Chapter One Trey
chapter one
Trey
In time there would be a big company. And in time there would be software programs millions of lines long at the core of billions of computers used around the world. There would be riches and rivals and constant worry about how to stay at the forefront of a technological revolution.
Before all of that, there was a pack of cards and a single goal: beat my grandmother.
In my family there was no faster way to win favor than to be good at games, especially card games. If you were confident in rummy or bridge or canasta, you had our respect, which made my maternal grandmother, Adelle Thompson, a household legend. “Gami’s the best at cards” was something I heard a lot as a kid.
Gami had grown up in rural Washington, in the railroad town of Enumclaw. It’s less than fifty miles from Seattle, but it was a world away in 1902, the year she was born. Her dad worked as a railroad telegraph operator and her mother, Ida Thompson—we called her Lala—would eventually earn a modest income by baking cakes and selling war bonds at the local lumber mill. Lala also played a lot of bridge. Her partners and opponents were the society people in town, the wives of bankers and the owner of the mill. These people may have had more money or higher social standing, but Lala leveled some of the difference by handily beating them at cards. This talent got passed on to Gami and to a degree to my mom, her only child.
My initiation into this family culture started early. When I was still in diapers, Lala started calling me “Trey,” the card player’s lingo for three. It was a play on the fact that I was the family’s third living Bill Gates, after my dad and grandfather. (I am actually number four, but my dad chose to go by “junior” and in turn I got called Bill Gates III.) Gami started me off at age five with Go Fish. In the coming years we would play thousands of hands of cards. We played for fun, and we played to tease each other and pass the time. But my grandmother also played to win—and she always did.
Her mastery fascinated me back then. How did she get so good? Was she born that way? She was religious, so maybe it was a gift from above? For a long time, I didn’t have an answer. All I knew was that every time we played, she won. No matter the game. No matter how hard I tried.
When Christian Science rapidly expanded across the West Coast in the early 1900s, both my mother’s and father’s families became devout followers. I think my mother’s parents drew strength from Christian Science, embracing its belief that a person’s true identity is found in the spiritual and not the material. They were strict adherents. Because Christian Scientists don’t track chronological age, Gami never celebrated her birthday, never disclosed her age or even the year she was born. Despite her own convictions, Gami never imposed her views on others. My mom didn’t follow the faith, nor did our family. Gami never tried to persuade us to do otherwise.
Her faith probably had a role in shaping her into an extremely principled person. Even back then, I could grasp that Gami followed a strict personal code of fairness and justice and integrity. A life well-lived meant living simply, giving your time and money to others, and, most of all, using your brain—staying engaged with the world. She never lost her temper, never gossiped, or criticized. She was incapable of guile. Often she was the smartest person in the room, but she was careful to let others shine. She was basically a shy person, but she had an inner confidence that presented as a Zen-like calm.
Two months before my fifth birthday my grandfather, J. W. Maxwell Jr., died of cancer. He was only fifty-nine years old. Following his Christian Science beliefs, he had declined modern medical interventions. His last years were filled with pain, and Gami suffered as his caregiver. I learned later that my grandfather believed his sickness was somehow the result of something Gami had done, some unknown sin in the eyes of God, who was now punishing him. Still, she stoically stood by his side, supporting him until the end. One of my sharpest memories from childhood was how my parents wouldn’t let me attend his funeral. I was hardly aware of what was going on, other than the fact that my mother, father, and older sister got to see him off while I stayed behind with a babysitter. A year later, my great-grandmother Lala died while visiting Gami at her home.
From that point on, Gami channeled all her love and attention into me and my older sister, Kristi—and later my sister Libby. She would be a constant presence in our young lives and have a profound effect on who we would become. She read to me before I could hold a book and for years after, covering the classics like The Wind in the Willows, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Charlotte’s Web. After my grandfather died, Gami started to teach me to read for myself, helping me sound out the words in The Nine Friendly Dogs, It’s a Lovely Day, and other books in our house. When we had worked through all of those, she drove me to the Northeast Seattle Library to load up on more books. I was aware that she read a lot and seemed to know something about everything.
