Is John Fry the love child of Thomas Pynchon and Greta Garbo?

I'd never heard of John Fry until I read Lee Gomes's "Portals" column in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, in which Gomes related his experiences last week at a workshop in Palo Alto sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics.

"The institute is funded in large part by John Fry, the owner of a chain of computer and electronics stores," wrote Gomes.

Wait a minute — "a chain of computer and electronic stores" doesn't even begin to describe how important John Fry's original store, opened in 1985 in Sunnyvale, was to the birth of personal computing.

But I digress.

Gomes continued, "Mr. Fry is a math buff, but also something of a Thomas Pynchon [top] figure, in that he declines all requests for interviews."

Hence the headline of this post.