A broken television set in his parents’ home is what started Thomas Lee, owner of The Audio Visual Company, on a career path in the electronics industry. Lee, at the time a high school student at Saint Louis School, had to sit at home and wait for the TV repairman to arrive.

When the young technician showed up, he took a brief look at the TV and said he had to take it in to be fixed. Two weeks went by with no television before the set was returned — along with an expensive repair bill. That’s when Lee decided he would study electronics himself.

Conventional schooling was always a chore for Lee, he recalls, so right out of high school he joined the Hawaii Air National Guard to study electronics and work with the Avionics group on F-102 fighter jets. Lee did earn an associate’s degree in science, however, and later attended New York Technical School for Electronics in Honolulu.