My grandparents had built a house in the upscale Seattle neighborhood of Windermere big enough to accommodate grandkids and family gatherings. Gami continued to live there after my grandfather died. On some weekends Kristi and I would stay over, alternating who got the privilege of sleeping in Gami’s room. The other one slept in a nearby bedroom where everything from walls to curtains was pale blue. Light from the street and passing cars painted eerie shadows in that blue room. I got scared sleeping there and was always glad when it was my turn to stay in Gami’s room.
Those weekend visits were special. Her house was just a couple of miles from ours, but spending time there felt like a vacation. She had a pool and compact mini golf course we’d play in the side yard, set up by my grandfather. She also allowed us the treat of television—a tightly controlled substance at our own house. Gami was up for anything; thanks to her, my sisters and I became avid game players who made anything—Monopoly, Risk, Concentration—into a competitive sport. We’d buy two copies of a jigsaw puzzle so we could race to see who finished first. But we knew her preference. Most nights after dinner, she dealt the cards and then proceeded to kick our butts.
I was about eight when I got my first glimmer of how she did it. I still remember the day: I’m sitting across from my grandmother at the dining room table, Kristi next to me. The room has one of those huge old wooden radios that even then was a relic of the past. Along another wall is a big cabinet where Gami stored the special dishes that we used every Sunday for dinner.
It’s quiet, except for the slapping of cards on the table, a frenzy of drawing and matching cards in rapid fire. We’re playing Pounce, a fast-paced, group form of solitaire. A serial Pounce winner can keep track of what’s in their hand, what cards are showing in all the players’ individual piles, and what’s in the communal piles on the table. It rewards a strong working memory and the pattern-matching ability to instantly recognize how a card that comes up on the table fits into what you hold in your hand. But I don’t know any of this. All I know is that whatever it is that’s needed to turn luck in your favor, Gami has it.
I am staring at my cards, my head racing to find matches. Then I hear Gami say: “Your six card plays.” And then, “Your nine card plays.” She’s coaching my sister and me while also playing her own hand. She somehow grasps everything happening at the table and even seems to know the cards we’re each holding—and it’s not magic. How is she doing it? To anyone who plays cards, this is basic stuff. The more closely you can track your opponent’s hand, the better your chances of winning. Still, to me at that age, it’s a revelation. I see for the first time that for all the mystery and luck in a game of cards, there are things that I can learn to increase my chances of winning. I realize Gami isn’t just lucky or talented. She’s trained her brain. And I can too.
From that time on, I would sit down to a game of cards with an awareness that each hand dealt offered the chance to learn—if only I would take it. She knew it too. That didn’t mean she made the path easy. She could have sat me down and walked me through the do’s and don’ts, the strategies and tactics of various games. That wasn’t Gami’s way. She wasn’t didactic. She led by example. So we played and played.
We played Pounce, gin rummy, hearts, and my favorite, sevens. We played her favorite, a complicated form of gin she called Coast Guard rummy. We played a little bridge. We played our way through a volume of Hoyle’s, front to back, dealing games popular and not—even pinochle.
All the while, I studied her. In computer science there’s a thing called a state machine, a part of a program that receives an input and, based on the state of a set of conditions, takes the optimal action. My grandmother had a finely tuned state machine for cards; her mental algorithm methodically worked through probabilities, decision trees, and game theory. I couldn’t have articulated these concepts, but slowly I started to intuit them. I noticed that even at unique moments in a game—a combination of possible moves and odds she probably had never seen before—she usually made the optimal move. If she lost a good card at some point, later in the game I’d see she had sacrificed it for a reason: to set herself up for a win down the road.
We played and played and I lost and lost. But I was watching, and improving. All along, Gami continued to gently encourage me. “Think smart, Trey. Think smart,” she’d say as I weighed my next move. Implicit was the idea that if I used my brain, stayed focused, I could figure out the right card to play. I could win.
One day I did.
There was no fanfare. No grand prize. No high fives. I don’t even remember what game we were playing the first time I won more games in a day than she did. I do know my grandmother was pleased. I’m pretty sure she smiled, an acknowledgment that I was growing.
Eventually—it took about five years—I was winning consistently. By that point I was almost a teenager, naturally competitive. I enjoyed the mental wrestling, as well as the deeply satisfying feeling you get from learning a new skill. Card playing taught me that no matter how complex or even mysterious something seems, you often can figure it out. The world can be understood.
