Leaving Something Under the Family Tree : A Costa Mesa inventor/author/businessman says that when his children are ready to learn about their roots, his bio will be there for them.

Usually after spending 20 or so years growing up under one’s parents’ roof, the last thing an offspring wants to hear is more of their stories and reflections. So, even though George Siposs gets along fine with his four grown children, he’s not especially surprised that they haven’t yet shown much interest in the single-spaced 500-page autobiography he’s written for their benefit.

When 61-year-old inventor/author/businessman Siposs learned he had heart disease a couple of years back--he’s since licked it, along with leukemia--he undertook what he thought would be his last work, the autobiography called “First Generation” that to him is a personal version of “Roots.” He wrote the book partly as a cathartic process, he said, and only dimly with the intent of seeing it published.

Rather, his chief reason for assembling the book, complete with maps, photos and family tree, was to leave something to his children.

“I started thinking after a friend of mine who is Indian said that his son really didn’t know what he was or where he came from. I thought if I died my children wouldn’t know much about the family background and how I had to fight my way up from a simple penniless orphan immigrant boy to a successful business executive, a totally self-made man. People reach a point in their life when they would give anything to find out about their roots, and I didn’t want to leave them without that,” Siposs said.

The book, spread through two volumes, was started two years ago and finished last year. The first volume recounts his life growing up in a part of Hungary that was annexed into Czechoslovakia, while the second covers his years in business in Canada and the United States. Except for a daughter who typed most of the manuscript for him, none of his children has shown more than a glancing interest in the work so far.

“It may bore them now, but someday I think it will be interesting reading for them,” Siposs said. “It seems it usually isn’t until people turn 45 or 50 that they become interested in their roots. Someday they’ll have to sit down and read it, I guess. It’s like when you die, all of sudden the world discovers you. I think that’s what will happen someday.”

In the meantime Siposs isn’t sitting on his hands. Already on this Fourth of July holiday morning he’d been working the three hours since 7 o’clock on a new novel, to join the trio of as-yet unpublished fiction books he has completed. Siposs is basically a dynamic, can-do kind of guy. You almost expect him to get a wrench out when he states, “Heart surgery is basically plumbing. It’s so simple you can explain it in an hour.”

He has more than a passing knowledge of such things, as he’s a biomedical engineer with nearly 20 patents for such life-saving devices as artificial-heart valves and an insulin pump. He also has 11 published nonfiction books, on subjects ranging from radio controlled model race cars--an invention he pioneered and perfected in the ‘60s--to a small business success formula called “How to Cash In on Your Bright Ideas.” A virtual pauper when he fled Eastern Europe four decades ago, he says now he’s been successful in business beyond his wildest dreams.

One should also mention that he’s spoken in lecture halls around the world, been a champion white-water kayaker, guested on the “Steve Allen” and “To Tell the Truth” TV programs and composed and produced his own locally staged 1986 opera about Orange County folk hero Modesta Avila (a Capistrano woman who died in prison after becoming the county’s first convicted felon in 1889. The crime, legend has it, was stringing a clothesline across the Santa Fe tracks to protest the railroad). The walls of Siposs’ Costa Mesa office are crowded with awards and commendations he’s received.

Though aimed at his offspring, Siposs feels his book may be of wider interest. In lightly accented English he explained, “I’ve found that nobody has really written about the immigrant experience after World War II. Most are about the first part of the century.

“The postwar people had a very different story. Instead of Ellis Island, they came in through the International Refugee Organization, on Liberty Ships. And we were looked down on, ostracized, called DPs--displaced persons. I recall how awful it felt to be a nobody. I had no papers, nothing, so I had to invent myself, so to speak, to prove that I was somebody. When I became a citizen and got my engineering degree were some of the high points in my life because I could prove then that I was somebody.”

Siposs’ homeland had been torn by annexation, World War II and a communist takeover. “The most terrifying thing that I ever saw was one day I was going downtown on my bicycle and came up against this stopped truck, with these people sitting on the bed of it. As the truck started, this guy was dragged off and all of a sudden he was swinging in front of me. He was tied to the tree, strung up there. I was horrified. And the truck kept stopping like that; the Nazis were stringing over 25 people up to trees and lampposts. This was in the last days of the war. We were being bombed all the time, and then the Russians came in.”

When he was 18, Siposs’ family’s textile factory was seized by the communists. “Suddenly there was a guy with a red armband and a gun at the door, checking us before he’d let us in, and here the house and the factory had been ours for the last 80 years. It was very difficult to take that.”

Combined with expectations of being drafted into the military, Siposs said, “we thought there was no future for us. So my brother, his new wife and I left with what was on our backs and snuck across the Iron Curtain. We had zip, just ourselves. I had a pair of shorts on and sandals. When the sole broke on a sandal, I fixed it with an old license plate riveted on. I sounded like Fred Astaire tap-dancing. There was very little food. We became so resourceful and so self-sufficient I feel nothing could hurt me now.”

After a few years in refugee camps, Siposs was able to relocate to Canada, where he put himself through engineering school and met his wife of 35 years, Glenna. He finally was able to move to the United States in 1963 and has lived in Orange County since 1964. He went to work for Edwards Laboratories, which at the time was the only medical equipment manufacturer in the county.

“I’d always dreamed of coming to America because I read so much about it, about airplanes and cars and businesses and people being able to do things, like Dale Carnegie for instance. I’d read his book in Hungarian and it really impressed me.

“We’d had several doctors in my family, and I always wanted to be one, though I’d also leaned towards being an engineer. Then here I am suddenly in America with a lab that needed an engineer to work on medical products. It was a heaven-sent thing. I studied medical books and hung out with doctors and went to morgues and studied anatomy. Within three months I was working on my first heart-valve patent.”

Siposs was only paid $1 for each of the patents he produced. He eventually tired of others making the money off his creations and went into business for himself. Among the creations he came up with on his own was a cigarette pack-sized insulin pump.

“My son Gary is a diabetic, and when he was a teen-ager he kept asking me to invent something that would take the place of him having to inject himself twice a day with a needle, so I came up with an insulin pump, and he was the first patient. That was one of the highlights of my life, for a father to invent something and have his son become the first clinical patient to try it, staying up all night to monitor his blood sugar level every hour. All through my life I’d been working in the day and studying at night to be of some use, and this was a culmination of that,” Siposs said.

He made “First Generation” as honest as he could, he said, and if there are no dark revelations in it, it’s because “I had a clean life.”

“The book may not be totally accurate as much as it’s anecdotal and what I remember. If something happened Tuesday instead of Monday, who the hell cares? But it has what I felt when a Zeppelin flew over my town, the smells I remember and the habits of certain people.”

Though his children were around while a good part of Siposs’ story unfolded, he thinks they still may learn something from the book. “When I was growing up I may have heard my father talk about various relatives and business things, but they were just isolated items. It’s only when I started investigating this book that it became a living, breathing whole. So I think what my children will see out of this is how all these things they may have heard connect, of why Daddy was always building something in the garage instead of sitting in front of the TV with a beer.”