Mark Zuckerberg, and growing up in Westchester
By Dan Murphy
While all of us are about to spend the next week or two at home, or on limited activities at work and outdoors, we think its time to look for a good book to read. So after you read your latest copy of the weekly Rising newspaper, or check us out online at YonkersRising.com, we recommend a good book for you to divert your attention from COVID-19.
Facebook: The Inside Story, by Steven Levy, is a fascinating account of one of America’s great technology companies and of its founder, and Westchester native, Mark Zuckerberg.
Levy has used his 30+ many years covering the computer business, for Wired magazine and for Rolling Stone, The New York Times and The New Yorker, to best explain the technology and key players and CEO’s for those of us who know little, but also for the computer geeks, some of who like Zuckerberg, are now billionaires and play a major role in most of our lives.
Zuckerberg trusted Levy enough to give him inside access to Facebook, and to conduct several one on one interviews with him, something seldom done by the Facebook founder, who is still a bit secret and much like his shy and reserved self when he lived in Dobbs Ferry and attended Ardsley High School.
One chapter of the book deals with a young Mark Zuckerberg in Westchester. Mark Eliot Zuckerberg was born in White Plains in 1984. His parents, Karen and Ed Zuckerberg were first generation born in the US, with Mark’s grandparents on both sides of his family born in Eastern Europe.
Mark’s two grandparents were civil servants; one was a mailman and the other an NYPD Captain. Ed Zuckerberg was a computer geek before many owned a computer. Ed had both a computer and a modem in the late 1980’s, when a young Mark Z began to play games on his dad’s computer.
Ed Zuckerberg was a dentist and Karen was a psychiatrist. After living in White Plains, the family bought their first home in Dobbs Ferry, with space downstairs for a small dental office for Ed.
Mark was the 2nd oldest of four children, and Ed called his wife Karen, Superwoman because of her ability to work and take care of the family. Both Ed and Karen wanted their children to “love what you do. We wanted our children to figure that out for themselves,” said Karen in the book.
But most of all, they wanted their children to receive a quality education. The book quotes Mark as joking once that he had a “Good Jewish Mother, when I came home with a 99 on a test—Why didn’t you get a 100?”
Zuckerberg got his own computer in the 6th Grade, and shortly after, got a computer programming tutor after becoming bored of just playing games on the computer; he wanted to “make the computer games,” before entering middle school.
Mark began coding at the age of 10, and was too advanced to learn anything from the AP Computer class at Ardsley High School. His father never remembered Mark having to study at home at all, he learned everything in class quickly, which gave him more time to write programs and software while in high school.
After 2 years at Arsdley High School, Mark wanted to attend a high school that would challenge him and enable him to get into the Ivy League in College. That fact alone is interesting for those of us living in Westchester, that Zuckerberg was so gifted and talented that even Arsdley High School could not his IQ or his desire for higher learning.
But during his two years at Ardsley HS, thanks to a charismatic teacher, Mark did develop a love for classic literature, and an especial fondness for Ceasar Augustus. He spent his last two years at Philips Exeter Academy, a prep school in Andover Mass.
He remained quite shy at Exeter, writing code in his dorm room most of the time, but eventually got famous at the school for his coding and programming genius. His senior project at Exeter consisted of a program that played your favorite music songs, similar to the Spotify of today.
While Zuckerberg was the king of the computer room at Exeter, another student at the school came up with an idea that influenced his future. Kris Tillery, created a program called the Exeter student Facebook, that consisted of students names, photos and phone numbers, but little else. Tillery’s idea never went any further than that.
Both Zuckerberg and Tillery went on to attend Harvard, and Tillery watched as Zuckerberg used a similar idea with the same name, Facebook, to gain fame and fortune. Also interesting to note that Tillery ended up getting disillusioned with the Facebook of today, eventually deleting his account because Zuckerberg’s Facebook was “making him fell bad.”
At Ardsley High School, Zuckerberg excelled in classics. He transferred to Phillips Exeter Academy in his junior year, where he won prizes in science (math, astronomy and physics) and classical studies. On his college application, Zuckerberg claimed that he could read and write French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek. He was captain of the fencing team.
All of this information was in Levy’s book, Facebook, the inside story, which takes you from Westchester, to Harvard to Silicon Valley on a trip through Zuckerberg’s life. It reads quickly and keeps you super engaged. Another way to help our local economy would be to try and buy the book from your local bookstore, if you have one.
