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Doug Neckers| Community Columnist

One of the valuable gifts older people contribute to society is a collective memory about personalities and events that occurred in a community in the past. My own collective memory about some fascinating Toledo-area people, who tangled in an epic lawsuit, surfaced a few weeks ago. That lawsuit went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

My memory got an unexpected jog when I watched, as I usually do, Judy Woodruff's "PBS News Hour" program.

A final story from her Arts Canvas featured the classical pianist Mahani Teave, 38, who grew up on Easter Island, part of Polynesia. About 2,000 miles off the coast of Chile, it is one of the most remote places on Earth. Called "Rapa Nui" in the Polynesian language, the island has a population of barely 7,000 people. It's famous for those mysterious giant stone statues, the moai, created by the ancient Rapa Nui people.

Easter Island was a veritable music desert in Teave's childhood. Music teachers came, spent a few months, and left. Pianos? Oh, they were almost "non-existent" in her recollection. Yet it can take 10-15 years of intensive study with a master pianist to become a classical pianist with hours of practice every day.

So how did Teave become the ingnue of classical piano, mastering pieces like Chopin's Scherzo No. 1 in B Minor? That's the featured track on Teave'sdebut album, "Rapa Nui Odyssey." In March, it climbed to the top of Billboard's classical charts. How did that odyssey happen?

The answer involves, peripherally at least, Toledo, Bowling Green State University, and a $100 million lawsuit alleging the pilfering of intellectual property. It touches on some of northwest Ohio's most renowned personalities: Visionary inventors like the glass industrys duo of the late Harold McMaster and Norman Nitschke and the computer scientist, David L. Fulton. McMaster and Nitschke need little introduction to Toledo area folks. McMaster and Nitschke founded GlasstechInc. the glass fabrication firm and First Solar, the solar energy mega-company manufacturing glass solar panels in Perrysburg. Both were also investors in my company, Spectra Group Ltd. now part of Form Labs LLC.

Fulton may be less familiar. In 1970, he was hired by the mathematics department to bring the computer programming to Bowling Green State University. From math he began a department he called computer science and chaired it for a decade. He was there when I joined BGSU in late 1973. During that tenure, Fulton also co-founded with Sylvania, Ohio, attorney Richard LaValleySr. a company named Fox Software. It developed a widely used database management program called FoxPro. But before that came a predecessor; Fox Research.

Fox Datas 150 employees worked in a Perrysburg shopping center. It had 100,000 customers using Fox Data programs for everything from manufacturing control to accounting. Fulton sold it to Microsoft for $173 million in stock 1992, and became a Microsoft vice president, inviting selected employees to join him in Seattle, before retiring in 1994.

Like so many scientists Albert Einstein to name one Fulton was an interested, amateur musician. For more about the science-music connection check outnobelprize.org/symphony-of-science. For more about Fulton's life in music, google "Fulton violin." Teaser: With his new found wealth, Fulton amassed an astonishing collection of priceless violins, cellos, and bows by Stradivari and other masters.

PBS flashed an image of Fulton and, I think, a Stradivarius violin when detailing Teave's odyssey. It began when a visiting teacher introduced Teave to the piano. It was love at first sound and touch for her. Her natural talent for the keyboard blossomed. Teave left Rapa Nui to advance that talent in Chile, the United States, and Germany. Then she returned.

Fulton, now a Seattle arts patron, visited Easter Island three years ago. After hearing Teave play, he convinced her to come to the U.S. to record her work and helped her with the money. The result was her top-of-the-charts album, the "PBS News Hour" feature, and a new Amazon documentary on her life and home. The title: "Song of Rapa Nui."

Fulton's image on PBS made my jaw drop. And slowly those collective memories washed over me. I remembered him from BSGU. And from a major legal clash that involved my good friends and colleagues Harold and Norm. They were among a group of investors who put money into Fulton's startup business, Fox Research. Older readers may have their own collective memories about pillars of their communities, that invested in the shops of creative young person.

The Toledo investors in Fox Research, though were less than happy when LaValley and Fulton sold Fox Software to Microsoft and they were not included as part of the sale. They hit the proverbial ceiling, contending that Fulton and LaValley improperly sold knowledge the development of which they had paid for and owned. They wanted a piece of the sales largesse. So they sued both LaValley and Fulton.

Other shareholders in the original Fox Research settled for about $400,000. Mr. Delos Palmer, a Toledo attorney, persisted. A Toledo jury awarded him $22 million, which a judge reduced to $13.7 million. But in 1997, a federal appeals court reversed the original verdict.Mr. Palmer appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear the case. He wound up with a $3 million settlement. Fulton took his money though it doesnt appear he played the fiddle forever after.

So, to my older friends I say:Share those collective memories with others. They can become part of a larger endowment of knowledge that helps illuminate and enlighten the younger people as they march through the years.

Doug Neckers is the retired founder of the center for photochemical sciences and past president of the board of the Robert H. Jackson Center; his writings can be found on 3dsicenceblog.com. The author is indebted to science writer/collaborator Michael J. Woods for some of this story.

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Douglas Neckers: Easter Island and Toledo - HollandSentinel.com