Zorro."

That was 20 years ago. He hasn't mellowed with age.

Now the wiry-haired Palo Alto inventor no longer wears the Batman style get up, at least not in public. Instead, Krieg tools around in a homemade, three-wheeled aluminum mini-car with the name of his new persona - Dr. Technology - stenciled across the sides.

Like Eco-man, Krieg's latest persona seeks to do battle with the forces of evil, in this case, gas-guzzling behemoths that spew their destructive emissions into the air and the solitary drivers who blithely drive them. Call it better living through technology - quirky technology. "I wanted people to realize you can get around town without a BMW," he said.

The tiny car - part Honda scooter, part go-cart, part aluminum sheets salvaged from the junkyards - weighs 500 pounds and gets 100 miles to the gallon. Flashier than a bicycle, less intimidating than a motorcycle and more sheltered than a scooter, the point-nosed car draws small crowds of people who poke and prod its parts to determine its construction.

So how, one wonders, does Krieg justify the GMC truck in his driveway? "That's different," he says. "That's 5,000 pounds."

Unlike Somerset Maugham's quip that home is the place he could take off his personas, Krieg's home is the place where his personas take off. With a house and garage full of curious and wonderful projects of his own invention, Krieg recalls Wemmick, the circa-1861 techno-twit from Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations."

Wemmick's tiny cottage on the outskirts of London had a moat with a drawbridge, a painted rooftop battery with mounted guns, an ornamental lake for cooling drinks and a tarpaulin umbrella to protect it from the elements. "I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades," said Wemmick.

The same could be said of Krieg. Although he has no moat or mounted guns, Krieg's Palo Alto house, which was turquoise and had a red lava roof when he bought it six years ago, is chock-a-block with the fruits of Krieg's imagination and ingenuity. Granted, some of the fruits are a bit bungled or misshapen.

In the bedroom, there is a whimsical metal bed with intertwined hearts, a Valentine's Day gift for his wife. The garage has everything from a sculpted plastic head to a unicycle-powered buggy he made his sons for the May Fete Parade to a mobile homeless shelter that can be moved from neighborhood to neighborhood. "That way no one neighborhood will feel left out," he said.

[Picture: Jan holding teeth] Below, Jan Krieg holds a bronze tusk he made for Tava the elephant. He has a signed photograph on his wall from Tava thanking him for the tusk. Krieg scrounged the bronze for the tusk from discarded sprinkler heads.

A stuffed deer head above the fireplace suggests Krieg has killer instincts. Not so, he counters. With one bull mastiff, two corgis, a car, a 30-year history of vegetarianism and an aversion to war, Krieg doesn't even like the idea of squishing bugs. "I could never kill anything," he said. "I got that at a garage sale. I mean, how could I resist?"

Krieg's Lake Tahoe house, the first house he built, used a diving bell for a fireplace and a submarine door leading to the bathroom.

Krieg is a familiar figure in downtown Palo Alto, either atop his balloon-tire bicycle, the coils of his wild hair trailing off in every direction, or hanging out in cafes, where he estimates he wastes 60 percent of his time "drawing and dreaming."

Those who have seen Krieg drawing and dreaming might presume he is a man of leisure, or as he suspects, a kook. "People don't come up to me and ask me, Are you a weirdo?" he said. "But they might want to."

But speculators can relax. Krieg does work, and he's not a kook. He is a dental technician, now semi-retired. "Really, I'm not that weird. I used to look like everyone else. For 25 years I put on a tie and went over to work on Welch Road."

These days, Krieg works in a compact shop off his garage. Although he began his career like all dental technicians, by making crowns and bridgework for people, he now makes oral wear for lions and tigers and bears. And monkeys and elephants and pumas.

His creations include a partial tusk for Tava the elephant from Marine World, two gold fangs for Jack the tiger from the San Francisco Zoo and four gold front fangs for Buster the jaguar from San Francisco Zoo. He works with local dentists Paul Brown and Bob Turner, who have achieved minor celebrity as dentists to local animal stars.

He's had no complaints from customers. On one wall in his office, he has a signed picture from Tava the elephant and another of Jack the tiger. In the tiger photo, Krieg's head is half inside Jack's mouth. The scene mirrored the one taking place under Krieg's feet - Krieg's mastiff had all but swallowed the head of one of his corgis.

The job has its hazards, like the time Krieg and a lightly anesthetized tiger were having an intimate tete-a-tete and the tiger woke up. Five people had to pull the tiger's paw back from Krieg with a rope. Another time a tiger bit a hole through a stainless steel bucket. "He bit through it like it was a paper bag," he said.

[Picture: electric car frame] Krieg pieces together the body of a future electric car in his driveway.

These days, Krieg only does dental work two days a week. The rest of the time he "doodles, dreams" and makes things. He never drafts plans or makes elaborate sketches. "I'll do prototypes. If they don't work, I trash them. I built this in two weeks," he said, pointing to his minicar. "It might have taken months doodling around on a drafting table."

A Texas native for three months, Krieg grew up in Mountain View and graduated from Mountain View High "with a degree in advanced switchblade." He went to Foothill College for a few years, but found academia stifling. "I think too much schooling keeps the vein of really good ideas from flowing," he said. "There must be a better way to educate people."

In 1964 he spent a summer in a dental laboratory in Palo Alto and stayed as an apprentice. At one point Krieg worked under Ptah, Palo Alto's most well-known dental technician. The barefoot technician, who twice ran for City Council, believes himself to be an Egyptian deity reincarnated. "Mostly I ran errands for Ptah," said Krieg.

Krieg lives in his house-cum-workshop with his wife Diana and his sons, Ian, 11, Max, 9. Although the family fits snugly into the 1,200 square-foot cottage, Krieg's projects are advancing ever more slowly toward the house. Soon, he realized, he will have to find a warehouse to keep his stuff - and the peace. "My wife is always screaming at me, 'You've got to stop,'" he said.

But getting Krieg to stop hatching ideas and projects is about as likely as getting crabs to walk only in straight line. "I have hundreds of projects I want to do," he said.

As well as a few projects he doesn't want to do, like painting the wood trim in his house. "I need to do it," he said. "I will. I will do it," he added, his conviction growing with each repetition. "Someday."

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