Paul Jobs with Steve, 1956
The Los Altos house with the garage where Apple was born
In the Homestead High yearbook, 1972
With the âSWAB JOBâ school prank sign
CHAPTER ONE
CHILDHOOD
Abandoned and Chosen
The Adoption
When Paul Jobs was mustered out of the Coast Guard after World War II, he made a wager with his crewmates. They had arrived in San Francisco, where their ship was decommissioned, and Paul bet that he would find himself a wife within two weeks. He was a taut, tattooed engine mechanic, six feet tall, with a passing resemblance to James Dean. But it wasnât his looks that got him a date with Clara Hagopian, a sweet-humored daughter of Armenian immigrants. It was the fact that he and his friends had a car, unlike the group she had originally planned to go out with that evening. Ten days later, in March 1946, Paul got engaged to Clara and won his wager. It would turn out to be a happy marriage, one that lasted until death parted them more than forty years later.
Paul Reinhold Jobs had been raised on a dairy farm in Germantown, Wisconsin. Even though his father was an alcoholic and sometimes abusive, Paul ended up with a gentle and calm disposition under his leathery exterior. After dropping out of high school, he wandered through the Midwest picking up work as a mechanic until, at age nineteen, he joined the Coast Guard, even though he didnât know how to swim. He was deployed on the USS General M. C. Meigs and spent much of the war ferrying troops to Italy for General Patton. His talent as a machinist and fireman earned him commendations, but he occasionally found himself in minor trouble and never rose above the rank of seaman.
Clara was born in New Jersey, where her parents had landed after fleeing the Turks in Armenia, and they moved to the Mission District of San Francisco when she was a child. She had a secret that she rarely mentioned to anyone: She had been married before, but her husband had been killed in the war. So when she met Paul Jobs on that first date, she was primed to start a new life.
Like many who lived through the war, they had experienced enough excitement that, when it was over, they desired simply to settle down, raise a family, and lead a less eventful life. They had little money, so they moved to Wisconsin and lived with Paulâs parents for a few years, then headed for Indiana, where he got a job as a machinist for International Harvester. His passion was tinkering with old cars, and he made money in his spare time buying, restoring, and selling them. Eventually he quit his day job to become a full-time used car salesman.
Clara, however, loved San Francisco, and in 1952 she convinced her husband to move back there. They got an apartment in the Sunset District facing the Pacific, just south of Golden Gate Park, and he took a job working for a finance company as a ârepo man,â picking the locks of cars whose owners hadnât paid their loans and repossessing them. He also bought, repaired, and sold some of the cars, making a decent enough living in the process.
There was, however, something missing in their lives. They wanted children, but Clara had suffered an ectopic pregnancy, in which the fertilized egg was implanted in a fallopian tube rather than the uterus, and she had been unable to have any. So by 1955, after nine years of marriage, they were looking to adopt a child.
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Like Paul Jobs, Joanne Schieble was from a rural Wisconsin family of German heritage. Her father, Arthur Schieble, had immigrated to the outskirts of Green Bay, where he and his wife owned a mink farm and dabbled successfully in various other businesses, including real estate and photoengraving. He was very strict, especially regarding his daughterâs relationships, and he had strongly disapproved of her first love, an artist who was not a Catholic. Thus it was no surprise that he threatened to cut Joanne off completely when, as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, she fell in love with Abdulfattah âJohnâ Jandali, a Muslim teaching assistant from Syria.
Jandali was the youngest of nine children in a prominent Syrian family. His father owned oil refineries and multiple other businesses, with large holdings in Damascus and Homs, and at one point pretty much controlled the price of wheat in the region. His mother, he later said, was a âtraditional Muslim womanâ who was a âconservative, obedient housewife.â Like the Schieble family, the Jandalis put a premium on education. Abdulfattah was sent to a Jesuit boarding school, even though he was Muslim, and he got an undergraduate degree at the American University in Beirut before entering the University of Wisconsin to pursue a doctoral degree in political science.
In the summer of 1954, Joanne went with Abdulfattah to Syria. They spent two months in Homs, where she learned from his family to cook Syrian dishes. When they returned to Wisconsin she discovered that she was pregnant. They were both twenty-three, but they decided not to get married. Her father was dying at the time, and he had threatened to disown her if she wed Abdulfattah. Nor was abortion an easy option in a small Catholic community. So in early 1955, Joanne traveled to San Francisco, where she was taken into the care of a kindly doctor who sheltered unwed mothers, delivered their babies, and quietly arranged closed adoptions.
Joanne had one requirement: Her child must be adopted by college graduates. So the doctor arranged for the baby to be placed with a lawyer and his wife. But when a boy was bornâon February 24, 1955âthe designated couple decided that they wanted a girl and backed out. Thus it was that the boy became the son not of a lawyer but of a high school dropout with a passion for mechanics and his salt-of-the-earth wife who was working as a bookkeeper. Paul and Clara named their new baby Steven Paul Jobs.
