At first I thought this was okay. Many times in the past, as I've described to you, my head is thinking about a problem ahead— it's all in my head—and by the time I sit down to write things down, the code, I can write it really quickly and productively. I can do a lot in a short time because I've figured it all out beforehand. So I expected that to happen and it didn't.
It was then that I thought, You know what? There are a lot of engineers in the world and I've got kids. I think I'd rather just hire somebody to do this part of the code. It was like I had sort of reached my limit of being able to mentally—with the 4-bit microprocessor—put myself through this kind of design effort.
So we hired another programmer to do that job on the 8-bit microprocessor. I wanted to spend more time with my children.
I stayed at CL 9 for another year, but that was really when my life changed once again.
Giving It Away
I didn't start Apple so that I would get more money than I would ever need to live on. I never planned in my life to seek great wealth. And I'd always been inspired by stories of those who gave in order to do good things in life.
So I felt this was the right thing to do. And it felt good. I was around people on the boards of the museums and the ballet who were more inclined to social activity. They were less about humor and jokes, less than I was, anyway. But they were good people who believed in what they were doing, and I believed in them.
The first project I funded was the Children's Discovery
Museum of San Jose. I funded it entirely for many years, even-mutually to the tune of a few million. Then I helped start The Tech of Silicon Valley, a computer museum. I also did the initial financing for the San Jose Cleveland Ballet, now known as the Ballet of Silicon Valley. Why ballet? Again, it was the people. They were great and I had confidence in them.
I also contributed to an expansion of the Center for the Performing Arts in San Jose, which benefited both the ballet and the orchestra. This was a donation that would directly benefit the city of San Jose. How neat to donate to a city.
And though I didn't expect it, in 1988 San Jose's mayor, Tom McEnery, called me to say they were going to name a street after me! In fact, it would be the same street the Children's Discovery Museum would be on. The name of the street is Woz Way. And it's one of the proudest things in my life—to have a street named after me! Not a dumb name, but a cool name. It would be a bummer to have a dumb-sounding street named after you.
Chapter 19
The Mad Hatter
I think there's a time in everyone's life when you look back and ask yourself, What else could I have been? What else could I have done? With me there's just no question about the answer, none at all.
If I couldn't have been an engineer, I would've been a teacher. Not a high school teacher, not a college teacher. A fifth-grade teacher. I specifically wanted to be a fifth-grade teacher ever since I was in fifth grade.
This was something I wanted to do since so early in life. Who knows where these things come from? Probably because my fourth- and fifth-grade teacher, Miss Skrak, was so good to me and I liked her so much. I felt she had helped me so much in life by encouraging me. And I believed, truly believed, that education was important.
I remember my father telling me way back then that it was education that would lift me up to where I wanted to go in life, that it could lift people up in values. I remember how he said that the world was kind of screwed up at the time—there was the Cold War between the USSR and the United States and all that. And he said that with education, the newer generation could learn from the mistakes of their parents and do a better job.
I felt these were really mighty goals in life: looking consciously at the sort of person you want to be, the sort of life you want to live, the sort of society you want to help build.
But by the time I was in high school and college, I'd kind of forgotten about my goals of working in education. There were times when it glimmered back at me. This girl at Berkeley, Holly, the first girl I kissed, well, a relative of her roommate brought around to our dorm a baby, four months old. And Holly, who was interested in child psychology, started doing all kinds of little games with the baby, trying to test where the baby was in its own head. Like she'd move a pencil and see if the baby's eyes would follow it, that sort of thing. I remember how that just struck me that day, this notion of cognitive development. How shocking it was to me to suddenly realize that the mind really develops in identifiable stages. Almost like logic in a computer, it's predictable. It was like logic, the thing I was into at the time, an intriguing kind of process—a game with rules.
That made me really remember my desire to be a teacher, and for the rest of my life I was always paying a lot of attention to children wherever I went. Infants, babies, younger children, older children. I'd try to relate to them, to smile, to tell them jokes, to be kind of part of their company. I'd been brought up with the idea that there were "bad people" who might hurt children or kidnap them, so I decided I would be a "good guy" any kid who met me could rely on.
• o •
Some people just love being around children, others don't as much. I remember one summer when I was working at HP, Steve Jobs told me he really needed a job for some extra money. I drove him down to see the job listings over at De Anza Community College, and we found this job listing for people to stand in Westgate Mall for a week dressed in
Alice in Wonderland
costumes. They needed an Alice, a White Rabbit, and a Mad Hatter. I was so
intrigued. I drove Steve down to the guy who was interviewing people and telling them what it was like. Basically you put on these costumes, he said, and carry some helium balloons and you stand around. You can't talk to the children, but they'll all be around looking at you, he said.
"Can I do it, too?" I asked. I loved the idea. So basically, they hired Steve, his girlfriend Chris Ann, and me as the
Alice in Wonderland
characters. We took turns in the costumes with some other people because, even after a twenty-minute stretch, these costumes got terribly hot and sweaty inside. You could hardly breathe. So sometimes I would be the White Rabbit and Steve would be the Mad Hatter, and sometimes it would be the other way around.
It was kind of funny because you had really limited mobility in those big costumes. I remember I went out as the Mad Hatter once, and all of a sudden about ten kids started grabbing me by my arms and my sleeves and spinning me around. For fun. They were laughing! And I couldn't say anything to stop them, because there were a lot of kids doing it and I wasn't allowed to talk. They could have toppled me! I was lucky they didn't.
I thought this job was so fun I even cut back my engineering hours and took an hourly minimum wage for that week so I could spend more time doing it. I loved looking at the kids' faces when they saw us. I just loved it.
