Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [18]
One of the Mountain View neighbors convinced Paul Jobs he should try his hand at real estate. He earned his Realtor’s license, did well for a year or so, but disliked the hustle, the sycophancy, and the uncertainty. During his second year he didn’t make much money. Circumstances were so grim that he had to refinance his home to tide the family over. To help make ends meet, Clara Jobs found part-time work in the payroll department at Varian Associates, a firm that made radar devices. Finally Paul Jobs became so disenchanted with the vagaries of real estate that he decided to return to his trade as a machinist. When he was finally hired by a machine shop in San Carlos he had to work his way up from the bottom again.
The setback wasn’t something that escaped Steven Jobs. There were no family vacations, the furniture was reconditioned, and there was no color television. Paul Jobs built most of the home comforts. In fourth grade when his teacher asked her pupils, “What is it in this universe that you don’t understand?” Steven Jobs answered, “I don’t understand why all of a sudden we’re so broke.” That same teacher, Imogene “Teddy” Hill, saved her nine-year-old charge from going astray after he had been expelled from another class for misbehaving. Her pupil recalled, “She figured out the situation real fast. She bribed me into learning. She would say, ‘I really want you to finish this workbook. I’ll give you five bucks if you finish it.’” As a consequence Jobs skipped fifth grade and though his teachers suggested he attend junior high school and start to learn a foreign language, he refused. His sixth grade report noted, “Steven is an excellent reader. However he wastes much time during reading period. . . . He has great difficulty motivating himself or seeing the purpose of studying reading. . . . He can be a discipline problem at times.”
For the Jobses, as for the Wozniaks, swimming was important. They first ferried Steven to swimming lessons when he was five and later enrolled him in a swim club called the Mountain View Dolphins. To pay for swimming lessons Clara Jobs spent her evenings babysitting for friends. Some years later, when he was old enough to become a member of the club swim team, Jobs met Mark Wozniak. Jobs, Wozniak recalled, was taunted and roughhoused by some of the other swimmers who liked to snap wet towels at him. “He was pretty much a crybaby. He’d lose a race and go off and cry. He didn’t quite fit in with everyone else. He wasn’t one of the guys.”
Steven Jobs did, however, change schools and started attending Mountain View’s Crittenden Elementary School. The school drew children from the lower-income eastern fringes of Mountain View and had a reputation for attracting ruffians and fostering hooliganism. Local police were frequently summoned to break up fights and discipline children who jumped out of windows or threatened teachers. After a year, Steven Jobs, who found himself miserable and lonely, issued an ultimatum: He would refuse to return to school if it meant another year at Crittenden. Paul Jobs detected the firmness. “He said he just wouldn’t go. So we moved.” Once more the Jobses hopped another step down the Peninsula, attracted by the lure of the Palo Alto and Cupertino school districts. In Los Altos they bought a house with a gently raked roof, a large garage, and three bedrooms, all of which happened to sit within the curious embrace of the Cupertino School District.
THE CREAM SODA COMPUTER
When John McCollum arrived to teach electronics at Cupertino’s Homestead High School the day it opened in 1963, Classroom F-3 was almost empty. There was a cold concrete floor, cinder-block walls, some gray metal chairs, and on a swivel stand a television