Childhood Of Celebrities : Al Gore

Albert A Gore Jr. was born in Washington, D.C., to Albert Arnold Gore, Sr., a U. S. Representative (1939–44, 1945–1953) and Senator (1953–1971) from Tennessee, and Pauline LaFon Gore, one of the first women to graduate from Vanderbilt University Law School. He divided his childhood between Washington, D.C., and Carthage, Tennessee: as a boy, during the school year, the family lived in a hotel in Washington and during summer vacations, Gore worked on the family farm in Carthage, where hay and tobacco were grown and cattle raised.

Gore attended Washington’s private St. Albans School through high school. In 1965, he enrolled at Harvard College. His roommate (in Dunster House) was actor Tommy Lee Jones. Gore graduated from Harvard with honors in June 1969 (with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government).

Gore opposed the Vietnam War and could have avoided serving overseas by accepting a spot in the National Guard which a friend of his family had reserved for him or by other means of avoiding the draft. Gore has stated that his sense of civic duty compelled him to serve in some capacity. He enlisted in the United States Army on August 7, 1969. After basic training at Fort Dix, Gore was assigned as a military journalist writing for The Army Flier, the base newspaper at Fort Rucker. With seven months remaining in his enlistment, Gore was shipped to Vietnam, arriving on January 2, 1971. He served for four months with the 20th Engineer Brigade in Bien Hoa and for another month at the Army Engineer Command in Long Binh.

Gore said in 1988 that his experience in Vietnam:

didn’t change my conclusions about the war being a terrible mistake, but it struck me that opponents to the war, including myself, really did not take into account the fact that there were an awful lot of South Vietnamese who desperately wanted to hang on to what they called freedom. Coming face to face with those sentiments expressed by people who did the laundry and ran the restaurants and worked in the fields was something I was naively unprepared for.

As his unit was standing down, he applied for and received a non-essential personnel honorable discharge two months early in order to attend divinity school at Vanderbilt University. Gore left Vanderbilt after completing the required one-year Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for students returning to secular work. In 1970, Gore married Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson (known as Tipper), whom he had first met at his high school senior prom in Washington, D.C.

Gore then spent five years as a reporter for The Tennessean, a newspaper in Nashville, Tennessee. His investigations of possible corruption among members of Nashville’s Metro Council resulted in the arrest and prosecution of two councilmen for separate offenses. It frustrated him, however, that a journalist could only expose wrongdoing without being able to correct it. That realization led to a leave of absence from the paper to try law school. Before he could finish, he learned that his local congressman planned to retire in 1976.

Credit : Wikipedia

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Bill Gates

William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle, Washington to William H. Gates, Jr. (now Sr.) and Mary Maxwell Gates. His family was wealthy; his father was a prominent lawyer, his mother served on the board of directors for First Interstate Bank and the United Way, and her father, J. W. Maxwell, was a national bank president. Gates has one older sister, Kristi (Kristianne), and one younger sister, Libby. He was the fourth of his name in his family, but was known as William Gates III or “Trey” because his father had dropped his own “III” suffix. Several writers claim that Maxwell set up a million-dollar trust fund for Gates. A 1993 biographer who interviewed both Gates and his parents (among other sources) found no evidence of this and dismissed it as one of the “fictions” surrounding Gates’s fortune. Gates denied the trust fund story in a 1994 interview and indirectly in his 1995 book The Road Ahead.

