A childhood friend of Steve Jobs recalls that Silicon Valley's quintessential entrepreneur was partly a product of Mountain View, where he attended school and lived until his early teens.
On Friday, Mountain View resident Steve Hatt reminisced about a 1965 class photo of Jobs and himself at San Ramon School, a now-closed middle school on San Ramon Avenue, just east of Rengstorff Avenue.
Jobs was "motivated and not afraid to try something different," and was a little mischievous and awkward as well, Hatt recalled. He said he counted Jobs as one of a half-dozen close buddies in the Monta Loma neighborhood. Hatt remembers Jobs attending Monta Loma elementary school and according to county property records, the Jobs family owned a house at 286 Diablo Avenue from 1959 to 1967. Hatt said he would join Jobs every morning before school at a bus stop near the corner of Alvin and Victory streets.
The Monta Loma neighborhood was a vibrant young neighborhood in the early 1960s, popular with Stanford professors and early Silicon Valley engineers. Hatt said that "everything was engineering" for kids in the neighborhood who could often be found building electrical kits, like crystal set radios, from places like Radio Shack.
The adoptive parents who brought Jobs to Mountain View, Paul and Clara Jobs, were a machinist and an accountant, respectively. He called his adoptive father a "genius with his hands" and said he wanted "to try to be as good a father to them (his own children) as my father was to me."
Jobs was reportedly born in San Francisco to his biological mother Joanne Schieble. She gave up Jobs amid family pressure to not marry his biological father, Muslim Syrian Abdulfattah Jandali, who went on to become a political science professor. His biological parents eventually married and had Jobs' biological sister, novelist Mona Simpson, who he later met and considered "one of my best friends in the world."
After sixth grade, Hatt said Jobs moved away and attended Cupertino Middle School and Homestead High School. It wasn't long before Hatt saw Jobs on the cover of Newsweek magazine as the successful entrepreneur who co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak at age 21. Hatt said people in the neighborhood loved to talk about Jobs' success.
"Everyday it inspires me," Hatt said of having known Jobs.
Perhaps Jobs was thinking of his hometown when he recently told the Cupertino City Council that if Apple could not build its new headquarters in Cupertino, "We have to go somewhere like Mountain View."
His local connection may have also been why Monta Loma elementary school was one of the first to receive free Apple computers. Hatt said he remembers that his kids, who were attending Landels at the time, did not receive them until later.
Hatt said it astonished him that news reports have made no mention of Jobs' connection to Mountain View. He hopes local kids are inspired by Jobs "to learn something new and do something great."
Mountain View Whisman School District officials said most of their records from the early 1960s were destroyed. They could confirm only that Jobs attended Crittenden Middle School and Monta Loma elementary school.
He apparently did not enjoy Crittenden according to a Los Angeles Times report: "Jobs' willfulness and chutzpah were evident early on. At 11, he decided he didn't like his rowdy and chaotic middle school in Mountain View, Calif., and refused to go back. His family moved to a nearby town so he could attend another school."