—
I was born on October 28, 1955, the second of three kids. Kristi, born in 1954, was twenty-one months older; my sister Libby wouldn’t appear on the scene for nearly another decade. As a baby, I was dubbed “Happy Boy” for the wide grin I seemed to always display. It wasn’t that I didn’t cry, but the joy I apparently felt seemed to override all other emotions. My other notable early trait might be described as excess energy. I rocked. At first on a rubber hobby horse, for hours on hours. And as I grew older, I kept it up without the horse, rocking while seated, while standing, anytime I got to really thinking about something. Rocking was like a metronome for my brain. It still is.
Early on, my parents knew that the rhythm of my mind was different from that of other kids. Kristi, for one, did what she was told, played easily with other kids, and from the start got great grades. I did none of those things. My mother worried about me and warned my preschool teachers at Acorn Academy what to expect. At the end of my first year, the director of the school wrote: “His mother had prepared us for him for she seemed to feel that he was a great contrast to his sister. We heartily concurred with her in this conclusion, for he seemed determined to impress us with his complete lack of concern for any phase of school life. He did not know or care to know how to cut, put on his own coat, and was completely happy thus.” (It’s funny now that one of Kristi’s earliest memories of me includes the frustration of always being the one who had to wrestle me into my coat and then get me to lie on the floor so I was still enough for her to zip it up.)
In my second year at Acorn Academy, I arrived “a newly aggressive, rebellious child,” a four-year-old who liked singing solo and taking imaginary trips. I scuffled with other kids, and was “frustrated and unhappy much of the time,” the director reported. Fortunately, my teachers were heartened by my long-term plans: “We feel very accepted by him since he is including us as passengers on his proposed moon shot,” they wrote. (I was ahead of Kennedy by a few years.)
What educators and my parents noted at an early age were hints of what would come. I channeled the same intensity that drew me into solving the puzzle of Gami’s card skill into anything that interested me—and nothing that didn’t. The things that interested me included reading, math, and being alone in my own head. The things that didn’t were the daily rituals of life and school, handwriting, art, and sports. Also, mostly everything my mother told me to do.
My parents’ struggle with their hyperkinetic, brainy, often contrarian, tempestuous son would absorb much of their energy as I grew up and would indelibly shape our family. As I’ve grown older, I better understand just how instrumental they were in helping chart my unconventional path to adulthood.
My father was known as a gentle giant, six-feet-seven-inches tall with a calm politeness you might not expect from a man who was often the biggest guy in the room. He had a direct, purposeful way of dealing with people that defined him and suited his career as a lawyer advising businesses and boards (and later as the first head of our philanthropic foundation). Though polite, he wasn’t shy to ask for what he wanted. As a college student, what he wanted was a dance partner.
In the fall of 1946, he was part of a wave of veterans on the G.I. Bill, the generous government program that gave millions of people an education they might not have afforded otherwise. The one downside, in my father’s estimation, was that the number of men on the University of Washington campus far surpassed the number of women. That meant the chances of finding a dance partner were low. At some point he asked a friend for help. Her name was Mary Maxwell.
He knew she was an officer at a sorority, Kappa Kappa Gamma, so he asked: Did she know someone who might be interested in meeting a tall guy who liked to dance? She said she’d check. Time went by. No introduction came. One day while walking together just outside the sorority house, my dad asked her again if she knew someone suitable.
“I have someone in mind,” she said. “Me.”
My mother was five-foot-seven, and my dad told her that, literally, she didn’t measure up. “Mary,” he replied, “you’re too short.”
My mom sidled up next him, stood on her tiptoes, put her hand atop her head, and retorted, “I am not! I’m tall.”
My father always claimed his request for an introduction wasn’t a tricky way of getting my mom to go out with him. But that’s what happened. “By golly,” he said, “let’s have a date.” Then, as the story goes, two years later they got married.
I always loved hearing this story because it so perfectly captures my parents’ personalities. My dad: deliberate and unapologetically pragmatic, sometimes even in matters of the heart. My mom: gregarious, and also not shy about getting what she wanted. It was a neat story, a distillation of the full story, one of differences that went beyond height, and which would ultimately play into who I became.