When Joanne found out that her baby had been placed with a couple who had not even graduated from high school, she refused to sign the adoption papers. The standoff lasted weeks, even after the baby had settled into the Jobs household. Eventually Joanne relented, with the stipulation that the couple promiseâindeed sign a pledgeâto fund a savings account to pay for the boyâs college education.
There was another reason that Joanne was balky about signing the adoption papers. Her father was about to die, and she planned to marry Jandali soon after. She held out hope, she would later tell family members, sometimes tearing up at the memory, that once they were married, she could get their baby boy back.
Arthur Schieble died in August 1955, after the adoption was finalized. Just after Christmas that year, Joanne and Abdulfattah were married in St. Philip the Apostle Catholic Church in Green Bay. He got his PhD in international politics the next year, and then they had another child, a girl named Mona. After she and Jandali divorced in 1962, Joanne embarked on a dreamy and peripatetic life that her daughter, who grew up to become the acclaimed novelist Mona Simpson, would capture in her book Anywhere but Here. Because Steveâs adoption had been closed, it would be twenty years before they would all find each other.
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Steve Jobs knew from an early age that he was adopted. âMy parents were very open with me about that,â he recalled. He had a vivid memory of sitting on the lawn of his house, when he was six or seven years old, telling the girl who lived across the street. âSo does that mean your real parents didnât want you?â the girl asked. âLightning bolts went off in my head,â according to Jobs. âI remember running into the house, crying. And my parents said, âNo, you have to understand.â They were very serious and looked me straight in the eye. They said, âWe specifically picked you out.â Both of my parents said that and repeated it slowly for me. And they put an emphasis on every word in that sentence.â
Abandoned. Chosen. Special. Those concepts became part of who Jobs was and how he regarded himself. His closest friends think that the knowledge that he was given up at birth left some scars. âI think his desire for complete control of whatever he makes derives directly from his personality and the fact that he was abandoned at birth,â said one longtime colleague, Del Yocam. âHe wants to control his environment, and he sees the product as an extension of himself.â Greg Calhoun, who became close to Jobs right after college, saw another effect. âSteve talked to me a lot about being abandoned and the pain that caused,â he said. âIt made him independent. He followed the beat of a different drummer, and that came from being in a different world than he was born into.â
Later in life, when he was the same age his biological father had been when he abandoned him, Jobs would father and abandon a child of his own. (He eventually took responsibility for her.) Chrisann Brennan, the mother of that child, said that being put up for adoption left Jobs âfull of broken glass,â and it helps to explain some of his behavior. âHe who is abandoned is an abandoner,â she said. Andy Hertzfeld, who worked with Jobs at Apple in the early 1980s, is among the few who remained close to both Brennan and Jobs. âThe key question about Steve is why he canât control himself at times from being so reflexively cruel and harmful to some people,â he said. âThat goes back to being abandoned at birth. The real underlying problem was the theme of abandonment in Steveâs life.â
Jobs dismissed this. âThereâs some notion that because I was abandoned, I worked very hard so I could do well and make my parents wish they had me back, or some such nonsense, but thatâs ridiculous,â he insisted. âKnowing I was adopted may have made me feel more independent, but I have never felt abandoned. Iâve always felt special. My parents made me feel special.â He would later bristle whenever anyone referred to Paul and Clara Jobs as his âadoptiveâ parents or implied that they were not his ârealâ parents. âThey were my parents 1,000%,â he said. When speaking about his biological parents, on the other hand, he was curt: âThey were my sperm and egg bank. Thatâs not harsh, itâs just the way it was, a sperm bank thing, nothing more.â
Silicon Valley
The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs. The finance company where Paul worked as a repo man, CIT, had transferred him down to its Palo Alto office, but he could not afford to live there, so they landed in a subdivision in Mountain View, a less expensive town just to the south.
