[Guest Column] PR Perspectives: Blogging--Look, think before you leap

Attn: Tom Foreski
The SVW site is great. But when you publish errors that can have an endless life just by appearing on the internet, I do think a correction is sometimes in order. Particularly when dealing with the belligerent assertions of Fredric Alan Maxwell. eg:

From the spiel of Maxwell re Apple CEO Steve Jobs that you published on October 26, 2005:

'Turns out Jobs wasn't born in San Fran, as he's always claimed, but Madison, Wisconsin, something he's known for decades -- yet another example of his famous reality distortion field."'

Steve Jobs was born in San Francisco. His biological sister, Mona Simpson, was born in Green Bay, Wisconsin.

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20051204/GPG0101/512040591/1207/GPGnews

Who is responsible for the reality distortion field here??

(In case you can's access the site, here is the story:)
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Apple Computer mogul's roots tied to Green Bay

By Andy Behrendt
abehrend@greenbaypressgazette.com

It was in a Green Bay paint store in the early '80s that Jim Giese learned about the most famous fruit of his family tree.

Word had gotten around town that Steve Jobs, founder of the upstart Apple Computer, was his cousin.

"Steve who?" asked Giese, then a painting contractor and regular store customer.

"He is? Are you sure?"

Giese jokes that he was the last person in town to find out. But even 20 years later, with Jobs as chief executive officer of not only the $5 billion iPowerhouse of innovative technology but also the revolutionary Pixar Animation Studios that's worth another $1 billion, it's largely unknown how the Apple fell from a tree whose roots run deep in Green Bay.

Though not a Green Bay native himself, the charismatic but cutthroat Steve Jobs - whose brainchildren have spawned the Mac, the wildly popular iPod and blockbusters like "Finding Nemo" - is the biological son of a hometown-Green Bay schoolteacher and brother to one of Titletown's genuinely native celebrities, author Mona Simpson.

Giese, 56, who now runs a Green Bay sign and novelty gift company called Jaguar Marketing, doesn't own an iPod, and his business runs on Dell PCs. He says humbly that he never met Jobs and never had much longing to meet him until he came across a commencement address that Jobs gave at Stanford University in June.

In the speech, Jobs talked about looking back at your life and being able to connect the dots that made you what you are. Giese found it so concise and powerful that "It was almost like another dot," he said.

"It gives you the opportunity to look at your life and say, 'Where are my dots?' You know?"

Connecting the dots in Jobs' life isn't easy. Some Web sites, most notably the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.org, would lead you to believe the starting dot was in Green Bay.

Scott Eastman of Green Bay was recently perusing facts about his city on City-Data.com. Finding a list of famous natives and expecting to see the usual, like actor Tony Shalhoub, Eastman was startled to come across the California-based Jobs. It prompted questions why Green Bay wasn't getting a bite out of Apple.

"In his hometown, why would we not have an Apple store?" Eastman said.

Records of any presence Jobs ever had in Green Bay are about as scarce as an Apple sales franchise. In fact, Steven Jobs was born in San Francisco in February 1955, according to the California Office of Vital Records.

Jobs, 50, in his speech at Stanford, talked about his biological mother, an unmarried grad student. She had given him up for adoption at birth, he said, with demands that his new parents be college graduates. After a lawyer and his wife backed out, he wound up with the Jobses, neither of whom had a college degree. (Jobs himself dropped out of college after six months, but that, he said, was one of his key "dots.")

Rooted in Green Bay

The biological mother was 23-year-old Joanne Schieble, Giese's aunt, whose family owned a mink farm at what's now the site of the east-side Wal-Mart on the Bellevue-Green Bay border. Jobs' father was Abdulfattah Jandali, a native of Syria and also 23.

Schieble and Jandali were students at the University of Wisconsin in Madison at the time, and with society as it was in 1955, they had gone to California to secretly have the baby - unknown to the family, Giese said.

Mary Lou Ziga, then the owner of St. Catherine Book Shop in downtown Green Bay, knew Joanne Schieble as a frequent customer. Ziga also knew the family from attending parties hosted by Schieble's mother.

"She was a person who really liked quality, and she always wanted the very best," Ziga said of Schieble, whose son is known for his drive toward perfection. "When she had her home decorated, she always got the best drapes and things like that. She was quality. Her clothes were the best, even though she couldn't get many of them."

Ziga recalls learning at the funeral of Schieble's father in August 1955 that he had threatened to take his daughter out of his will if she married Jandali.

Four months later, she did. On the day after Christmas, 1955 - 50 years ago this month, 10 months after Jobs' birth - the couple wed at St. Philip Church in the then-town of Preble, now the city of Green Bay. The marriage certificate in the Brown County Register of Deeds office notes the two were students living in Madison at the time. Abdulfattah Jandali earned a doctorate in 1956, and his wife completed a master's in speech in 1957, according to the Wisconsin Alumni Association.