—
My mom was meticulous about keeping records of her life, photo albums of family trips and school musicals, scrapbooks of newspaper clippings and telegrams. I recently found a set of letters that she and my father traded in the year leading up to their marriage in the spring of 1951. Six months before the wedding, my father was in his hometown working as an attorney, his first job after earning his law degree earlier that year. My mother was back at the university finishing her last year. A letter she wrote in October begins with her hope that in the pages that follow she would avoid the “emotional unbalance” she felt in a conversation they had a day earlier. She didn’t elaborate, but it seems like there were some pre-wedding worries about their union and how to bridge certain differences between them. She explained:
My objective conclusion about our relationship is that we have much in common and a very fine thing. We want much the same social life and home life. I think it’s true that we both want a very close marriage—that is, we want we two to be one. Although our social and family backgrounds are different, I think that we are able to be understanding about problems evolving from this, because as individuals we are much the same. We do both like to be dealing with ideas—to be continually thinking and learning…We both want the same—all the success in the world that can be gotten honestly and fairly. Even though we prize success highly, neither of us would consider it being worth it to be unjust so to push another man down. We would like our children to have the same basic values. Perhaps our “means” would be somewhat different but I am inclined to think we could present a solid front that would complement both of our points of view…You know Bill that if you truly loved me always, I would do anything in the world for you.
I love you Bill
Mary
In the letter I glimpsed the private negotiations that surely continued all though my childhood and beyond. They nearly always maintained their solid front, in private working out their differences, most of which stemmed from how each was raised.
My mom, Mary Maxwell, grew up in the embrace of a family culture set by her grandfather J. W. Maxwell, a banker who doted on my mom and was a model for a life of constant self-improvement. As a boy in Nebraska, J.W. quit school and talked himself into a job digging out the basement of a house owned by a local banker in return for money and room and board. When J.W. put down his shovel two months later, the man offered him a job at his bank. He was fifteen. After a few years learning the banking business, he moved to Washington state to carve out a new life. The 1893 depression wiped out his fledgling bank, and the coastal town he bet would boom instead went bust. He eventually took a steady job as a federal bank examiner, work that had him away from his family for months on end traveling on horseback, wagon, and train around the West measuring the health of small banks. Eventually he succeeded in starting his own bank. By the time he died in 1951 at age eighty-six, my great-grandfather was chairman of a major bank in Seattle and an active civic leader. He had also served as a mayor, a state legislator, a school board member, and a director of the Federal Reserve.
The platform of wealth and opportunity set by J.W. and furthered by my grandfather, also a banker, meant that my mom would want for nothing as a child. She was a great student with a full slate of sports and activities with family and a wide circle of friends. Sundays were for family picnics and summer days for swimming at her grandparents’ beach house on Puget Sound. Sports and games were an essential part of any gathering—croquet, shuffleboard, and horseshoes were mainstays—and there was no question that my mom would learn to play tennis, ride horses, and become a graceful skier. In the Maxwell family, games held larger lessons. Golf, for instance, was a proxy for banking, both of which, her grandfather wrote, require “skill, continued practice, sobriety, patience, endurance and alertness.”
In one of my mother’s albums is a photo from when she was three or four years old. A group of neighborhood parents assembled their kids for the snapshot, each with their tricycles. On the back, Gami wrote the story of the picture. One boy had the biggest tricycle. My mom wanted him to trade with her so she could have the biggest trike. Somehow, she got him to agree. In the resulting photo, she’s beaming, sitting a full head taller than everyone else. She was never afraid to be strong, to occupy space.
Where my mom got her confidence and ambition was probably equal parts the Maxwell side and Gami, who, beyond her card-table acuity, was valedictorian of her high school class, a gifted basketball player, widely read, and aimed for a bigger life outside of her hometown. It was at the University of Washington that she met my grandfather. My mom followed, entering UW in 1946 with the full support of two ambitious parents and a family-wide expectation that she would excel.
—
Across Puget Sound from Seattle, my father’s hometown of Bremerton was best known for its Navy shipyard, celebrated as the place where battle-weary ships came to be fixed. Not too many years earlier it had a reputation as a town of gamblers and more saloons than anyone could stagger to in one day.
