A Glimpse into Steve's Personal Life

From the archive: first published October 6, 2011 — the day after Steve Jobs's death, at 56, after a long battle with pancreatic cancer.

The adoption

Steve Jobs was born on February 24, 1955, in San Francisco. His biological parents were two University of Wisconsin graduate students: Joanne Carole Schieble, and Abdulfattah "John" Jandali, a Syrian political science student who later became a professor. Unmarried at the time, they put the baby up for adoption.

Schieble had insisted the adoptive parents be college-educated — but the couple who ended up with the baby, Paul and Clara Jobs, were a lower-middle-class Bay Area couple, and Paul, a machinist, had not even graduated from high school. She refused to sign the papers until they pledged that the boy would go to college. They named him Steven Paul.

Paul and Clara later married — Schieble and Jandali married in December 1955 and had a second child, novelist Mona Simpson, in 1957 — and when Steve was a toddler they moved to Mountain View, in what would become Silicon Valley. They later adopted a daughter, Patty.

Childhood

Jobs himself always insisted that Paul and Clara "were my parents 1,000%." Paul, a Coast Guard veteran, taught his son to work with his hands in the family garage — taking apart and rebuilding radios and televisions — which gave the boy an early taste of technical tinkering. Clara, an accountant, taught him to read before he started school.

Steve was a turbulent child. At Monta Loma Elementary he was a notorious prankster; his fourth-grade teacher resorted to bribing him to study. He tested so well that administrators wanted to skip him ahead to high school — his parents declined. He went on to Cupertino Junior High and Homestead High in Cupertino, graduating in 1972 and enrolling at Reed College in Portland, Oregon — fulfilling the promise his adoptive parents had made nearly two decades earlier.

Editor's note: this article was rewritten during our editorial review. The original 2011 version reproduced a third-party biography verbatim and broke off mid-sentence; the text above is an original summary of the documented facts.