Biography | Gordon Moore — The Coast Town Where a Sheriff's Son Learned Chemistry Behind the House

People file Gordon Moore under Silicon Valley. The first laboratory he used was the creek and the backyard of a town of a few hundred people on the San Mateo coast. Gordon Earle Moore was born on 3 January 1929 in San Francisco. He grew up in Pescadero, two miles inland from the state beach, where his father, Walter Harold Moore, served as a San Mateo County deputy and later undersheriff. His mother, Florence Almira Williamson Moore, came from the family that ran the general store. The Williamson name was already on the main street when he was a child. A 2006 street guide later identified 250 Stage Road as the childhood house. That building is now a shop on the public commercial strip, not a private home, and this pin stays at the Stage Road crossing that Wikipedia publishes as the center of town. In 1939 his father took a promotion and the family moved to Redwood City. The Pescadero years were the ones Moore himself treated as origin. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation's memorial note records the same scene: fishing the neighborhood creek, and making explosives on a small production basis behind the house after a chemistry set arrived at Christmas 1940. The New York Times obituary of 24 March 2023 confirms the San Francisco birth and the Pescadero childhood. Some later summaries collapse those two places and list Pescadero as the birthplace. That is the wrong town. What the coast gave him was not a company. It was a habit of measuring what a wild place used to look like, then watching it change. He would spend the second half of his life putting large gifts into conservation for exactly that reason. The pin is the street he could walk before any of that money existed. Photo: Daniel J. Leivick, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Stage Road looking north, Duarte's on the right, 29 September 2008.