Happy Holden: How I Became an Engineer

Estimated reading time: 1 minute

What drives someone to become an engineer, particularly a PCB engineer? For industry icon Happy Holden, it was growing up in a family that couldn’t afford a TV but that lived close to a library and a movie theater. It allowed a curious boy the time and space to entertain his interests in science fiction and take things apart to see how the world really worked. As we guide and mentor today’s and future generations, his counsel is definitely worth considering.

Marcy LaRont: Happy, you’ve been in the industry for more than 50 years. How did you become an engineer?

Happy Holden: In the simplest sense, it boils down to toys, time, and money. I wanted toys to play with, my family did not have much money, and I had a lot of time on my hands. Neither of my parents were scientists or engineers. My father was a dairy farmer in Wisconsin and attending UW-Whitewater on the GI Bill. My mother was a farmer’s wife, but worked as a chemist on the Manhattan Project. She had also been an AAU swim champion, so she appreciated sportsmanship and hard work.

When I was young, we didn’t have a TV, so I was left to my own devices to entertain myself. I would often build my toys as the store versions were too expensive. Even for model airplanes, the plastic kits cost too much, so I bought inexpensive balsa wood and paper plane kits which took a lot of time and skill to build. With rubber bands, they could actually fly. Of course, I added a JetEx miniature solid fuel rocket motor to give them power.

We did have a radio, and I enjoyed listening to those programs. I was a builder from my earliest days, and I eventually built a radio receiver. I was someone who wanted to know how things worked. I enjoyed taking things apart and putting them back together.

Read this entire article, which appeared in  the January 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.