DECEMBER 27, 1999 VOL. 154 NO. 25 Page 1 | 2 | 3
FROM A TO E Some people must be genetically predisposed to explore the frontiers. As a child, Bezos adored Star Trek, but it is unclear that he ever made a connection back then to his ancestors, people whose role in life was that of risk taker, exploring the unknown. The family can trace its American roots to the turn of the 19th century, when a colorful, 6-ft. 4-in. character named Colonel Robert Hall moved to San Antonio, Texas, from his home in Tennessee. A sepia-toned photo of him is framed in Bezos' living room and shows the man wearing a bizarre outfit stitched together from dozens of different kinds of animal pelts. The settler favored that multicolored garment in later years. "When he walked down the streets of San Antonio, the crowds would part," says Jackie Bezos, Jeff's mother and the family historian.
Her great grandfather, Bernhardt Vesper, acquired a 25,000-acre ranch in Cotulla, in the southern part of the state. Jeff would spend summers there with his grandparents, Lawrence Preston ("Pop") Gise and his wife Mattie Louise Strait (related to country singer George Strait).
Pop was Jeff's favorite relative. A career government employee, he moved his family to Albuquerque, N.M., where he headed the former Atomic Energy Commission's operations in a seven-state region before retiring to the Cotulla ranch at a relatively early age.| ALSO IN TIME | |||||
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That guy is Mike Bezos, a Cuban refugee who moved to the U.S. by himself when he was 15 years old, with nothing more than two shirts and a pair of pants. Taken under wing by a Catholic mission, Mike learned English, toiled at many odd jobs and made his way to the University of Albuquerque. While working the night shift as a clerk at a bank, he met Jackie, who was also employed there, and fell in love. They married when Jeff was four.
Jeff was an exceptionally smart child. Fed up with sleeping in a crib, the toddler found a screwdriver and reduced his jail to its component parts. He constantly built models, worked a Radio Shack electronics kit that Pop bought him down to the nubs and endlessly tinkered with stuff. When he was six, his sister Christina was born; a year later, his brother Mark arrived. When the siblings were old enough to get into Jeff's bedroom, he rigged a buzzer to his door that would go off like a burglar alarm. Later, in what his family has come to think of as the "solar-cooker era"--named after a solar microwave he concocted out of an umbrella and aluminum foil--the garage became his laboratory.
In high school in Miami--his father, an engineer with Exxon, moved the family several times--Jeff became the valedictorian. He didn't drink, do drugs or even swear. People liked him anyway. And almost every summer, he headed for his grandfather's ranch in Cotulla. It was the perfect antidote to the brainy world he inhabited the rest of the year. On the ranch he'd ride horses, brand cattle with a lazy g, fix windmills and tool around in a 1962 International Harvester Scout. He helped his grandpa fix a D6 Caterpillar tractor using nothing but a 3-ft.-high stack of mail-order manuals. "You have to have a lot of patience on a ranch in the middle of nowhere," he says.
If you ask him today who his heroes were, he names two: Thomas Edison and Walt Disney. The former was a brilliant innovator and a horrid businessman, the latter a good innovator and a great businessman. It wasn't Disney's movies that impressed Bezos but his theme parks. He went to Disney World six times. "The thing that always amazed me was how powerful his vision was," Bezos says. "He knew exactly what he wanted to build and teamed up with a bunch of really smart people and built it. Everyone thought it wouldn't work, and he had to persuade the banks to lend him $400 million. But he did it."
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