Growing up, Kristi and I would ride the ferry to Bremerton to visit my father’s parents. From the ferry we’d walk a short distance up the hill to the house where my dad grew up. It was a small blue Craftsman on a quiet street. We’d stay with my grandparents for a night or two. If the TV was on, my grandfather would be watching boxing, which was pretty much the one diversion he allowed himself. My paternal grandmother, Lillian Elizabeth Gates, had the same spark for cards that Gami did, so we would often get a few games in. Like my maternal grandparents, my dad’s parents were Christian Scientists. One memory I have from those visits is of Grandma Gates in the kitchen every morning with a cup of coffee, quietly reading Mary Baker Eddy’s Daily Bible Lesson to my grandfather.
When my dad talked about his childhood, he always seemed wistful about his father. He described him as a workaholic who left little time for much else in his life. He owned a furniture store, passed down from my great-grandfather, that had survived the Great Depression, but just barely. Constant anxiety about the family finances made my grandfather a hostage to the business. Behind the little blue house was an alley that in an earlier time my grandfather would pass through on his way home from work so that he could pick up bits of coal dropped by delivery trucks. My father said his dad never went to movies or took his son to baseball games; he saw such things as distractions that robbed time from the store. He always seemed to be running scared, my father said.
In a way, you couldn’t blame him. My grandfather had known poverty as a kid in Nome, Alaska, where his family scraped by while my great-grandfather, the first Bill Gates in our family, sought his fortune in the Gold Rush of the late 1800s. Bill Jr. had to quit school in the eighth grade to support the family. He sold newspapers in the icy streets of Nome and picked up whatever jobs he could while his dad was off prospecting. Eventually they would move back to Seattle, settling into the furniture business. Times got better for the family, but the anxieties of those early experiences never disappeared.
My grandfather also maintained what my dad called a very narrow view of the world. Dad attributed this partially to insecurities. Lacking a full education, my grandfather clung to what my dad called his axioms, rigid rules about the world and life. “Learn to earn, son, learn to earn,” he would tell my father. Education was about gaining the skills you needed to get a job. Nothing more.
My grandmother, proud salutatorian of her high school class, had an axiom of her own, one that influenced my dad’s view on self-improvement: “The more you know, the more you don’t know.” But it wasn’t always easy for her at home. Even as women were starting to forge new paths in society, my dad’s father was stuck in a bygone time. He wouldn’t allow my father’s older sister, Merridy, to get her driver’s license. He wouldn’t consider sending her to college. The skills a woman needed were around the house.
My father was very aware of the intellectual gap between himself and his father. Though not illiterate, his dad could hardly read, while my father wanted to use his head, wanted to go to college. He didn’t want to knuckle under to his father’s plan for him to join the furniture business.
Next door to my dad’s family home was something seemingly out of a fairy tale: a Norman-style brick-and-stucco house with stained-glass windows and a tower topped by a conical roof. It looked so different from the Craftsman bungalows around it that locals dubbed it the “castle.” My father’s journey to a bigger life began when he started hanging at the castle with the Braman family. Jimmy, the oldest of the sons, was my dad’s inseparable best friend growing up. My dad said he marveled at Jimmy’s ability to turn a crazy idea into reality, and the two spent their days dreaming up all kinds of schemes and businesses. They ran a hamburger stand in the front yard, started a circus in the backyard. It’s funny to think that kids paid to watch my shirtless dad lie on a bed of nails. They also published a newspaper—The Weekly Receiver—where for a few cents their seventy subscribers got news picked off the radio and scores from local school football and baseball games.
My dad became a surrogate son in the Braman family. In Jimmy’s father, he found a mentor and a model for the type of person he could become. A high school dropout, Dorm Braman started Bremerton’s largest millworks, would later become an officer in the Navy, get elected mayor of Seattle, and eventually serve as deputy transportation secretary in the Nixon administration. He designed and built that distinctive home with his own hands.
Dorm had “no sense of personal limitations whatsoever,” my dad said admiringly. That was an ethos Dorm passed on to the boys in his family and his scout troop, which my father joined as soon as he turned twelve.
Both my grandfather and Dorm had dropped out of school, but they handled that challenge in completely different ways, and life’s opportunities followed suit. My grandfather lived in a state of anxiety and clung to his rigid rules. Dorm didn’t dwell on what he lacked but focused on what he could become. My dad preferred Dorm’s way of seeing the world.