Gates excelled in elementary school, particularly in mathematics and the sciences. At thirteen he enrolled in the Lakeside School, Seattle’s most exclusive preparatory school. When he was in the eighth grade, the school mothers used proceeds from Lakeside’s rummage sale to buy an ASR-33 teletype terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric computer. Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC and was excused from math classes to pursue his interest. After the Mothers Club donation was exhausted he and other students sought time on other systems, including DEC PDP minicomputers. One of these systems was a PDP-10 belonging to Computer Center Corporation, which banned the Lakeside students for the summer after it caught them exploiting bugs in the operating system to obtain free computer time.
At the end of the ban, the Lakeside students (Gates, Paul Allen, Ric Weiland, and Kent Evans) offered to find bugs in CCC’s software in exchange for free computer time. Rather than use the system via teletype, Gates went to CCC’s offices and studied source code for various programs that ran on the system, not only in BASIC but FORTRAN, LISP, and machine language as well. The arrangement with CCC continued until 1970, when it went out of business. The following year Information Sciences Inc. hired the Lakeside students to write a payroll program in COBOL, providing them not only computer time but royalties as well. At age 14, Gates also formed a venture with Allen, called Traf-O-Data, to make traffic counters based on the Intel 8008 processor. That first year he made $20,000; however, when his age was discovered, business slowed.
As a youth, Bill Gates was active in the Boy Scouts of America where he achieved its second highest rank, Life Scout. According to a press inquiry, Bill Gates stated that he scored 1590 on his SATs. He enrolled at Harvard University in the fall of 1973 intending to get a pre-law degree, but did not have a definite study plan. While at Harvard, he met his future business partner, Steve Ballmer, who he latered renamed as CEO of Microsoft. At the same time, he co-authored and published a paper on algorithms with computer scientist Christos Papadimitriou.

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Paul Allen

Paul Allen attended Lakeside School in Seattle, where he was introduced to computing through the school’s timeshare computer. He was part of a small group who monopolized the Teletype room, where the computer terminal was located, and there met Bill Gates, who was two grades behind him. While other kids were writing BASIC versions of blackjack and Yahtzee, he was busy rewriting a BASIC compiler in assembly language.

Allen, Gates, and two other students, Ric Weiland and Kent Evans, formed the Lakeside Programming Group and made a number of business deals, at first trading their programming services for free computer access, but later actually getting paid. He and Gates also formed a company called Traf-O-Data to build and sell computerized machines to process highway traffic tapes.

After two years at Washington State University he dropped out to set up yet another business with Gates, who had just graduated from high school. Gates instead decided to go to Harvard, and Allen followed him east, where he got a job at Honeywell in Boston. It was there, in Cambridge, that he discovered the Altair computer on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics. Over the next few weeks he and Gates wrote a version of the BASIC language for the Altair, the first product of their new company, Micro-Soft.

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Arnold Schwarzenegger

Arnold Schwarzenegger was born in Thal, Austria, a city bordering the Styrian capital Graz, and was christened Arnold Alois Schwarzenegger. His parents were the local police chief Gustav Schwarzenegger (1907–1972), and his wife, the former Aurelia Jadrny (1922–1998). They were married on October 20, 1945—Gustav was 38, and Aurelia was a 23-year-old widow with a son named Meinhard. According to Schwarzenegger, both of his parents were “very strict”. “Back then in Austria it was a very different world—” he says, “if we did something bad or we disobeyed our parents, the rod was not sparred [sic].” It was a Roman Catholic family who attended Church every Sunday. Gustav, who was frequently drunk, signed up for the Nazi party after the 1938 Anschluss. Still, after the war, in 1947, Gustav was allowed to work as a police officer as there was no evidence he had committed war crimes. He had a preference for Meinhard, the elder of the two sons. Gustav’s favouritism was “strong and blatant”, which stemmed from unfounded suspicion “that Arnold wasn’t his child.” Schwarzenegger has said his father had “no patience for listening or understanding your problems…there was a wall; a real wall.” Schwarzenegger has reportedly disavowed Nazi views. In later life, Schwarzenegger commissioned the Simon Wiesenthal Centre to research his father’s wartime record, which came up with no evidence of atrocities. At school, Schwarzenegger was apparently “in the middle” but stood out for his “cheerful, good-humoured and exuberant” character. Money was a problem in the household; Schwarzenegger has recalled that one of the highlights of his youth was when the family bought a refrigerator. Read more »

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