In June 1957, as Jobs was growing up in California, the Jandalis, living locally alongside the Schieble/Giese family, had a second child - a daughter, Mona, born at St. Vincent Hospital. Joanne Jandali recorded no previous pregnancies on the birth certificate.

The Jandalis divorced in 1962. Abdulfattah Jandali, previously an automobile salesman and, in 1961, a political science instructor and lecturer at St. Norbert College, was back in Syria at the time, according to court filings.

Famous family tree

Joanne, a speech correction teacher in the Green Bay School District from 1960 to 1964, married again, to George Simpson, a world-traveled skating pro at the Brown County Veterans Memorial Arena and longtime area skating instructor. That marriage didn't last either, with Joanne and Mona Simpson leaving for California in 1970.

Mona Simpson, like her mother a regular at Ziga's bookstore, would eventually return to the store to sign autographs for her own book, the 1987 novel, "Anywhere But Here," about the fame-seeking pilgrimage of an eccentric mother and her daughter from a Midwestern town to California. The fame finally came with the breakthrough book and the 1999 film version starring Susan Sarandon and Natalie Portman.

The book is loaded with real-life local references, many of them thinly veiled. Bay City is Green Bay (and see if you can translate Malgoma, DePeer, Prebble Park or the Bay City Press Gazette).

Jim Giese in the novel is Hal Measey, who as a child spends his savings of silver dollars on a pony that becomes a failed kiddie-ride business, has a short stint in the Air Force and begins lecturing local youths about the dangers of drug use after getting busted as a dealer. All true, Giese said without hesitation.

Mona Simpson, a grad of the University of California at Berkeley and Columbia University, dedicated her novel "For Joanne, our mother, and my brother Steve." Early in the '80s, Steve Jobs had tracked down his biological mother and sister, leading to Giese's conversation in the paint store.

"That was a nice surprise that Steve was her brother," Ziga said of Mona Simpson. "That was quite a story, I must say."

Mona Simpson employed that story in a later novel, "A Regular Guy," about a girl who finds her father, a biotech mogul determined by many to be based on Jobs, often unflatteringly. Continuing the chain of the family's fame and stranger-than-fiction story, Mona Simpson married Richard Appel (not Apple), a former writer and producer for "The Simpsons."

Joanne Simpson, who remains in California, declined comment for this story.

The last branch

While many of his relatives have found fame elsewhere, it has had little effect on Jim Giese. He's the only one in his family remaining in Green Bay. Seated in an east-side café near his business with a gray, blustery backdrop outside, he said his less-famous relatives, including his mother and his daughter, have moved to Florida.

Giese said he's happy for the literary success of one cousin. And he's proud of the other cousin he never met, although he doesn't credit his own family or hometown. Whoever the Jobses were, he said, they must have been the perfect parents to lead Steve Jobs toward making his contributions to society.

Though he admits he hasn't made all the right moves in his own life, Giese is working to make a larger contribution of his own. He's building a nonprofit group called the Center for Intuitive Healing Foundation that will create and sell resources to promote nutritional and spiritual health, with profits funding child literacy and mentoring programs and a day camp for autistic children.

Giese said his Jaguar Marketing somehow evolved from selling crafts and women's clothing in 1992 to producing signs and other products now sold at small stores nationwide, although he has never solicited a store to sell those products. Considering that, Giese said he shared in Jobs' philosophy about one dot leading to another.

"That's where I found an interesting parallel with Steve," he said. "Just that parallel that you followed the guidance of something and got where you got because that's where you're meant to be. If he'd have lived here, would he have been who he was?"

For all its character, Green Bay may not have done much to spark the tech mogul's storied career. Anyone hoping for him to sponsor a Steve Jobs Civic Center on the Fox River will surely be disappointed. But as Scott Eastman realized shortly after he found the mistaken information on the Mac-daddy's birthplace, Green Bay actually does have an Apple store.

"I was coming down West Mason on my way home and went by our The Apple Store, where they were announcing that they now have Honey Crisp apples," Eastman said. "It's like the new (iPod) Nano, only not so much."

Ms. Oliver seems to keep going and going. When I challenged her on many points to a posting that she made concerning Jobs, she responded with ad hominum comments, and continues to do so. In fact, I've yet to see any proof that Steve Jobs was indeed born in San Francisco. When I asked her to contact me personally, she refused. I wonder if Ms. Oliver even exists, or is a screen name of someone else -- or Apple's PR folk. Who knows? But why she keeps on pointing this out, well, as Bill Shakes said, me thinks she doth protest too much.

Why does everyone refer to John Jandali in the PAST tense????