This is by no means new news, but since we've been focusing here on some of the negative messages about adoption that roll around in the world, it seems a good time to relate an inspirational tale ... a true story of kismet and success in epic proportions.

Sometime during the summer of 1954, a college graduate student in California learned that she was pregnant. Not yet married to the father, also a grad student, an adoption plan was made.

Given the importance of education to these two, the mother was determined that her baby would go to an educated family ... college graduates, at least ... and she was matched with a lawyer and his wife.

The baby was born on the 24th of February, a healthy baby boy. The lawyer and his wife decided at the last minute, however, that it was a girl baby they wanted, so they pulled out of the adoption..

Another couple had been waiting for a child, and because they were at the top of the list of potential parents they were the ones on the receiving end of a middle-of-the-night phone call.

"We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?"

Their answer: "Of course."

My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

The quote is from a commencement address by this baby-boy-grown to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford University -- the occasion being, as he says, the " ... closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation." His theme? "Connecting the dots."

At seventeen, he did attend college ... for a while ... but didn't see the value in it, or at least not enough value to warrant using up all of his working-class parents' saving. He dropped out, but did take a calligraphy class.

You may wonder what sort of practical application a calligraphy class might prove to have. Wait for it ...

So, to wrap this for punch line delivery ...

In February, 1955, Joanne Scheible gives birth to a baby boy. His father is a Syrian, Abdulfattah John Jandali. At the age of two-days-old he went to his adoptive parents, Paul and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California, who named him Steven Paul.

He now goes simply by Steve ... Steve Jobs.


Steve's birth parents eventually married, then divorced, and he has a sister the novelist Mona Simpson.

The calligraphy class came in very handy 10 years later when Steve was designing the first Macintosh computer. As he says, "It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do."

You can see Steve deliver his inspirational address to the students of Stanford here.