In the fall of his junior year in high school, he took eighty-five dollars from his bedroom dresser, walked four blocks to a used-car dealer, and bought a 1939 old Model A Ford coupe with bubble tires. His father wouldn’t let him drive the family car—too much risk for a teenager. My dad wasn’t yet old enough to legally buy the car, so his sister signed the title. (Sometimes when he told the story, my father said she even bought the car for him as a birthday present.)
He did this knowing his father would be angry—and not just at him. He would never have spent money on a car for his son. And now his sister, forbidden from driving, owned a car.
My father drove home and nonchalantly announced that he was the proud owner of a beat-up light green coupe. Alarmed by the shouting in front of the house, my grandmother yanked father and son inside, sat them down, and forced them to make peace. My dad maintained that keeping the car running wouldn’t cost much and finally persuaded his dad to go for a drive with him. I like to imagine the two of them together, the unyielding older man finally giving in to his son’s elation. That night, my dad got out of bed twice just to peek at his new purchase. “I was about to bust a button—independence at last!” my dad wrote in a college paper.
My father named his car Clarabelle, which he thought fit its middle-aged persona. Clarabelle brought him freedom, carrying him on dates, to football games, and on fishing trips. At times as many as ten people squeezed into the rumble seat and hung off the fenders as it rattled down the Bremerton streets and the rutted Forest Service roads outside of town.
By then my father had started to drift away from Christian Science, and to question religion broadly. In his last year of high school, my dad and two friends started spending their Sunday nights at the home of their school’s basketball coach, Ken Wills, a revered leader at the school. On Sundays he opened his gym for anyone who’d rather play basketball than go to church. In the evening my dad and his friends listened to his arguments for why they should question the Old Testament and the existence of God.
The United States was nearly two years into the Second World War, and many of my father’s friends and most men under age forty-five who weren’t already fighting were preparing themselves for war. In the sky above Bremerton floated huge barrage balloons aimed at foiling an attack from Japanese dive-bombers. Down the hill at the Bremerton shipyard the USS Tennessee and surviving ships from Pearl Harbor were repaired. After graduating from high school, my dad joined the Army Reserves, which allowed him to go to the University of Washington until he was called up for active duty. That call came at the end of his freshman year. In June 1944, a week after hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops pushed their way onto the beaches of Normandy, my dad reported to basic training in Arkansas.
This is when my father decided to change his name. His birth certificate read “William Henry Gates III,” which to him sounded too posh for the son of a furniture seller. Convinced that the implied status of “the third” would invite ridicule and abuse by drill sergeants and Army peers, he legally stripped off the suffix and replaced it with “Junior.”
I recognize my dad in the nineteen-year-old who wrote frequent letters home from basic training and later Officer Candidate School. He is humorous, self-aware, talks of how hard he’s working, shows deep feelings for his family back home. Woven throughout his letters is frustration over how difficult the Army’s uncertain schedule makes it for him to arrange a home visit. He’s playful, apologetic for needing extra money from home for small purchases (underwear) and because he loaned another recruit fifteen dollars. Mostly he is thoughtful about his life. The military is hard, he reports. But he focuses on how he is growing, striving to be better. He marvels at the new world he’s exposed to, young men from all walks of life, poor, rich, and people of color. With a group of Southerners, my dad argues about the Civil War.
Officer’s school had regular reviews: if you didn’t pass, you got booted. With each review, my dad saw his class get smaller and smaller. Even as he survived, he worried about the next review, particularly the push-ups, chin-ups, 100-yard chest crawl, and other physical tests. He entered the service as “more or less a weakling,” he wrote. “I sort of get the feeling of becoming a man instead of just a boy now. If I flunk out of here, I know I’ll never recover. If I make it I believe I’ll tackle everything in life more confidently and with more spirit. I’m sure it will make me. Besides the mental side of it I have never been in better shape physically.”
He did make it—graduating a second lieutenant—and was on a ship to the Philippines on August 15, 1945, when Japan surrendered. My dad spent most of his deployment as part of the first group of GIs in Tokyo. His letters are full of dizzying contrasts: the beauty of climbing Mount Fuji early one morning, and the shocking state of Tokyo after America’s firebombing—burned homes and buildings that were nothing more than concrete shells.
