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John
Lagadinos: 40 years under the radar
By Jay Turner
Citizen Staff
For a man
who has worked closely with A-bomb scientists, been sought out
and honored by NASA, and designed what he describes as the
“heart” of the Doppler weather radars used all over the world,
Raven Road resident John Lagadinos has somehow managed to remain
a relative unknown throughout his more than 40-year career in
Canton.
 Even the
building his business has operated out of since 1972 — an
unassuming, two-story brick structure on Bolivar Street — is
easily overlooked by passing motorists. Just two modest signs
hang on the building’s façade: one for Lagadinos’ original
business, MagCap Engineering, now owned by his son; and the
other for Pulse Systems, which specializes in building
state-of-the-art transmitters for a variety of different radar
systems.
“I’m really
happy with what I’ve accomplished in my life,” admitted the
70-year-old, Greek-born Lagadinos in his first-ever newspaper
interview.
But rather
than trying to avoid the spotlight, Lagadinos’ surprising
anonymity appears to be more the result of years of “staying
late and working very hard” — a philosophy that he and his wife,
Effie, have followed since they first went into business
together in 1969.
“I enjoy
it,” said Lagadinos of the cutting-edge work he continues to do
at Pulse Systems. “I’m here every day. I don’t have plans to
retire.”
After
spending his childhood in three different regions of Greece,
including his final years of high school in Athens, Lagadinos
made the difficult decision in 1956 to leave his family and
travel to the United States to study engineering in college.
Young,
penniless and alone, he boarded the SS Queen Frederika with a
student visa and reached American shores on November 16.
“I arrived
in Boston and I didn’t know anybody,” he said. “It was hard. I
had no support.”
Although the
terms of his visa stipulated that he could attend school but not
work, Lagadinos got a job in a restaurant out of necessity, and
it was there that he met Effie. He also spent his first year in
Boston attending a school for immigrants; and even though the
admissions director at Northeastern University didn’t think his
English was strong enough, he decided to enroll there anyway in
the fall of 1957.
Lagadinos
said there were many times during his early years in the U.S.
that he considered giving up and going back to Greece, but he
persevered through the challenges — with a lot of help from the
Greek Orthodox Church, to which he remains forever indebted.
“The church held my family together,” he said.
“When you’re
alone in a foreign environment and you leave your family at 18
years, it is very hard,” he said. “I had to become a very mature
man in a hurry in order to survive.”
Upon
graduation from Northeastern in 1963, Lagadinos landed a job at
E G&G, a nuclear testing company founded by three MIT engineers,
and rose to head of the magnetics department after being there
for just six months. By 1965, he had moved to Raytheon, where he
worked as an inspector on a NASA contract for the bulk of the
next three years.
Lagadinos
then decided to leave Raytheon and went into the restaurant
business, owning two delicatessens, including one across from
South Station that was later purchased by the Federal Reserve
Bank.
“It was a
job that I never liked to do,” he said of his days as a
restaurant owner. “Very routine kind of thing, no incentives.”
Fortunately,
NASA was so impressed by an account he had given of the Raytheon
project that they went looking for him. When they found him,
they offered him $55,000 to complete a design manual for space
grade magnetic components and systems, which helped put his
newly-formed MagCap business on the map.
Since the
move to Bolivar Street in 1972, Lagadinos has focused more on
the design of transmitters for a variety of radar systems,
including weather, surveillance and early warning systems. His
transmitters have served governments and business all over the
world, everywhere from Europe to Asia to Australia.
In 1996,
Pulse Systems became one of the first to build a solid state
transmitter, which is used primarily for Doppler weather radars,
and soon became the exclusive supplier to Enterprise
Electronics, a world leader in the field. When the government of
Canada, for instance, wanted to upgrade its weather network to
Doppler, it chose Enterprise radars. Now there are 31 radars
stretching from coast to coast, all using Lagadinos’
transmitters to power their signals.
Along with
Environment Canada, some of Pulse System’s other notable clients
have included: United States Department of Defense, WBZ-TV
Channel 4, WCVB-TV Channel 5, University of Massachusetts,
Lockheed Martin, Honeywell, Baron Services, and the Australian
Bureau of Meteorology.
Having
enjoyed considerable professional and financial success as an
engineer for the past several decades, Lagadinos said he now
likes to give back, especially to the Greek community. He said
he likes to support people who come from Greece because they
remind him of himself as a young man, and he has also donated
substantially to the Greek Church.
In fact, he
recently purchased medical equipment and an ambulance for the
monastic community of Mt. Athos in northern Greece — his
favorite place in the world to travel to. “On a spiritual basis
I find something there that’s very difficult to describe if you
haven’t experienced it,” he said.
By sharing
his story with the Citizen, Lagadinos said he hopes that
people will find inspiration in a poor Greek immigrant who found
success through years of hard work.
“I never
stood in an unemployment line, never in my life,” he said, while
also adding, “We have never borrowed money to do our own job.”
Most of all,
Lagadinos said he wants people to learn the lesson that he did
after arriving to the United States: “Starting with nothing, you
can still make it, because nothing is impossible.”
May 22, 2008
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