Childhood Of Celebrities : Richard Branson

Branson was educated at Scaitcliffe School (now Bishopsgate School) until the age of thirteen. He then attended Stowe School until he was fifteen. Branson has dyslexia, resulting in poor academic performance as a student. He was the captain of football and cricket teams, and by the age of fifteen he had started two ventures that eventually failed: one growing Christmas trees and another raising budgerigars.

At sixteen, Branson left school and moved to London, where he began his first successful business, Student magazine. When he was seventeen, he opened his first charity, the “Student Advisory Centre.”

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Martha Stewart, born Martha Kostyra, was the second of six children in a Polish-American family. She grew up in a working class neighborhood in the small town of Nutley, New Jersey. Her father was strict, demanding, temperamental, and disappointed with life; her mother (also named Martha) was a cold, unhappy, resentful housewife. This volatile combination of parental forces, along with the constant threat of poverty, imbued Stewart with a permanent yearning for power and comfort, desires that would manifest themselves as an endless devotion to perfection and a chronic, insatiable ambition for material success.

In an attempt to fulfill these needs, Stewart consciously developed herself in three ways. First, she learned to how to achieve her goals with the single-mindedness of a charging rhinoceros. Second, she became enormously skillful in the domestic arts, developing powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men (and women). Finally, she turned herself into the public authority on Gracious Living, Along the way, Stewart reinvented her childhood for public consumption, fantasizing about the happy, loving family life she never had. In later years, Stewart would do the same thing with her adult life, portraying her husband, daughter Alexis, and herself as living an ever-so-happy and perfect domestic existence, an image that was far from the truth. In 1987, for example, her husband of 26 years, Andy Stewart, moved out to live with Martha’s former assistant. (The actual divorce came three years later.)

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Childhood Of Celebrities : Soichiro Honda

Soichiro Honda was born in Yamahigashi on November 17 1906. His father, Gihei Honda, was the local blacksmith but could turn his hands to most things, including dentistry when the need arose. His mother, Mika, was a weaver.

Honda’s subsequent spirit of adventure and determination to explore the development of new technology had its roots in his childhood. The family was not wealthy, but Gihei Honda instilled into his children the ethic of hard work, and a love of mechanical things. Soichiro soon learned how to whet the blades of farm machinery, and how to make his own toys. A nearby rice mill was powered by a small engine, and the noise fascinated him. He would demand daily that his grandfather take him to watch it in action. At school he got the nickname ‘black nose weasel’, which is less derogatory in Japanese than it sounds in English, because his face was always dirty from helping his father in the forge.

Soichiro Honda’s childhood days are full of examples of technical ingenuity, including using a bicycle pedal rubber to forge his family’s seal on school reports that were less than promising.

The bicycles had another use: those that his father sold from the shop he subsequently opened helped Honda to hone his engineering skills. As he grew, the dream of the car on the country road acted like a magnetic force, drawing him ever closer towards things mechanical. In 1917 a pilot called Art Smith flew into the Wachiyama military airfield to demonstrate his biplane’s aerobatic capabilities. Honda raided the family’s petty cash box, ‘borrowed’ one of his father’s bicycles and rode the 20 kilometers to a place he had never before visited. When he got there he soon realized that the price of admission, let alone a flight, was far beyond his meagre means, but after climbing a tree he watched the plane in motion, and that was enough. When Gihei Honda learned what his son had done to get to the airfield, he was more impressed with his initiative, determination and resilience than he was angry with him for taking the money and the bike.

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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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