Bill Gates Sr. reflects on his roots, global health and his famous son

Bill Gates Sr., a retired attorney and father of Microsoft's co-founder, remembers life before he began working on how to give away billions. He grew up during the Depression with a fear of being poor. Gates has just published a memoir of the values and experiences that has shaped his 83 years, "Showing up for Life," which he discusses in this recent interview.

Q: You sum up your book's main point as "We are in this life together and we need each other." Is this a world view?

A: It's a world view. It's easy to have this sharing of responsibility among people, particularly among neighborhoods. We've clearly gotten to the point where there's a sense of sharing 7,000 miles away. There's really nothing complicated about it. ... We have to be helpful to each other or it would be an impossible world. This is not only good religion but very practical for economy and humanity.

Q: You described part of your childhood in the Great Depression, when your father walked home and collected chunks of coal by the side of the road for heat. What lasting effect did that have on you?

A: It's there. I never leave a room empty without turning the lights out. That is absolutely a habit learned from my father. ... To some extent, that's a product of this basic sense that comfort and a good life are always at risk, and there is another thing that happens to people called poverty. My children really don't have any notion of that.

Q: What has moved you the most in your travels?

A: A couple months ago I was in India with Bill, and we went back into this slum area to see a little girl Hashmin, who had contracted polio. It was a terrible thing against this worldwide very muscular effort going on to rid the world of polio.

I can remember as a father thinking about the possibility of my children getting polio. No parent thinks about that anymore because it doesn't happen. The trip in India was the first time I'd been on an overseas (foundation) trip with Bill. It was something he organized and we had his two sisters along as well.

Q: You've spent more than 10 years working at the Gates Foundation, where you're one of three co-chairs. What do you think have been the most successful and least successful efforts?

A: Set aside all the things in progress. We don't have any grade for them up or down. A vaccine for AIDS ... we've got a good many years ahead of us before we have the answer if it's a useful exercise or a waste of time.

I do think the delivery of vaccines in the poor world ... couldn't be left out of the list of positive results of the foundation's work. Without putting figures on it, at least thousands of kids who had the benefit of a good regimen of vaccines are not going to get sick and die prematurely.

The work we're doing in education, while it's been very good and delivered a lot of value to kids, is something we've decided the strategy we were using ... wasn't a bit clear [whether] it was ever going to go to scale, and we needed to look at other factors than the size of high schools ... and think about things that were a bit more fundamental, like the quality of teaching.

Q: What do you think about the criticism that the foundation is too heavily focused on technology solutions?

A: Actually I don't think there's any validity to that. It seems to me kind of nonsense. It's a question of what works. We've got so many lessons over the past decade about technology contributing to efficiency, accomplishing things that otherwise would be impossible.

To be honest I don't understand what technology the critics are talking about. If they mean vaccines, it's sheer nonsense. There's isn't any question of the value of creating a vaccine that would rid the world of malaria.

Q: What about the criticism that the foundation has too much influence because of its enormous assets yet only a small number of people making decisions — three co-chairs and three directors.

A: We try to ameliorate that in the case of three major program advisory groups with knowledgeable, mature, experienced people who get together and review the programs. Getting their input and advice is a fairly significant safeguard against the potential for bad decisions with such a very few minds working on it. ...

We have people in global health who know as much about global health as there is to know. The decisions of what we're doing go though that mechanism to start with.

But I go on to say in a hurry that we very likely will miss one somewhere here or there. I would just offer the same thing is true with foundations that have 50-person boards or 15-person boards.

Q: Getting back to raising Bill Gates, I read about the famous incident at the dinner table, in which you threw water in his face for arguing with his mother. At some point you realized you could not control him.

A: I couldn't control myself was the problem. Nobody can really control their kids; it's just [a] natural universal phenomenon. Kids get to the point they begin to feel their selfness, their worthiness, and that naturally generates a resistance to somebody imposing their will on them.

It started at a bit younger age because he started thinking very independently and thoughtfully at an earlier age than at most kids.

Q: What are the values you imparted to him?

A: I guess I would think about what values he has and go on and say we played some part in all of that, but incidentally not a controlling part — his curiosity, his energy, getting answers to things, his sense of appropriateness of hard work. ... His sense of the interdependency of humanity is something he got at least some confirmation of around the dinner table at home.

Q: And what characteristics surprise you ... that you don't recognize in yourself?

A: I suppose his well-known proclivity for being argumentative and even ... quite challenging of the suggestions and ideas that other people are expressing. It's wonderful to sit around the table with him when people are talking about what makes sense and what doesn't make sense, but he comes into those discussions very strongly. It's an indication of his immense self-confidence. It's a characteristic I'm not going to be able to explain where it came from.

Kristi Heim: 206-464-2718 or kheim@seattletimes.com