Two never-before-seen color 3.5 x 3.5 candid photos of Steve Jobs from December 1972, depicting him as a long-haired 17-year-old relaxing with friends at a Chinese restaurant in Mountain View, California. Jobs, who in the two pictures is shown lighting a friend's cigarette and smiling broadly with a place mat in his hands, was home from his first and only semester at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. In overall fine condition.
Accompanied by a scarce hardcover 1972 Pegasus yearbook from Jobs's senior year at Homestead High, picturing him on page 24; Chrisann Brennan, Jobs' girlfriend and the mother of his first child, and Bill Fernandez, a close friend of Jobs and Apple employee No. 4., are also pictured in the yearbook. The consignor, the original owner of the photos and yearbook, was a friend and high school classmate of Jobs' at Homestead High School in Cupertino, California. She recalls the night the photos were taken, stating that it was 'from a dinner in 1972 at Christmastime, when we returned from our first quarter at college for winter break. It was at a Chinese restaurant in Mountain View. We walked in the back door and were told there were no tables. Steve told the host that we had a reservation. He insisted on it, even though it wasn't true. Such was his 17-year-old power of persuasion that our group was seated promptly…Steve was the most fascinating person I ever knew: intense, impatient, inspiring, curious, challenging, enigmatic, frustrating, funny. Looking back I wonder if his intensity and impatience came from a premonition that he didn't have any time to waste.'
From Walter Isaacson's 2011 authorized biography (Simon & Schuster, pp. 40-41, Kindle Edition):
'Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking the required classes. In fact he was surprised when he found out that, for all of its hippie aura, there were strict course requirements. When [Steve] Wozniak came to visit, Jobs waved his schedule at him and complained, 'They are making me take all these courses.' Woz replied, 'Yes, that's what they do in college.' Jobs refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted…
Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his parents' money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. 'All of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition,' he recounted in a famous commencement address at Stanford. 'I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.'
He didn't actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn't interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. 'He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive,' said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. 'He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.' Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.
'The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,' he said. Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. 'I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.' From his Stanford speech: 'If I had never dropped in on that single calligraphy course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.'
