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.
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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.
I was different, as my mother had previously warned my pre-school teachers. By early elementary school I was reading a lot on my own at home. I was learning how to learn by myself, and I liked the feeling of being able to quickly absorb new facts and entertain myself with chapter books. School, however, felt slow. I found it hard to stay interested in what we were learning; my thoughts wandered. When something did catch my attention, I might leap up from my seat, frantically raise my hand, or shout out an answer. I wasn’t trying to be disruptive; my mind simply shifted easily into a state of unrestrained exuberance. At the same time, I also felt like I didn’t fit in with the other kids. My late-October birthday meant that I was younger than most of my classmates, and I really looked it. I was small and skinny and had an unusually high-pitched, squeaky voice. I was shy around other kids. And I had that rocking habit.
I got the sense that my parents were in close touch with my teachers, more than other parents were. Did other families have their kids’ teachers over for dinner at the start of the school year? I didn’t think they did. To my parents this was only natural, a sign of their commitment to our education. To Kristi and me it was nothing but embarrassing. It felt unnatural to see your teacher eating at your dining room table. Over the years, only one teacher declined the invitation, fearing that being plied with tuna casserole was a conflict of interest. (She waited until school ended before accepting.)
My parents didn’t hound us about grades. Their expectations were communicated mainly in how my mom talked about other families. If the son or daughter of a family friend wasn’t doing well in school, or got in trouble for one thing or another, my mom would speculate about the disappointment her friends must feel. She never said, don’t be like those kids. But given her tragic tone in relaying the story, we understood the unspoken message: Don’t goof off. Excel. Don’t let us down. They also subscribed to a rewards system: the going rate for an A was a quarter; all As earned you dinner at the restaurant of your choice, which was usually six hundred feet in the air at the Eye of the Needle, the spinning dining room at the top of the shiny new Space Needle. It was always Kristi’s grades that got us there, but as her brother I got to tag along no matter my performance.
My mom by then was starting to spend more time volunteering at community nonprofits like the Junior League and what later would be called the United Way. Often she’d be out in the afternoon, so my sister and I would arrive home from school to find Gami waiting for us. I loved seeing her at the door. It meant she’d usher us inside, feed us Ritz crackers with peanut butter or some other kid snack, and ask us all about school. Then, for the rest of the day, we’d read or play games together until my mother got home. Gami was like a third parent. She joined us on vacations, Christmas skating parties, summer retreats, and pretty much every other family event. Other families knew that if they met up with the Gateses, that would often include the grandmother who would be the best dressed of the group, with a string of pearls and perfectly coiffed hair. Still, she didn’t see herself as a parent proxy; she was our friend and patient teacher. She wanted to give my mom and dad space to raise us their own way. There was a clear line between roles that she respected by saying goodnight and heading to her own house just before my father got home from work.
Soon after he walked in the door, we’d sit down to eat. My mother would typically tell me to put my book down: reading at the table wasn’t allowed. Dinner with family was a time for sharing. My mom heard that JFK’s father, Joseph Kennedy, expected each of his kids to arrive at dinner ready to explain some topic that he had assigned them. The future president might have to give an overview of Algeria between bites of his carrots. We discussed this Kennedy ritual at dinner, and the important things you could learn in that hour together. My parents didn’t expect us to give a recitation on any topic, but we talked about our days, and they shared theirs. Through these conversations I started to form a picture in my head of the lives of adults and what went on in the wider world they inhabited.
It was over dinner that I first heard terms like “matching funds” or “conflict resolution” as my mother described campaigns at the Junior League or some challenge at the United Way. I detected the serious tone of my mom’s voice. Every person should be treated fairly. Every issue carefully considered. Every dollar wisely spent. My mother shorthanded her philosophy with a phrase we heard a lot: one should be “a good steward.” Her definition was right in line with Merriam-Webster: the careful and responsible management of something entrusted to one’s care. That was my mother to a T.
My father at the time worked for Skeel, McKelvey, Henke, Evenson & Uhlmann, a firm mainly known for tough and thorough litigation. I don’t think being a courtroom bulldog fit my dad’s temperament but, as with the Army, I’m sure he saw it as good training. I didn’t understand the details of his cases, but I had a clear sense that companies paid my father to do important things. Before I could have told you what a lawyer actually did, I had a sense from my father that the law was something to revere.
If my parents sound a little virtuous and resolute about volunteering, giving back, and all that, I can’t help it. That’s really who they were. They spent a lot of their waking hours planning and meeting, calling and campaigning, and whatever else was needed to help their community. My father could happily spend a morning on a street corner wearing a sandwich sign promoting the school levy and that night be at the board meeting of the University YMCA, where he once served as president.
My parents’ friends were the same way. These weren’t people who felt a longing to leave their hometown for more exciting lives in New York or Los Angeles. They graduated from the University of Washington with degrees in law, engineering, and business, then settled down within miles of their alma mater and their old friends. They had kids, set up businesses, joined firms, ran for office, and spent their free time on their own versions of the school levy and YMCA board. Many of my father’s friends were members of the Municipal League. No, not bowling, but an organization of young nonpartisan reformers—most of the people were like my parents, in their thirties—who were determined to upend what they saw was a hidebound Seattle government. My dad explained to us how the league evaluated the qualifications of political candidates and publicized their ratings during election years.
How much did all of this exposure to adults affect me? In time it obviously would, but as a young kid it mainly left me with the impression that to be an adult was to be busy. My parents were busy people, their friends were all busy people.
When my parents’ friends came to the house, my sisters and I were expected to engage with them. Often that meant my mom gave us a job to do. Mine was pouring coffee while they played bridge. I felt proud as Mom watched me circling the table, carefully tilting the coffeepot over the porcelain cups, just as she had shown me. This is a memory that I go to even now when I want to sense my mom near me. I felt important, included in this adult ritual, essential to their fun.
From Source Code © 2024 by Bill Gates. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Audio excerpted with permission of Penguin Random House Audio from Source Code by Bill Gates, read by Wil Wheaton and Bill Gates. © Bill Gates ℗ 2025 Penguin Random House, LLC.
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