Biography | Gordon Moore — The Williamson Store on Stage Road Where the Sheriff's Son Grew Up

People treat Silicon Valley as if Gordon Moore arrived with a briefcase and a forecast.

He arrived as a child on this street.

Gordon Earle Moore was born in San Francisco on 3 January 1929.

He spent his first nine years in Pescadero, a coastal village on the San Mateo County side of the Santa Cruz Mountains, where his mother's family had kept a general store.

A 1975 drawing of Stage Road still labels the shop Williamson's Country Store, since 1885.

Florence Almira Williamson Moore came from that counter.

His father, Walter, worked as the town deputy sheriff and later as San Mateo County's chief deputy.

Across the street from the store stood the house where neighbors remembered the boy.

That house is a private residence.

This pin stays on the public street and the store front, not on the door.

A Science History Institute oral history with a Pescadero neighbor, recorded decades later, places the childhood house directly across from the store the Muzzi family later ran.

The later grocery at 251 Stage Road burned in September 2016.

The original Williamson counter is the one that matters here.

Moore fished the creek and, after the family moved to Redwood City at the end of the 1930s, turned a backyard shed into a chemistry bench.

The move followed his father's promotion.

Sequoia High School and a neighbor's chemistry set did the rest.

He was a fifth-generation Californian whose working life, the Computer History Museum later noted, stayed inside a forty-mile radius of this village for most of it.

The radius would stretch only when the chips he helped make did.

Pescadero is still a short main street.

Duarte's Tavern, the stage-road shops, and the creek are what a visitor finds.

The boy who learned to count fish and then transistors started here.

Photo: Daniel J. Leivick, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Fishing portrait: Intel Free Press collection as filed on Commons.