Apple founder Steve Jobs had Green Bay roots – Green Bay Press Gazette
Though not a native to the area, Steve Jobs has a Green Bay connection.
Jobs, the founder and former CEO of Apple who died Wednesday at age 56, is the biological son of a former Green Bay teacher and is brother to author Mona Simpson.
Jobs’ biological mother was 23-year-old Joanne Schieble, whose family owned a mink farm at what’s now the site of the Walmart on Green Bay’s east side. His father was 23-year-old Abdulfattah Jandali, a native of Syria.
Schieble and Jandali were students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1955. They had gone to California to secretly have the baby, said Schieble’s nephew, Jim Giese of Green Bay.
Jobs was born in San Francisco in February 1955, according to the California Office of Vital Records, and given up for adoption.
Schieble and Jandali married in December 1955 — 10 months after Jobs’ birth — at St. Philip Church in the then-town of Preble, now the city of Green Bay.
Jandali earned a doctorate in 1956 and went on to work as a political science instructor and lecturer at St. Norbert College in De Pere in 1961.
Schieble earned a master’s degree in speech in 1957, and worked as a speech correction teacher in the Green Bay School District from 1960 to 1964.
The Jandalis had a second child in 1957 — daughter Mona, born at St. Vincent Hospital in Green Bay.
They divorced in 1962. Abdulfattah Jandali was back in Syria at the time, according to court filings.
Joanne Jandali then married George Simpson, a world-traveled skating pro and longtime area skating instructor. They divorced before Joanne and Mona Simpson left for California in 1970.
In the early 1980s, Jobs tracked down his biological mother and sister, prompting Mona Simpson to dedicate her 1987 novel, “Anywhere But Here,” “For Joanne, our mother, and my brother Steve.”
Giese, who said he learned of the connection to Jobs in the 1980s, said in 2005 he had never met Jobs.
Giese said he is the only one in his family to remain in Green Bay.