Jeff Bezos grew up in a tight-knit family, with two deeply involved and caring parents, Jackie and Mike, and two close younger siblings, Christina and Mark. Jackie, who gave birth to Bezos just two weeks after she turned 17, was a towering figure of authority to Bezos and his friends. Mike, also known as Miguel, was a Cuban immigrant who arrived in America at age 18, alone and penniless, knowing only one English word: hamburger. Through grit and determination, he got a college education and climbed through the ranks of Exxon (XOM) as a petroleum engineer and manager, in a career that took the Bezos family to Houston, Pensacola, Fla., Miami, and, after Bezos left for college, cities in Europe and South America.
Yet for a brief period early in his life, before this ordinary if peripatetic childhood, Bezos lived alone with his mother and grandparents. And before that, he lived with his mother and his biological father, a man named Ted Jorgensen. Bezos has said the only time he thinks about Jorgensen is when he’s filling out a medical form that asks for his family history. He told Wired in 1999 that he’d never met the man. Strictly speaking, that’s not true: Bezos last saw him when he was 3 years old. And while Bezos’s professional life has been closely studied and celebrated over the last two decades, this story has never been told.
Jorgensen was a circus performer and one of Albuquerque’s best unicyclists in the 1960s. A newspaper photograph taken in 1961, when he was 16, shows him standing on the pedals of his unicycle facing backward, one hand on the seat, the other splayed theatrically to the side, his expression tense with concentration. The caption says he was awarded “most versatile rider” in the local unicycle club.
In high school, Jorgensen started dating Jacklyn Gise, a girl two years his junior whose father also worked at Sandia Base. Their dads knew each other. Her father, Lawrence Preston Gise, known to friends as Preston and to his family as Pop, ran the local office of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, the federal agency that managed the nuclear weapons program after Harry S Truman took it from the military following World War II.
Thanks for that gumshoe’ing!