Happy Birthday John

As most of you probably already know, last year we lost our great leader. John Strohbeen drove development at Ohm for 45 years, never satisfied to accept the conventional approach to doing anything. For much of that time, it was my honor to work beside him. He was a great friend. Today is his first birthday since he left us. He would have been 79.

Early Days

John spent his boyhood years in Iowa Falls living in a 900 square foot home with his parents and three sisters. His dream was to make cars: he got his first Model A when he was fifteen, in non-working condition. He took it apart piece by piece, and rebuilt the whole thing from the ground up to get it working. His favorite pastime was cruising around to different junkyards looking for spare parts. Model A-ing he used to call it.

When he went to MIT for management, John quite accidentally found himself the founder of a hifi store that spun out into a regional chain called Tech Hifi, with stores as far away as Michigan. Owing to the store’s early success, he dropped out of MIT before completing his studies there. John used Tech Hifi as grounds to experiment with design, from contracting white label products for the Tech Hifi store brand TDC, to his unsuccessful electronics startup Integral Systems, to collaborating on the first Ohm H.

The Ohm Years

During the 1970s, Tech Hifi was possibly the biggest seller of Ohm speakers nationwide. So when the founding President of Ohm, Marty Gersten, told John in 1978 that they were going out of business, he let the other shareholders at Tech Hifi buy him out so that he could purchase Ohm.

John led Ohm to its greatest period of prosperity, designing dozens of our most memorable products - all of them completely outside the box. It was thanks to his relentless creativity that he saved the company from being dragged under when the hifi retail market collapsed in the 1990s.

Life In Brooklyn

It was at that time that he became involved with the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition (BWAC, pronounced BEE-whack). He moved into an artists’ loft in Brooklyn with a member of the nonprofit artists’ collective and fancied that he would retire from the speaker business and become a full-time artist. That didn’t quite happen, but was certainly a more unrestricted conduit for his creativity! He even served as the volunteer President at BWAC for over a decade.

After his heart attack in 2012, John started winding down, and it was serendipitous that my relationship with him began around that time. For years I was essentially his business manager while he focused on his favorite aspects of the company: talking to customers on the phone, and working on speakers!

It’s now been nearly a year without him. Ohm is extremely fortunate to be reliant on a small staff of highly dedicated individuals who have all benefited from John’s guidance for many years. I couldn’t ask for a team better suited to the task at hand. But not a day goes by when I don’t find something I wish I could talk to John about. He will be missed.

Evan Cordes Author

Evan Cordes is the Director of Operations at Ohm Acoustics.