Biography|Gordon Moore — The Stage Road Town Where a Deputy's Son Learned to Fish

People treat Gordon Moore as a Santa Clara executive who arrived with a law about transistors.

He spent his first decade on this two-block street instead.

Gordon Earl Moore was born in San Francisco on 3 January 1929.

The New York Times obituary and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation both place the childhood that followed in Pescadero, a coastal farm town in San Mateo County, where his father Walter worked as a deputy sheriff and his mother's family ran the general store.

The pin is Stage Road at Duarte's Tavern, 202 Stage Road, a public front on the same street the family used.

An oral history recorded by the Science History Institute with Ronald Duarte, who grew up next door, places the Moore house across from the general store for the first nine years.

Duarte dated the family's move to Redwood City to 1938 or 1939, after Walter became under-sheriff of the county.

The Computer History Museum's memorial essay puts the same move at the close of the 1930s and notes that Moore's people had been among the first Anglo settlers of the village in the 1840s.

On this street he learned to fish Pescadero Creek.

The Foundation's own memorial says the creek and the open coast gave him the outdoor measure he later used when the Foundation bought land to keep Bay Area hills from turning into resorts.

The chemistry-set explosions came later, after Redwood City.

The childhood here was creek water and a sheriff's household, not a laboratory.

The general store his mother's family ran later passed to other owners and traded as Muzzi's.

The 2016 fire that leveled the Pescadero Country Store at 251 Stage Road took a successor building, not the 1930s shop.

Duarte's Tavern, kept by descendants of the same neighborhood, still faces the road.

The house across the street is an ordinary private address and is not marked.

Stand on the pavement.

Photo: Daniel J. Leivick, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons