The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (20 page)

Bezos says that the only time he thinks about Ted Jorgensen is when he’s filling out a medical form that asks for his family history. He told
Wired
in 1999 that he had never met the man. Strictly speaking, that is not true; Bezos last saw him when he was three years old.

It is of course unknowable whether the unusual circumstances of his birth helped to create that fecund entrepreneurial mix of intelligence, ambition, and a relentless need to prove himself. Two other technology icons, Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison, were adopted, and the experience is thought by some to have given each a powerful motivation to succeed. In Bezos’s case, what is undeniably true is that from his earliest years, his parents and teachers recognized that this child was different—unnaturally gifted, but also unusually driven. His childhood was a launching pad, of sorts, that sent Bezos rocketing toward a life as an entrepreneur. It also instilled in him an abiding interest in the exploration and discovery of space, a fascination that perhaps one day may actually take him there.

Theodore John Jorgensen was a circus performer and in the 1960s was one of Albuquerque’s best unicyclists. The archives of local newspapers contain a colorful record of his youthful proficiency. An
Albuquerque Journal
photograph taken in 1961, when he was sixteen, shows him standing on the pedals of his unicycle facing backward, one hand on the seat, the other splayed theatrically to the side, his expression tense with concentration. The caption says he was awarded “most versatile rider” in the local unicycle club.

That year, Jorgensen and half a dozen other riders traveled widely playing unicycle polo in a team managed by Lloyd Smith, the owner of a local bike shop. Jorgensen’s team was victorious in places like Newport Beach, California, and Boulder, Colorado. The
newspaper has an account of the Boulder event. Four hundred people turned out in freezing weather to a shopping-center parking lot to watch the teams swivel around in four inches of snow wielding thirty-six-inch-long plastic mallets in pursuit of a small rubber ball, six inches in diameter. Jorgensen’s team swept the contest, a doubleheader, three to two and six to five.
³

In 1963, Jorgensen’s troupe resurfaced in newspapers as the Unicycle Wranglers, touring county fairs, sporting events, and circuses. They square-danced, did the jitterbug and the twist, skipped rope, and performed tricks like riding on a high wire. The group practiced constantly, rehearsing three times a week at Lloyd Smith’s shop and taking dance classes two times a week. “It’s like balancing on greased lightning and dancing all at the same time,” one member told the
Albuquerque Tribune.
⁴
When the Ringling Brothers Circus came to town, the Wranglers performed under the big top, and in the spring of 1965 they performed in eight local shows of the Rude Brothers Circus. They also went to Hollywood to try out (unsuccessfully, as it happened) for the
Ed Sullivan Show.

Ted Jorgensen was born in Chicago to a family of Baptists. His father moved the family to Albuquerque when Jorgensen and his younger brother, Gordon, were in elementary school. Ted’s father took a job as a purchase agent at Sandia, then the largest nuclear-weapons installation in the country, handling the procurement of supplies at the base. Jorgensen’s paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Denmark, was one of the last surviving veterans of the Spanish American War.

In high school Jorgensen started dating Jacklyn Gise, a girl two years his junior whose father also worked at Sandia. Their dads knew each other. Her father, Lawrence Preston Gise, known to friends as Preston and to his family as Pop, ran the local office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency that managed the nuclear-weapons program after Truman took it from the military following World War II.

Jorgensen had just turned eighteen and was finishing his senior year in high school when Gise became pregnant. She was sixteen
and a sophomore. They were in love and decided to get married. Her parents gave them money to fly to Juárez, Mexico, for a ceremony. A few months later, on July 19, 1963, they married again at the Gises’ house. Because Gise was underage, both her mother and Jorgensen’s signed the application for a marriage license. The baby was born on January 12, 1964. They named him Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen.

The new parents rented an apartment in the city’s Southeast Heights neighborhood and Jackie finished high school. During the day, her mother, Mattie, took care of the baby. The situation was difficult. Jorgensen was perpetually broke, and they had only one car, his cream-colored ’55 Chevy. Belonging to a unicycle troupe didn’t pay much. The Wranglers divided their fees among all members, with Lloyd Smith taking a generous cut off the top. Eventually Jorgensen got a $1.25-an-hour job at the Globe Department Store, which was part of Walgreen’s short-lived foray into the promising discount-retail market being pioneered at the time by Kmart and Walmart. Occasionally Jackie brought the baby to the store to visit.

