Return to the Little Kingdom_ Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple - Michael Moritz [42]
He returned from a tour of inspection and broke the news at home. Paul Jobs, horrified by the prospect of enormous tuition bills, remembered the gist of the discussion: “We tried to talk him out of it.” Clara Jobs had a blunter recollection: “Steve said that was the only college he wanted to go to and if he couldn’t go there he didn’t want to go anywhere.” So the senior Jobses buckled to some emotional blackmail, tucked their son into the back of their car, drove him to Reed, and said their farewells on a deserted campus a few days before the start of the 1972 school year. The parting was etched on Steven Jobs’s memory. “It wasn’t real cordial. I sort of said ‘Well, thanks, ’bye.’ I didn’t even want the buildings to see that my parents were there. I didn’t even want parents at that time. I just wanted to be like an orphan from Kentucky who had bummed around the country hopping freight trains for years. I just wanted to find out what life was all about.”
Portland’s natural setting provided enough distractions to give some sense of life’s sensations. The weather was more melancholy than along the southern reaches of the San Francisco Peninsula but there were other consolations. There was the remote splendor of Mount Hood for backpacking, the thunderous vigor of the Columbia River Gorge for hitchhiking, and desolate beaches along the Oregon coastline where redwoods perched on the edge of cliffs. For students contemplating their new surroundings Reed College presented a deceptive face. Its Victorian Gothic buildings—complete with slate roofs, ivy, copper gutters, and window boxes—had bay windows that overlooked spacious gardens. It seemed like a drizzly home for Portland’s cafe society, a movable stage for poets, filmmakers, artists, and free spirits.
Some former Reed students had started The Rainbow Farm, which became one of the regional keystones of the hippie movement, and ripples from the psychedelic tone of the late sixties flowed through the campus. Reed was a regular stopping point for a caravan of lecturers like author Ken Kesey, poet Allen Ginsberg and the very guru of “Turn on, tune in, drop out,” Timothy Leary. But behind the graceful air and dreamy throwback to Parisian life in the twenties was an ironclad curriculum with long, compulsory reading lists. The three hundred or so students who enrolled in each class found the large flock of professors kept a close watch on their progress and the college tolerated their quirks only if they coped with strenuous academic standards. During the early seventies about a third of each class failed to return for their junior or senior years after discovering that, at Reed, liberal was spelled with a capital L.
Jobs found an eclectic collection of students and, for the first time in his life, started to bump into people from other parts of the country. Since Reed gave scholarships to a goodly sprinkling of minorities, Jobs had his first taste of cosmopolitan flavors. One of his classmates, Elizabeth Holmes, commented, “In the early seventies Reed was a campus of loners and freaks.” Even against that colorful backdrop Jobs managed to stand out and his picture was missing from the booklet of freshman profiles distributed to the new arrivals. Among the other members of the freshman class was Daniel Kottke. A bony, bearded teenager with a gentle way of speaking and soft brown hair, Kottke had grown up in an affluent New York suburb, won a National Merit Scholarship and turned to Reed after being rejected by Harvard. He was quiet, slightly lethargic, had a disdain for material possessions, and liked to play the piano. Within a few months