Excerpt narrated by Wil Wheaton.
Here’s how the Hollywood version of my story would go: entranced by the IBM Pavilion, nearly age seven, I fell in love with computers and never looked back. That may well have been the case with other kids. Paul Allen, my partner in starting Microsoft, credited the fair with hooking him on computers the way some musicians grab the violin at that age and never let go. Not me. I fell in love with the daredevil tandem water-skiers, and I marveled at the view of our city from the Space Needle.
At that impressionable age, the message in 1962 was so clear: We would explore space, stop disease, travel faster and easier. Technology was progress and, in the right hands, it would bring peace. My family watched Kennedy give his “we choose to go to the moon” speech that fall, all of us gathered around the television as the president told America that we needed to harness the best of our energies and skills for a bold future. From Walter Cronkite and Life we were treated to a steady flow of new wonders: the first laser, first cassette tape, first factory robot, and first silicon chip. You couldn’t be a kid back then and not feel the excitement of this.
This climate of limitless potential was the backdrop for my early life and the ambitions my mom held for us. I was equally raised by my parents, but it was my mother who set our clocks ahead by eight minutes so we would be on mom time.
From the start, she had a grand vision for our family. She wanted my father to be highly successful, with success defined less by money and more by reputation and his role helping our community and a wider circle of civic and nonprofit organizations. She envisioned kids who excelled in school and sports, were socially active, and pursued everything they did fully and completely. That her kids would all go to college was a given. Her role in this vision was that of supportive partner and mother, as well as a force in the community who would eventually build her own career. Though she never said it explicitly, I suspect her model for the Gates family was informed by one of the most famous families of the day: the Kennedys. In the early 1960s, before all the tragedy and troubles that would befall the famous clan, they were the model of a handsome, successful, active, athletic, and well-appointed American family. (More than one of her friends compared Mary Maxwell Gates to Jackie Lee Kennedy.)
We lived by the structure of routines, traditions, and rules my mother established. She had a clear sense of a right way and a wrong way that applied to all parts of life, from the most quotidian matters to the biggest decisions and plans. Mundane daily chores—making our beds, cleaning our rooms, being dressed, pressed, and ready for your day—were sacrosanct rituals. You did not leave the house with an unmade bed, uncombed hair, or a wrinkled shirt. Her edicts, repeated through my youth, are now part of me, even if I still don’t abide by them: “No eating in front of the television.” “Don’t put your elbows on the table.” “Don’t bring the ketchup bottle to the table.” (It would be unseemly to serve condiments out of anything but little dishes with little spoons.) For my mom these small things were the bedrock of a well-ordered life.
As a first- and then second-grader in 1962, I would walk with Kristi up a short hill to View Ridge Elementary, where my sister had set the mold for what teachers expected from me. At school she was a careful student, easy on teachers, completed her assignments on time, and, most important, she got great grades.
