Dr. An Wang (June 7, 1983)
By Charles Phillip Bissell (1926 -)
16.5 x 12, ink and wash on board
Coppola Collection

In 1960, Boston Globe cartoonist Phil Bissell, working for $25 a day, was handed an assignment that would change his life—and the lives of fans of the brand-new AFL football team coming to Boston. “Sports editor Jerry Nason came to me and he said, ‘They’ve decided to call the team the Boston Patriots. You better have a cartoon ready for tomorrow’s edition.’” Bissel’s “Pat Patriot” cartoon was the Patriot’s logo from 1961-1992.

An Wang (1920-1980) emigrated from China after WW2, and earned MS and PhD degrees from Harvard, in Applied Physics, in 1946 and 1948, respectively. Wang founded Wang Laboratories in June 1951 as the sole proprietor. He is a key figure in the development of magnetic core memory (which he sold to IBM in 1955), and for dedicated word processing machines in the mid-1970s. The company became the first market leader in desktop calculators.

With a $4M gift on June 3, 1983, Wang’s generosity spearheaded restoration of the Metropolitan Theater in Boston, which was renamed as the ‘Wang Theater’ in 1983.

In 1984, the Wang family owned about 55 percent of the company stock, and Forbes magazine, estimating his worth at $1.6 billion, ranked him as the fifth richest American.