Page 8 - Salesianum - Distinguished Gentleman - Summer 2020

NEWS FROM 18TH & BROOM
Angel P. Bezos ’63
ngel P. Bezos was born in Cuba and came to the United States in July of 1962, one of the more than 10,000 children who emigrated to the U.S. in what is known
as the Peter Pan Airlift. A week or so after his arrival at
Miami, Angel was relocated to Casa de Sales at 1300 Broom Street in Wilmington, where he shared a home with about 15 other Cuban refugees under the supervision of Fr. James P. Byrne, OSFS. Angel attended Salesianum School starting in September of 1962 and graduated in 1963. In that one short year, Angel was transformed from a shy teenager from the hinterlands of Cuba (Palo Seco, population 500) with close
to zero command of the English language, into a successful candidate for admission to the University of Maryland. It was a “mission impossible” type of feat which Angel attributes
to the environment of academic excellence, discipline and personal development that he encountered at Salesianum. Angel graduated from the University of Maryland in 1969 with a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering.
While attending the University of Maryland, Angel
and his college buddy and partner, Emilio A. Fernandez, founded Pulse Electronics, Inc. After graduation and while holding full-time jobs and raising families, Angel and Emilio spent a lot of time at nights and on weekends identifying
and then developing Pulse’s first product, a magnetic tape- based locomotive data recorder. This development took approximately five years. In 1977, Pulse officially started, after both Angel and Emilio left their other full-time jobs to work, very full-time, at Pulse. From that modest beginning, Pulse grew and 20 years later had approximately 200
employees. After the successful development and launching
of the magnetic-tape locomotive data-recorder product line, Pulse continued developing products for the railroad industry, including locomotive speed indicators, alertness monitors
and another very successful line of products, the End of Train devices that replaced the caboose.
Pulse Electronics has been and continues to be a leading supplier of innovative products to the railroad industry. Angel was chief engineer in charge of product design and development and senior vice president of Pulse Electronics, which is now a part of Wabtec. As Chief Engineer, Angel was responsible for the development of new products from concept to production and also for the support of the older products. Angel is the inventor or co-inventor of more than 31 patents, most related
to his work at Pulse, and along with Emilio had the honor
of being inducted into the University of Maryland School of Engineering Innovation Hall of Fame in 1994. Pulse was named the “Hispanic Business of the Year” in 1986.
Angel is now retired but still collaborates with Emilio
on identifying and developing products and on obtaining patent protection for such products. He says the work is just too much fun to pass up. They were recently granted a patent on an improved method of obtaining power for an electronic thermostat. Angel and his wife Rayssa now live in Hollywood, Florida and have been blessed with three children and nine grandchildren.
PDonald Pease, PhD ’63
rofessor Donald Pease has been an authority on 19th- and 20th-century literature and literary theory at Dartmouth College for the last 40 years. After graduating from
Salesianum in 1963, Donald received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in American Literature from the University of Missouri and his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago.
Donald started teaching at Dartmouth in 1973 and became the Ted and Helen Seuss Geisel Third Century Professor in the Humanities in 1990. In his prolific career, Donald has written more than a dozen scholarly text books and published more than 200 articles and essays. He has been a visiting professor
at Oxford; Uppsala University, Sweden; Free University of Berlin; Tor Vergata University of Rome; Columbia; University of Pittsburgh; and SUNY Buffalo to name a few.
6 DISTINGUISHED GENTLEMAN | Summer 2020