My dad rarely talked about his experience in the Army. He knew he was lucky. Officer’s school kept him from battle for a half a year, and then the atomic bomb ended the war. Many of his friends were not so lucky, and those who made it back brought the war home with them. A friend of my parents who lived near us in Seattle had been shot in the head and survived. He kept his mangled helmet and Purple Heart on display at his house. If asked, my father would say military service was extremely valuable for him and leave it at that.
When he returned to the U.S., Dad was in a hurry to get his degree, start a career, and, well, go dancing.
—
My parents had become friends while they were both student government volunteers. The Associated Students of the University of Washington was as much a social club as it was a governing body, and so my parents had many chances to spend time together. At that point the ASUW fought the university’s Board of Regents’ long-held policy that banned political speeches. I know the policy angered my father and he worked to reverse the ban—though he ultimately failed.
Unlike her soon-to-be boyfriend, who liked to work behind the scenes, my mom thrived at the center, and even more so if she had been chosen for that place by her peers. With typical determination, in her junior year she ran a highly organized campaign for secretary of the student government. She wrote a campaign song (it helped that “Mary” rhymes with “secretary”) and a script for supporters to follow when they phoned students asking for their vote. On election day she meticulously tracked how the five thousand voting students cast their ballots. My mother beat her rivals by a wide margin.
In one scrapbook, she saved congratulatory telegrams from friends and family, along with a handwritten note from her sorority sisters. She also kept a letter from her grandfather. He listed her big wins that spring: elected both to the secretary post and president of her sorority plus placing first in a ski race. As reward for those three wins, he enclosed $75 (about $1,000 today) and congratulated her for “coming out into the limelight.”
It’s easy for me to picture my parents’ early friendship. My mom had a warmth and grace of manner that imbued her with an almost magical ability to connect. If you showed up to a party and didn’t know anyone, my mother was the first person to extend her hand, welcome you, and smooth your way into the group in a room. The minister of our church once said that my mother “never met an unimportant person.”
I imagine her compelled to try to draw out tall, skinny Bill Gates Jr. She sees he’s reserved, and she tries to figure out his story, where he’s from, who his friends are, and what makes him tick. She quickly finds common ground: the people and issues of student government. She does this without flirting. He’s two years older, is already thinning up top. Not classically handsome. Her boyfriend at the time was. In photos he looks more chiseled. More middle-of-the-road.
Still, she’s intrigued. When Bill Gates speaks, there are no wasted words. He’s logical, clear, analytical. There are people who think out loud—her best friend, Dorothy, is like that—but this young man speaks from a place of wisdom that seems older, more thoughtful than the people around him. Plus, he’s fun. He’s got a big smile and is a joyous person.
My dad, for his part, is drawn to my mom’s energy, her quick mind and fearlessness about saying how she feels, even when it comes to telling other people what’s best for them. “Bill, I think it would be a fine idea if you were to…” is probably something he heard soon after getting to know her.
Plus, they danced well together.
Mary Maxwell’s photo collection tells the rest of the origin story. From the spring of 1948 pictures show her at dances, parties, and other college events with the chiseled guy. But by early 1950 she must have moved on, no more of that other guy, just a picture from the Dreamer’s Holiday Semi-formal in early 1950: my future mom and dad, seated at a table, beaming at the camera. My dad graduated that spring, with both an undergraduate and a law degree, thanks to an accelerated program offered to veterans. My mom graduated a year later with a degree in education.
They must have resolved whatever differences their letters hinted at, because in May 1951 they were married. My mom soon joined my father in Bremerton, where he was working for a local lawyer who doubled as the city attorney. The job had my dad helping people through divorce proceedings and prosecuting the city’s police court cases. My mom, meanwhile, started teaching at the same junior high school my father had attended.
After two years in Bremerton, the prospects of a better job and a more vibrant life lured them back to Seattle, and within months of my birth we moved again, to a newly built house in View Ridge, an area in North Seattle with an elementary school, kids’ park, and library all within walking distance. The whole neighborhood was still under construction when we arrived. I have a film my dad took right after we moved: You can see a dirt yard where our grass hadn’t been planted yet. My sister rides her tricycle on a sidewalk so clean the cement looks almost liquid. Across the street is the wood frame of an unfinished house. I watch the film and am struck by how everything was so new, as if the whole neighborhood had been freshly built for kids like us.