Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [17]
After several years in the Midwest where Jobs worked as a machinist at International Harvester and a used-car salesman, he and his wife returned to San Francisco in 1952. It was there that they started to raise their family and experience the perils of parenthood. They began to endure all the perils that children could find. When their young son Steven jammed a bobby pin into an electric outlet and burned his hand, they rushed him to the hospital. Some months later they had his stomach pumped after he and a young accomplice built a miniature chemical lab from bottles of ant poison. In the Jobses’ South San Francisco home there was enough room for another child and Steven was joined by a sister, Patty. Confronted with the responsibility of filling four mouths, Paul Jobs characteristically took out two thousand-dollar-insurance policies to cover his funeral expenses.
Commuting occupied a prominent place among Paul Jobs’s pet dislikes, so after the finance company transferred him to an office in Palo Alto the entire family was tugged farther down the Peninsula. Jobs bought a home in Mountain View, a stone’s throw from the area’s first covered shopping mall, where the neighbors were a mixture of blue-collar and lower-middle-class families.
At the Jobs home Steven took to waking up so early that his parents bought him a rocking horse, a gramophone, and some Little Richard records so that he could amuse himself without disturbing the entire household. Some children across the street made super-8-mm movies and Jobs junior, dolled up in his father’s raincoat and hat, played detective. The family television set that normally was tuned to a steady diet of Dobie Gillis, I Love Lucy, Groucho Marx, and Johnny Quest cartoons.
Like Sunnyvale and Palo Alto, Mountain View had its share of electrical engineers. They brought scrap parts home from work, tinkered about in the garage, and when they built something interesting or novel, usually displayed it in the driveway. One engineer who worked for Hewlett-Packard and lived a few doors away from the Jobses brought a carbon microphone home from his laboratory, hooked it to a battery and speaker, and immediately turned into an electronic Pied Piper. Steven Jobs, who had picked up some elementary electronics from his father, was baffled by something that seemed to violate the rules that he had learned: The carbon microphone had no amplifier and yet sound emerged from the speaker. He reported this to his father who couldn’t provide a satisfactory explanation so he returned and badgered the expert from Hewlett-Packard. He was soon presented with the object under inspection and was frequently invited to dinner at the engineer’s house where he learned some more rudiments of electronics.
Jobs senior found automobiles altogether more interesting than electronics. As a teenager he had scraped together enough money to buy a car and had turned into a perpetual moonlighter—buying, trading, and swapping automobiles. He took pride in the fact that he stopped buying new cars in 1957 and thereafter relied on instincts and the wit in his hands to rescue and restore old models. Jobs concentrated fiercely on fixing examples of a particular model until something else caught his fancy. He mounted snapshots of his favorite automobiles either in a scrapbook or in a picture frame, and would point out subtleties that only a collector would appreciate: a seat decorated with a rare trim or a peculiar set of air vents.
After work he would clamber into a set of overalls, trundle out his clinically clean toolbox, and disappear under the car of the week. He came to know most of the clerks at the local department of motor vehicles by their first names and on Saturday mornings he trailed around the junkyards on the Bayshore frontage road in Palo Alto, sorting through the pickings. He frequently took his son along and let him watch