The parents were young and immature and their marriage was probably doomed from the start. But Jorgensen also had a habit of drinking too much and carousing late at night with friends. He was an inattentive dad and husband. Preston Gise tried to help him; he paid his son-in-law’s tuition at the University of New Mexico, but Jorgensen dropped out after a few semesters. Gise then tried to get Jorgensen a job with the New Mexico State Police, but Jorgensen didn’t follow through on the opportunity.

Eventually, Jackie took the child and moved back in with her parents on Sandia Base. In June 1965, when the baby was seventeen months old, she filed for divorce. The court ordered Jorgensen to pay forty dollars a month in child support. Court records indicate that his income at the time was a hundred and eighty dollars a month. Over the next few years, Jorgensen visited his son occasionally but missed many of those support payments. He was undependable, and he had no money.

Then Jackie started dating someone. On several occasions when
Jorgensen was visiting his son, the other man was there, and they avoided each other. But Jorgensen asked around and heard he was a good guy.

In 1968, Jackie called Ted Jorgensen on the phone and told him she was getting remarried and moving to Houston. He could stop paying child support, but she wanted to give Jeffrey her new husband’s surname and let him adopt the boy. She asked Jorgensen not to interfere in their lives. Around the same time, Jackie’s father cornered Jorgensen and elicited from him a promise that he would stay away. But Ted’s permission was needed for the adoption, and after thinking it over and reasoning that the boy was likely to have a better life as the son of Jackie and her new husband, Jorgensen gave it. After a few years, he lost track of the family, and then he forgot their last name. For decades he wouldn’t know what had become of his child, and his own bad choices haunted him.

The Cuban Revolution in 1959 blew apart the comfortable world of Miguel Angel Bezos Perez. Jeff Bezos’s future adoptive father had been attending the elite Jesuit private school Colegio de Dolores in Santiago de Cuba, on the south coast of the island, when the Batista government fell. Castro (himself a graduate of Dolores) replaced the schools with socialist youth camps and shut down private companies, including a lumberyard owned by Miguel Bezos’s father and uncle where Miguel worked most mornings. Miguel and his friends spent their days on the street, floating around and “doing things we shouldn’t have been doing, like writing anti-Castro slogans,” he says. When his parents heard about his antics, they worried he could get in trouble and, like many other Cuban families with teenage children, started making preparations to send him to the United States.

They waited a year before they got his passport under the auspices of the Catholic Church. Miguel’s mother fretted about his moving to the frigid climate of
el norte,
so she and his sister knitted him a sweater from old rags. Miguel wore it to the airport. (The sweater is now framed and hanging on the wall of his home in
Aspen.) His mother had to drop him off at the curb and then park in a nearby lot to watch the plane take off. But the family figured this was temporary and would last only until the political situation stabilized and everything reverted to normal.

Miguel Bezos arrived in Miami in 1962, sixteen years old and alone. He knew only one word in English:
hamburger.
He was one of the oldest members of Operation Pedro Pan, a rescue program run by the Catholic Church and heavily funded by the U.S. government, that removed thousands of teenagers from Castro’s grip in the early 1960s. The Catholic Welfare Bureau brought Bezos to a South Florida camp, called Matecumbe, where he joined four hundred other exiled children. By a stroke of good fortune, the next day his cousin Angel arrived at the same facility. “Immediately the two of us were joined at the hip,” Miguel says. A few weeks later, they were summoned to the camp’s office and given suitcases and heavy jackets—real ones. They were being moved to a group home in Wilmington, Delaware. “We looked at each other and said, ‘Boy, we’re in trouble,’ ” Miguel recalls.

