In 2004, while on safari, O'Sullivan had visited the Masai village of Oloolaimutia where people still live a traditional life surviving on cow's milk and blood. He started the Masai Education and Power Project to bring electricity and modern schools to the tribe. Thanks to solar-powered lights, children who tend cattle during the day can attend school at night. O'Sullivan persuaded Apple and Hewlett-Packard to donate laptops, printers, digital cameras and satellite Internet access to five existing schools and the next five, to be built in 2008.
Fish agreed to donate $75,000 to build two schools and then asked O'Sullivan if he could name the high school in honor of Tommy's 18th birthday. They had been estranged for months.
Brandon Thibodeaux
From his North Dallas apartment, Russell Fish keeps up with programmers around the world working on his latest project.
Brandon Thibodeaux
Friend Ben Goldfarb runs with Fish 10 miles every Saturday at White Rock Lake.
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"He said, 'I want to try and build a relationship with my son,'" O'Sullivan says. "'If I can do something that would make him proud, that would be it.'"
The Thomas R. Fish Secondary School in Sultan Hamud opened this September.
Fish says the trip to Kenya was life-altering. He sees the project as nothing less than an opportunity to reinvent education.
"I have spent half of my life dealing with public schools, and for most of that I figured all it needed was a few little tweaks," Fish says. "No. It must be totally destroyed, burned down, plowed over and covered with salt. I'm not going to do anything else in the U.S. until we finish the African project. These are stone-age kids, but they can do math. We'll bring the kids over here and enter them into competitions and stomp the American kids."
Tommy is now attending college. When he turned 18, he learned about the trust fund. Fish gave him a certificate for a skydive and a copy of his patent application for the TOMI-VAC. "Is this real?" he asked his father.
Violating all his own rules, Fish has spent money on himself, installing granite countertops, special cabinets and new carpet in his rented apartment and buying a huge flat-panel TV that hangs in his bedroom.
His business plan is secret for now. "There are two large divisions of the semiconductor industry," Fish says. "There's memory and there's microprocessors. Those two don't cross over. TOMI-VAC combines the two and redefines both of those industries." He says negotiations for licenses are under way with several U.S. companies and foreign sovereign entities.
O'Sullivan has gotten so excited about TOMI-VAC that he has come out of retirement to work with Fish and Beth Blankenship, the CFO who has been Fish's business partner for more than five years.
A Highland Park native, Blankenship has worked in corporate settings and with entrepreneurs. A "gut feeling" prompted her to sign on for the long haul with Fish, who splurged on a birthday gift he knew she'd love: training with a SWAT team.
Asked why she believes that the TOMI-VAC, still in the design phase, will change the world, Blankenship just smiles. She doesn't. But she knows Russell Fish.