There Paul tried to pass along his love of mechanics and cars. âSteve, this is your workbench now,â he said as he marked off a section of the table in their garage. Jobs remembered being impressed by his fatherâs focus on craftsmanship. âI thought my dadâs sense of design was pretty good,â he said, âbecause he knew how to build anything. If we needed a cabinet, he would build it. When he built our fence, he gave me a hammer so I could work with him.â
Fifty years later the fence still surrounds the back and side yards of the house in Mountain View. As Jobs showed it off to me, he caressed the stockade panels and recalled a lesson that his father implanted deeply in him. It was important, his father said, to craft the backs of cabinets and fences properly, even though they were hidden. âHe loved doing things right. He even cared about the look of the parts you couldnât see.â
His father continued to refurbish and resell used cars, and he festooned the garage with pictures of his favorites. He would point out the detailing of the design to his son: the lines, the vents, the chrome, the trim of the seats. After work each day, he would change into his dungarees and retreat to the garage, often with Steve tagging along. âI figured I could get him nailed down with a little mechanical ability, but he really wasnât interested in getting his hands dirty,â Paul later recalled. âHe never really cared too much about mechanical things.â
âI wasnât that into fixing cars,â Jobs admitted. âBut I was eager to hang out with my dad.â Even as he was growing more aware that he had been adopted, he was becoming more attached to his father. One day when he was about eight, he discovered a photograph of his father from his time in the Coast Guard. âHeâs in the engine room, and heâs got his shirt off and looks like James Dean. It was one of those Oh wow moments for a kid. Wow, oooh, my parents were actually once very young and really good-looking.â
Through cars, his father gave Steve his first exposure to electronics. âMy dad did not have a deep understanding of electronics, but heâd encountered it a lot in automobiles and other things he would fix. He showed me the rudiments of electronics, and I got very interested in that.â Even more interesting were the trips to scavenge for parts. âEvery weekend, thereâd be a junkyard trip. Weâd be looking for a generator, a carburetor, all sorts of components.â He remembered watching his father negotiate at the counter. âHe was a good bargainer, because he knew better than the guys at the counter what the parts should cost.â This helped fulfill the pledge his parents made when he was adopted. âMy college fund came from my dad paying $50 for a Ford Falcon or some other beat-up car that didnât run, working on it for a few weeks, and selling it for $250âand not telling the IRS.â
The Jobsesâ house and the others in their neighborhood were modeled on ones built by the real estate developer Joseph Eichler, whose company spawned more than eleven thousand homes in various California subdivisions between 1950 and 1974. Inspired by Frank Lloyd Wrightâs vision of simple modern homes for the American âeveryman,â Eichler built inexpensive houses that featured floor-to-ceiling glass walls, open floor plans, exposed post-and-beam construction, concrete slab floors, and lots of sliding glass doors. âEichler did a great thing,â Jobs said on one of our walks around the neighborhood. âHis houses were smart and cheap and good. They brought clean design and simple taste to lower-income people. They had awesome little features, like radiant heating in the floors. You put carpet on them, and we had nice toasty floors when we were kids.â
Jobs said that his appreciation for Eichler homes instilled in him a passion for making nicely designed products for the mass market. âI love it when you can bring really great design and simple capability to something that doesnât cost much,â he said as he pointed out the clean elegance of the houses. âIt was the original vision for Apple. Thatâs what we tried to do with the first Mac. Thatâs what we did with the iPod.â
Across the street from the Jobs family lived a man who had become successful as a real estate agent. âHe wasnât that bright,â Jobs recalled, âbut he seemed to be making a fortune. So my dad thought, âI can do that.â He worked so hard, I remember. He took these night classes, passed the license test, and got into real estate. Then the bottom fell out of the market.â As a result, the family found itself financially strapped for a year or so while Steve was in elementary school. His mother took a job as a bookkeeper for Varian Associates, a company that made scientific instruments, and they took out a second mortgage. One day his fourth-grade teacher asked him, âWhat is it you donât understand about the universe?â Jobs replied, âI donât understand why all of a sudden my dad is so broke.â He was proud that his father never adopted a servile attitude or slick style that may have made him a better salesman. âYou had to suck up to people to sell real estate, and he wasnât good at that and it wasnât in his nature. I admired him for that.â Paul Jobs went back to being a mechanic.
His father was calm and gentle, traits that his son later praised more than emulated. He was also resolute. Jobs described one example:
Nearby was an engineer who was working at Westinghouse. He was a single guy, beatnik type. He had a girlfriend. She would babysit me sometimes. Both my parents worked, so I would come here right after school for a couple of hours. He would get drunk and hit her a couple of times. She came over one night, scared out of her wits, and he came over drunk, and my dad stood him downâsaying âSheâs here, but youâre not coming in.â He stood right there. We like to think everything was idyllic in the 1950s, but this guy was one of those engineers who had messed-up lives.
What made the neighborhood different from the thousands of other spindly-tree subdivisions across America was that even the neâer-do-wells tended to be engineers. âWhen we moved here, there were apricot and plum orchards on all of these corners,â Jobs recalled. âBut it was beginning to boom because of military investment.â He soaked up the history of the valley and developed a yearning to play his own role. Edwin Land of Polaroid later told him about being asked by Eisenhower to help build the U-2 spy plane cameras to see how real the Soviet threat was. The film was dropped in canisters and returned to the NASA Ames Research Center in Sunnyvale, not far from where Jobs lived. âThe first computer terminal I ever saw was when my dad brought me to the Ames Center,â he said. âI fell totally in love with it.â
Other defense contractors sprouted nearby during the 1950s. The Lockheed Missiles and Space Division, which built submarine-launched ballistic missiles, was founded in 1956 next to the NASA Center; by the time Jobs moved to the area four years later, it employed twenty thousand people. A few hundred yards away, Westinghouse built facilities that produced tubes and electrical transformers for the missile systems. âYou had all these military companies on the cutting edge,â he recalled. âIt was mysterious and high-tech and made living here very exciting.â
In the wake of t...