Biography | Andrew Grove — The Admissions Office He Found on a Cold January Day

People treat Intel's third employee as if he arrived already fluent in American engineering.

He arrived as András István Gróf, twenty years old, with little English and almost no money.

Grove was born in Budapest on 2 September 1936 into a secular Jewish household.

His father ran a small dairy. His mother kept the books.

Scarlet fever in childhood left him with lasting hearing loss.

In 1944, after German troops occupied Hungary, his father was taken to a labor camp.

Grove and his mother survived the rest of the war hidden by a Christian family on the outskirts of Budapest.

He fled after Soviet forces crushed the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, walking into Austria, then reaching the United States in 1957.

In the statement that later accompanied his gift to City College, he dated the start of that education to the cold January day in 1957 when he found the admissions office.

Tuition was free.

He worked in a restaurant, read lips through lectures because of the damaged hearing, and took a bachelor's degree in chemical engineering in 1960 at the top of his class.

The Gothic pile on this ridge is Shepard Hall, the centerpiece of the North Campus that George B. Post designed after the college moved uptown from Twenty-Third Street.

The engineering rooms Grove used were still in Compton Hall and Goethals Hall.

Steinman Hall, which now houses the school that bears his name, was not finished until 1962.

What happened at this campus was simpler than the later legend.

A refugee walked onto a public college that asked him for grades, not money.

Three years later he left for Berkeley with a first-in-class degree and a name he had made American.

Photo: Su and Soe, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: World Economic Forum, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.