Repotting: December

Community Comments

Ode to the Family Tree

By Stephanie Chandler

The short, straightstretch of real estate that is Placerville’s historic Main Street is drenched in the history of schemes gone bad or prosperity found. Like most of his predecessors, Bob Bennett Jr.’s endeavor to set up shop on Main Street is full of life lessons, tenacity and fate.
    Bennett, 42, has an economics degree from Stanford and a business degree from Northwestern. He worked in marketing for such powerhouses as Hewlett Packard, Anderson Consulting and Intel before launching Sharewave, a start-up technology company in El Dorado Hills. 
    Bennett and three partners managed to secure more than $60 million in venture capital funding to develop a chip that enabled wireless networking capabilities. The business grew steadily, and in 2002, the partners accepted an offer to sell Sharewave to Austin-based Cirrus Logic. Bennett says, “It was a time when the IPO market was drying up.  It was a good move for us.”
    After successfully getting into — and out of — a start-up venture, Bennett had the luxury of some needed re-evaluation time. One thing he knew for sure: “I was tired of going to work at seven in the morning, getting home at seven at night and having only a small slice of time to spend with my family,” he says. “Once I had time away from work, I realized what I was missing at home. I discovered new priorities, and I knew that going back to Corporate America wasn’t the right thing for me.” 
    Bennett’s technology pursuits were a temporary departure from the family legacy. Bennett’s father, Bob Bennett Sr., and his father’s twin brother, Tom, are a world-renowned artistic team. The former gas station owners began their artistic pursuits in 1969 from the back of their service shop. They welded wire coat hangers into sculptures and eventually progressed to handcrafting bronze sculptures. In the late ’70s, they built a foundry to ensure the quality of their designs and in the ’80s, they opened galleries in Carmel, Dallas, Honolulu and San Francisco.
    The twins’ art ranges from abstract sculptures to statues of golfers, shiny 15-inch pieces to the dramatic ninefoot form perched in the entrance of Bennett Gallery. Many of their polished bronze sculptures are infused with patina, an acid polish that is marbleized during heating and creates different colors that often emulate granite or marble. Sadly, Bob Bennett Sr. passed away in April 2003.
Continued...

• Share
  • Digg This
  • del.icio.us
  • Newsvine
  • Facebook
  • Reddit
  • Furl It
  • !Y My Web
  • Google
• Email
• Print

Recommend This

Community Comments