We'd take lunch breaks in our regular clothes and eat at this little restaurant in the mall. One day this little kid—this tiny little kid—points at my tennis shoes and says, "Hey, he's the Mad Hatter!" I told him, "Hey, be quiet!" Ha. That was a very fun week. So fun.
But Steve didn't enjoy it as much as I did. I remember years and years later, I was commenting to him how much fun that
Alice in Wonderland
mall job was, and he said, "No, it was lousy. We hardly got paid anything for it." So he had bad memories of it, but
I just had the best memories of it. I guess I thought everyone was like me and would like doing something like that with kids.
• o •
I loved being a parent, too. It was great. I didn't read books on parenting; I didn't want to read about any structured rules. I wanted to relate to and communicate with the child. Because if you can talk to them, then they'll talk to you about most of the things in their life. I wanted to expose them to creative thinking, I wanted to show them that you don't have to narrow and restrict, your thinking the way so many people do. I never once tried to impress even my own values in life on any one of my kids.
I wanted to be like my dad. I remember his conversations with me; he would always point out all sides of an issue. I would know what he thought about it, but he would let me come to my own decisions, which very often turned out to be like his. He was a very, very good teacher. So I intended to be that way, too.
Candi and I had three children. The first was Jesse, who was born the night before the US Festival that Labor Day weekend in 1982. Then Sara came two years later. And Gary was born in 1987, after Candi and I had already divorced.. So that was hard.
• o •
With Jesse, when he just a few months old I had the most fun with him doing what I called these "flying tours." I would hold him so that his belly was over my palm and he could see everything from the correct perspective. (I got the idea from Candi's brother, Peter Clark, who told me that if you hold a baby on its back, it's always seeing everything differently than grown-ups do.) But the other way, the baby could see the world like we do. It was just logical.
So I used to hold baby Jesse that way, and all of a sudden I could see his eyes would look to the left or the right a little. Then his head would move in one direction and stay there, and I'd realize, Oh, okay, he's looking at the window shade. So what I did was
I'd take him over to it. It was only fair. I'd let him touch it—I'd move his hands against it—and when he was done, he'd turn his head again, like maybe back toward his mom, and we'd zoom back to her.
So we started getting in the habit of doing this. He'd be lying on my palm, looking at the big TV, and I'd take him to it. Or to the shelf, which had a top and an edge he could feel. So he started getting around the world this way, and he'd always come back to home base at the end.
Jesse got more and more confident. We'd start from home base and then go room by room through the entire house. He'd explore. I could feel his muscles tense in a certain way I could interpret as "Lift me up a little more" or "Let's go a little lower." Sometimes, when he got a little bigger, he would wave his arms and his feet like he was a mad swimmer, and that meant "Go as fast as you can." So we had this great form of communication between us, and this was all before he was even eight months old. I was no longer just looking at the movements his head made; I'd feel his muscles tensing to tell me which way to go. I used to tell people this, and they didn't believe me. So I'd tell them, "Okay, I'll close my eyes. Drop something." And then Jesse would just tense his muscles and lead me right down to it. It really surprised people.
I would try this with other babies—these flying tours—and I found out that after about twenty minutes, I could do it with them, too. All babies were the same! All babies gave the same muscle signals. I loved that I had figured out a way to let Jesse choose what to explore, before he could even crawl or walk, without having to be totally dependent on someone else.
When Jesse got bigger and too heavy for the flying tours, I got into these little Honda scooters. I had the little 80 and 120 cubic centimeter scooters. They're real small, like a bike with a little motor in it.
Up there in the Santa Cruz Mountains where we lived, there were a lot of little windy roads and veiy few cars. So I could put Jesse on the scooter and we could just go everywhere. I'd let him decide if we would go left or right, and I'd describe things we saw and then let him touch them—we'd say the words "leaf," or "water," or "tree." He chose every single turn we made. Eventually—over a period of a couple of years—he could get into his favorite routes. I remember these as such wonderful, wonderful days.
• o •
By 19881 was a full-time dad. I was finished with CL 9. By then we had also had our second child, a girl this time, Sara. Sara and Candi became really bonded, as bonded as Jesse and I were.
But Candi and I still weren't getting along. By this time we were already heading for divorce. A critical point happened the night after a concert at the Shoreline Amphitheater. We had a tradition with Jesse that the front passenger seat was the "story seat" and whoever got to sit there would get a story I would make up from the driver's seat. Now, I'm not a writer, and don't ask me how I did it, but I could come up with the most amazing stories. Science fiction stories, usually, and they would go on and on.
But one night Candi and I got into this fight. She felt like she'cl drunk too much to drive, and she wanted me to drive. That was fine with me. But she wanted to sit in the story seat, the front passenger seat. Jesse objected, because he wanted to hear a story. And I begged him, begged him, to please sit in the back and I would still tell a story. But he wouldn't get in the backseat. And Candi and I got in the hugest fight because of that. Very shortly after that, it was divorce time.
• o •
So now, suddenly, I was in a new house of my own in Los Gatos. The kids spent one week at my house and one week with Candi. I didn't have any business going on, CL 9 wasn't going on, so I could focus all my energy on the kids.
It was at about this time that I redirected my philanthropic activities from museums and ballet to schools in Los Gatos. This was about 1989, and computers in schools were starting to become the big talked-about thing. There were going to be computer "haves" and computer "have-nots." So I started providing computers to schools—setting up computer labs with dozens of computers in them as gifts to the schools and the kids.