Miguel and his cousin joined about two dozen other Pedro Pans in a facility called Casa de Sales under the care of Father James Byrnes, a young priest who spoke fluent Spanish and enjoyed the occasional vodka tonic. They would later learn he was fresh from the seminary, but to his youthful charges, Byrnes was a towering figure of authority. He taught them English, forced them to focus on their studies, and gave them each fifty cents a week after their chores were done so they could attend a Saturday-night dance. “What he did for us we can never repay,” says Carlos Rubio Albet, Miguel and Angel Bezos’s roommate at the facility. “He took a houseful of exiled teenage boys who didn’t speak English and turned it into a real family. That first Christmas I was there, in ’62, he made sure everyone had something under that tree.” After the thirteen tension-filled days of the Cuban missile crisis in October of that year, the residents of La Casa, as they called it, knew they weren’t going home any time soon.

While the atmosphere at the Casa de Sales was strict, the
teenagers enjoyed themselves, and when they later gathered for reunions with Father Byrnes, they remembered their days there as among the happiest of their lives. The young Miguel Bezos had a particular affinity for one practical joke. When someone new arrived at the orphanage, he would pretend to be a deaf-mute, gesturing and grunting for items at the dinner table. A few days into the routine, he would startle the joke’s target, usually by standing up and shouting as an attractive girl passed, “Man, that’s a good-looking woman!” His friends would all sing out, “It’s a miracle!” before everyone collapsed in stitches.

Miguel Bezos left the Casa de Sales after a year and enrolled as an undergraduate in the University of Albuquerque, a now-defunct Catholic college that offered full scholarships for Cuban refugees. To earn extra money, he got a job as a clerk on the overnight shift at the Bank of New Mexico—at the same time as the young, recently divorced Jacklyn Gise Jorgensen started work in the bank’s bookkeeping department. Their shifts overlapped by an hour. In his thick Cuban accent and rudimentary English, Bezos asked her out several times; he was repeatedly but politely rejected. Finally, she agreed. On their first date they saw the movie
The Sound of Music.

Miguel Bezos went on to graduate from the University of New Mexico and married Jackie in April 1968 at the First Congregational Church in Albuquerque. The reception was held at the Coronado Club on Sandia Base. Miguel got a job as a petroleum engineer at Exxon and they moved to Houston, the first stop in a career that would take them to three continents. Four-year-old Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen became Jeffrey Preston Bezos and started calling Miguel Bezos Dad. A year later, they had a daughter, Christina, and then a year after that, another son, Mark.

Jeff and his siblings grew up observing their father’s tireless work ethic and his frequent expressions of love for America and its opportunities and freedoms. Miguel Bezos, who later began going by the name Mike, acknowledges that he may have also passed on a libertarian aversion to government intrusion into the private lives and enterprises of citizens. “Certainly it was something that permeated
our home life,” he says, while noting that dinnertime conversations were apolitical and revolved around the kids. “I cannot stand any kind of totalitarian form of government, from the right or the left or anything in between, and maybe that had some impact.”

Certain moments in the early life of her oldest child took on significance when Jackie Bezos viewed them in retrospect. Like the time three-year-old Jeff disassembled his crib with a screwdriver because he insisted on sleeping in a bed. Or the time she took him to a spinning boat ride in the park and saw that while the other toddlers were waving to their moms, Jeff was looking at the mechanical workings of the cables and pulleys. Teachers at his Montessori preschool reported to his parents that the boy became so engrossed in whatever he was doing that they had to pick his chair up, with him still in it, and move it to the next activity. But Jeff was Jackie’s first child; she thought
all
children were like that. “The term gifted was new to the education vocabulary and certainly to me at age twenty-six,” Jackie Bezos says. “I knew he was precocious and determined and incredibly focused, and you follow that through to now and see that it hasn’t changed.”

At age eight, Bezos scored highly on a standardized test, and his parents enrolled him in the Vanguard program at River Oaks Elementary School, a half-hour drive from their home. Bezos was a standout pupil, and the school’s principal trotted him out to speak to visitors like Julie Ray, who was doing research for her book
Turning On Bright Minds.
A local company donated the excess capacity on its mainframe computer to the school, and the young Bezos led a group of friends in connecting to the mainframe via a Teletype machine that sat in the school hallway. They taught themselves how to program, then discovered a primitive Star Trek game on the mainframe and spent countless hours playing it.