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| Tinker, Maker, Jester, Sage | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| by Diane Sussman 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. “People don't come up to me and ask me, Are you a weirdo? But they might want to.” - Jan Krieg Alas, road society doesn't seem ready to accept the ecologically sound vehicle. "It's like riding a bicycle. You go around with the assumption that you are invisible," said Krieg. "But someone has to be willing to put his life on the line to show people that we don't need to have 4,000-pound cars per person."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. 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.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." “My wife is always screaming at me, 'You've got to stop.” - Jan Krieg All his projects are funded with "pocket change." Sparing every expense, he scrounges materials from junkyards, the streets, garage sales and freebies ads in newspapers. To make a clock that looks like bundled sticks of dynamite - "to show deadline pressure" - he picked up red road flares, and as a figure to sit in an electric chair, his protest against the death penalty, he used an old dental mannequin. 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.” – END |
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| Wild W E S T | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Parking No Problem | |||||||||||||||||||||||
By Tracie Cone Tiny purple car finds space |
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Jan Krieg calls himself Dr. Technology, but he is neither a doctor nor a toiler in one of Silicon Valley's many high-tech enterprises. What he has scientifically figured out, however, could be more useful to humanity than curing disease or designing a faster chip, especially in his hometown of Palo Alto, a city with approximately 10 times more trendy home accessory stores than parking spaces. Proving that necessity is, indeed, the parental unit of invention, Dr. Technology has built a smaller, more easily parked vehicle, and the world is beating a path to his tiny door, which is painted with his nickname in a very eye-catching pink. They're knocking mostly because they want to ask him what the heck he's tooling about town in. Dr. T will probably tell you it's a home-made space saucer powered by cold fusion. I'm pretty sure he's lying, but these days, who can tell? Aliens, I've been told by UFO-watchers, are among us. The machine's shape does look a lot like Darth Vader's head on top of a go-cart. Dr. T's miniature car can be seen nearly every day zipping up and down University Avenue loaded with other people's false teeth and dental bridgework. Dr. T makes these things, I should tell you, lest you mistakenly assume that a guy who believes he's driving a flying saucer would also have an unnatural desire to transport uppers, lowers and partials for no apparent reason. He uses his tiny car to deliver them from the lab to dentists' offices. "It has solved all of my parking problems," says Dr. T, "and it doesn't consume very much energy." All of the energy, it seems, goes into explaining what the vehicle is, especially since December when he painted it an eye-catching shade of purple. People run him down on foot, as I did, or gather around enviously to ask questions when he whips into the tiniest sliver of unoccupied asphalt to make a delivery. He built the vehicle nine years ago when he got tired of spending half of his delivery time searching for parking. It took two weeks and several hundred dollars' worth of sheet metal and tubing. He combined parts from a Honda scooter and a go-cart. "At first it was just plain metal, but the dog peed on it a couple of times so I had to make it look better," says Dr. T, who drives in a stylish black leather motorcycle-style jacket. "Now I think the purple color makes it more noticeable." No, Dr. T, a 44-inch-wide vehicle that looks like one of those miniature circus clown cars would be noticeable in any color amid the Troopers, Land Rovers and other automotive giants that cruise downtown P.A., spewing fossil fuels in their exasperating search for a place to shut down. Speaking of fossil fuels, Dr. T calls his purple car "The Pterodactyl." He doesn't call it that because the decayed bodies of pterodactyls and other prehistoric creatures are what metamorphosed into the oil we use to operate combustible engines. "I am the founder of the Society for the Preservation of the Pterodactyl," explains Dr. T. Aren't you a little late to save flying dinosaurs? "Oh, they're still around." The 350-member society is a group of Palo Alto doctors, lawyers and other business types who meet at least once a year at a black-tie gathering to "drink champagne and talk about what we'd do to save the world," Dr. T says. What he's doing is trying to cut down on car emissions and fuel consumption. His car goes 50 mph if you don't mind a lot of vibration, and gets 100 miles to a single, 87-octane gallon of unleaded. He's driven it as far as San Jose. The optimum speed for the 15 horsepower engine is 30. The entire car is 8 feet long, 350 pounds, street-legal and license. "My old Volvo cost me $75 a month in gas and got 20 miles to the gallon," he says. "This costs about $3." It has no air bags, safety belts, anti-lock brakes, nor side impact door reinforcements. What kind of match would it be for a 5,000-pound opponent? "Everything is relative," says Dr. T. "A car offers no protection from a train. If everyone was driving a car this size, we'd all be OK." The only remaining question is this all-important one: Does it work? And we don't mean mechanically. "I've never gotten a ticket," says Dr. T. "I've never even been stopped, and you'd think that I would have just out of curiosity." Kevin, a tow truck driver, double-parked (because, of course, there were no parking spaces nearby) to take a look at Pterodactyl, though there would rarely be a need to tow a vehicle that can be carried practically as easily as the saucer that George Jetson folded into his briefcase. "Only in Palo Alto," Kevin said, walking back to his big truck, " the town for artists and people with unique ideas." It's also the town where only a Pterodactyl can find a place to park. TRACIE CONE is a staff writer for West. |
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| Palo Alto Weekly - Arts & Entertainment | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| On The Road Again | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| photo coming | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| by Carolyn Copeland People take different approaches to doing their part for the environment Jan Krieg, a Palo Alto vintage car builder, uses ethanol fuel to power his 1929 Ford Roadster. Sporting a "Rednecks for Obama" bumper sticker above the license plate, the red and green rusted car rests in Krieg's shop in Palo Alto. The car is a two-seater convertible with metal seats, giant headlights, and hood that needs to be unscrewed in order to open it. Krieg started building his car three years ago after spending tow years searching for the parts. " I use ethanol fuel because its about 80 percent cleaner than gasoline and provides more horsepower," said Krieg, who works on cars as a hobby. "I'm also an environmenatal nut. I want to alert people about global warming. Like they say, If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." Hopefully this car will reach the people that are part of the problem." Plenty of people will see the Ford Roadster on July 25, when Krieg plans to display it at the Vintage Vehicles and Family Festival at El Camino ark in Palo Alto. He says he's excited to show if off at the event for the second time. Though the festival was cancelled last year due to funding issues, Krieg has entered cars in the festival several other times. This free annual event includes live music, LEGO displays, old time radio and radio-controlled model race cars, as will as classic cars, hot rods, bicycles, motorcycles and other vehicles on display. This year, there is also a section focusing on the evolution of the Ford vehicle. The Museum of American Heritage, which organizes the event, was able to get the funding to bring the event back thanks to sponsors and underwriters, said Gwenyth Claughton, executive director of the museum. Claughton said she expects there will be between 100 and 125 antique vehicles as well as some innovative ones. She anticipates thousands of visitors. "There's not always the same people showing at the event, so there's always something new to see," Krieg said. Krieg just might bring another vehicle along from his shop, which is home to several other works-in progress. His vintage cars include a green 1951 Chevy pick-up truck that he is currently selling and a blue 1985 Superkart[a go kart with a powerful motor] that has never been raced. He also an aluminum motorcycle that he built in 2001 that turns heads whenever he drives it because of its resemblance to a Three-wheeled car. Krieg says he does what he can to make his cars as environmentally friendly as possible. By using ethanol as an alternative fuel for his Roadster, he doesn't have to worry about his engine overheating. While a normal engine tends to be about 200 degrees, his car goes up to only 150, he said. Though he enjoys building and fixing up different cars, the Roadster remains one of his favorites. Krieg drives it about once a week and doesn't hesitate to take it long distances because it runs so well. |
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