Biography | Jeff Bezos — The Palmetto High School Where a Valedictorian Talked About Space Hotels

People treat Amazon's founder as a Seattle invention.

The public record starts at a Miami-Dade high school on Southwest 120th Street.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos was born Jeffrey Preston Jorgensen on 12 January 1964 in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

His mother, Jacklyn Gise, was 17. His father, Ted Jorgensen, was 19.

After the marriage ended, Jacklyn married Miguel Bezos, a Cuban who had arrived in the United States as a teenager through Operation Pedro Pan. Miguel adopted the boy, who took the new surname.

The family lived first in Houston, then in Miami-Dade.

The house is still a private address, so this pin stays on the school.

Miami Palmetto Senior High School opened in 1958 at 7431 Southwest 120th Street in what is now Pinecrest.

Bezos graduated here in June 1982 as valedictorian, a National Merit Scholar, and a Silver Knight winner in science.

A 2013 Miami Herald profile put the class at 689. In a later talk he recalled a class of about 750.

On 20 June 1982 the Herald printed a roundup of local valedictory speeches.

It summarized his as a plan to build space hotels, amusement parks, yachts, and colonies for two or three million people in orbit, and to keep Earth as a park.

He and a classmate, Ursula Werner, also ran a short summer course they called the Dream Institute, teaching ten-year-olds Gulliver's Travels, black holes, and electric current.

He left that summer for Princeton, intending at first to become a theoretical physicist.

The later companies sit on top of this paper trail: a public school diploma, a newspaper summary, and a yearbook photograph dated that June.

Photo: Jeffrey P. Bezos in the 1986 Princeton yearbook, Princeton University, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. School gate: Beanjamin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.