Biography | Craig Barrett — The Carlmont Classroom Where a Math Teacher Sent Him to Stanford Instead of Forestry

People treat Intel's fourth chief executive as a Stanford product from the first day.

He was not.

Craig R. Barrett was born in San Francisco on 29 August 1939.

He grew up in San Carlos, on the Peninsula, in a lower-middle-class household.

His father worked in Shell Oil research labs.

His mother worked as a nursing assistant.

The marriage ended when he was seven.

His father died of cancer three years later.

By his last year at Carlmont High School, at 1400 Alameda de las Pulgas in Belmont, the plan was forestry.

He had applied to one campus: Oregon State, then the cheapest West Coast school with a serious forestry department.

Stanford, a few miles south, had no forestry course and looked unattainable.

A Carlmont mathematics teacher, remembered in Barrett's later public talks as Mr. Crawford, handed him a Stanford application and told him to fill it out.

The grades in senior year still counted.

He filled it out.

He enrolled at Stanford in 1957 on a scholarship, first in metallurgical engineering, then in materials science.

The forest-ranger plan did not survive the first year.

Carlmont is still a public high school on this site.

The classrooms have been rebuilt.

The pin is the campus, not a vanished room.

What happened here is the fork: a teacher on this hill sent a boy who wanted trees into the materials science that later ran Intel's factories.

Photo: Robert Scoble, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait made at the World Economic Forum in 2008.