Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different
Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different
Steve Jobs: The Man Who Thought Different
An Imprint of Macmillan
steve jobs: the man who thought different. Copyright © 2012 by Karen
Blumenthal. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America by
R. R. Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia. For information,
address Feiwel and Friends, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
macteenbooks.com
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Seeds
When the call came in the middle of the night, they jumped
at the chance to adopt the newborn, and they named him
Steven Paul.
Schieble wanted her child to be adopted by college-
educated parents. Before the adoption could be finalized,
however, she learned that neither parent had a college degree.
She balked and only agreed to complete the adoption a few
months later, “when my parents promised that I would go to
college,” Jobs said.
Signing on to the hope of a bright future for their baby,
the Jobs family settled in, adopting a daughter, Patty, a couple
of years later. Little Steve proved to be a curious child, and a
challenging one to rear. He put a bobby pin into an electrical
outlet, winning a trip to the emergency room for a burned
hand. He got into ant poison, requiring yet another trip to
the hospital to have his stomach pumped. To keep Steve busy
when he got up before the rest of the household, his parents
bought him a rocking horse, a record player, and some Little
Richard records. He was so difficult as a toddler, his mother
once confided, that she wondered if she had made a mistake
adopting him.
When Steve was five, his father, Paul, was transferred to
Palo Alto, about forty-five minutes south of San Francisco.
After serving in the Coast Guard during World War II, Paul
had worked as a machinist and used-car salesman, and now
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his friend let a snake loose in the classroom and created a small
explosion under her chair. “We gave her a ner vous twitch,”
he said later.
He was sent home two or three times for his misbehavior,
but he doesn’t remember being punished for it. Instead, his
father defended him, telling teachers, “If you can’t keep him
interested, it’s your fault.”
In fourth grade, he was rescued by a special teacher, Imo-
gene “Teddy” Hill, who kindly showered attention on him
during a particularly trying time at home. Impressed by a
neighbor who seemed to be making a successful living sell-
ing real estate, Paul Jobs went to school at night and earned
a real-estate license. But his timing was bad and the demand
for housing slumped just as he was trying to break into the
business.
One day, Mrs. Hill asked her students, “What is it that
you don’t understand about the universe?” Young Jobs an-
swered: “I don’t understand why all of a sudden my dad is so
broke.” Clara took a part-time job in the payroll department
of a local company and the family took out a second loan on
their house. For a year or so, money in the Jobs home was
very tight.
Within a few weeks of having Jobs in her class, Mrs. Hill
had sized up her unusual student. She offered Jobs a sweet
bargain: If he could finish a math workbook on his own and
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get at least 80 percent right, she would give him five dollars
and a giant lollipop.
“I looked at her like, ‘Are you crazy, lady?’ ” Jobs said. But
he took the challenge. Before long, his admiration and respect
for Mrs. Hill were so great that he didn’t need bribes anymore.
She returned the admiration, providing her precocious
student with a kit for making a camera by grinding his own
lens. But that didn’t mean Jobs became an easy kid. Many
years later, Mrs. Hill entertained some of Jobs’s coworkers by
showing them a photo of her class on Hawaiian Day. Jobs
was in the middle, wearing a Hawaiian shirt. But the photo
didn’t tell the whole story: Jobs hadn’t actually worn a Ha-
waiian shirt that day—but he had managed to convince a
classmate to give him the shirt off his back.
Calling the teacher “one of the saints in my life,” Jobs
said, “I learned more that year than I think I learned in any
year in school.” And he credits her with moving him onto
the right path. “I’m one hundred percent sure that if it hadn’t
been for Mrs. Hill in fourth grade and a few others, I would
absolutely have ended up in jail,” he said later.
With his interest in school reignited and his performance
seemingly on track, Jobs was tested and scored so high that
school officials recommended he skip a couple of grades. His
parents agreed to let him skip just one.
Middle school was tougher academically and he still
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