Where Are They Buried? (85 page)

But after a near-fatal airplane crash in 1946, Howard became addicted to opiates, and from then on began to unravel. By 1950, Howard was in complete seclusion, his comings and goings cloaked in secrecy, and only a few select Mormon nursemaids were allowed to see him. His enormous business enterprise was somehow directed by memo, business meetings were called only
when absolutely necessary, and even those were often held in hotel washrooms, Howard in a stall while his associates gathered at the sinks. After 1956 Howard was not seen in public or photographed again for the rest of his life. In 1970, when the FBI investigated the possibility that he’d been murdered and his billions were in the process of being heisted, Howard confirmed through a telephone call that he was just fine, thank you.

In November 1966, clad in blue pajamas, Howard was stretchered off his private train and brought to the Desert Inn Hotel in Las Vegas, where he rented the entire top two floors. As New Year’s Eve approached, the management of the hotel demanded that Howard leave to make way for vacationing high rollers, so Howard bought the whole place. Over the next three years, Howard bought five more casinos, including the Sands, where Frank Sinatra was effectively shown the door after Howard cut off his credit. When Howard’s complaints about Las Vegas TV station KLAS going off the air after midnight went unanswered, he bought the broadcaster and had his favorite movies shown all night.

Through all of this, Howard
never
left the ninth-floor penthouse suite of his Desert Inn. Almost all of his time was spent sitting naked in a white leather chair in the center of the living room, an area he called the “germ-free zone,” watching one film after another, while the windows remained covered by black curtains lest sunlight inadvertently fall on Howard’s body. He was protected by guards who never caught a glimpse of their boss, and his staff awaited orders in the parlor around the clock. Due to his germ phobias, Howard slept atop sheets that were covered with a layer of paper towels, and he wrote his aides meticulous memos about how to wrap Kleenex around his eating utensils.

Finally, on Thanksgiving Day 1970, the bundle of neuroses called Howard, with his corkscrewing toenails, greasy, shoulder-length hair, and rotting teeth, was spirited onto a waiting jet and whisked to the Bahamas. The man obsessed with avoiding germs had, ironically, not allowed maids into the suite, and it had become disgustingly filthy and fetid. His aides stayed behind to clean up.

Howard’s final years were spent abruptly moving from place to place: the Bahamas, London, Mexico, Panama, and, probably, other locations. He would arrive quietly at a luxury hotel after elaborate measures had been undertaken to ensure complete privacy, and he would remain unseen during his stay. By 1976 Howard was a living cadaver: His 6-foot 4-inch frame had shrunk by two inches and had wasted to 100 pounds, his face
was gaunt and his dark eyes sunken, and his hair had turned a ghostly gray. As death enveloped him, Howard was boarded onto his jet and flown to Methodist Hospital in Houston for emergency care but, 30,000 feet in the air, Howard expired at 70 of kidney failure. The treasury department, which stood to reap over a billion dollars in estate taxes, required his identity be verified by fingerprints. An autopsy revealed broken hypodermic needles in his arms.

The dead man’s legend and legacy were richer than conventional reckoning could calculate. He had parlayed a small fortune from a revolutionary oil-drilling bit into a business empire than made him one of the richest men in the world, his estate estimated at $2 billion. Without an heir or an official will, 400 prospective beneficiaries tried to lay claim, but his assets eventually went to 22 cousins on both sides of his family.

Howard was buried at Glenwood Cemetery in Houston, Texas.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Glenwood Cemetery isn’t far from downtown Houston, located at 2525 Washington Ave., and is easily found by accessing the avenue from the exit at either I-10 or I-45, then following the address numbers.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery and turn right beyond the circle and bridge. Stay to the right on this drive and do not inadvertently bear onto any of the left-hand drives. After a couple hundred yards, there is a plot surrounded by an off-green steel fence on the right, which is the Hughes plot.

FEBRUARY 22, 1962 – SEPTEMBER 4, 2006

Steve Irwin’s fearlessness of up-close encounters with varmints and beasts of every stripe originated from a childhood spent at the Queensland wildlife park operated by his parents. In due course, the effervescent environmentalist won global fame as the “Crocodile Hunter,” on a television program on which he starred as a khaki-clad wildlife stalker who pushed the personal-space envelope with exotic animals while delivering mile-a-minute commentary in a ripe Australian twang.

Punctuated by a signature “Crikey!” exclamation whenever there was a close call, viewers were enlightened by his high-energy elucidations and came away from his shows with knowledge of lifestyle facts and figures for the scores of outlandish
creatures that costarred with him. But it was Steve’s high-energy stunts (that some critics categorized as “stupid,” among other things), including leaping on the backs of huge crocodiles and grabbing deadly snakes by the tail, that gained him genuine notoriety. Ultimately, his proclivity for too-close-for-comfort danger cost Steve his life.

At Australia’s Great Barrier Reef in 2006, Steve was snorkeling above a large stingray while filming segments for a show named “Oceans’ Deadliest.” The ray flicked his tail upward and the barb of its serrated and poisonous spine struck Steve squarely in the chest, piercing his heart before breaking off. Videotaped pulling the barb from his chest, a surprised and frightened Steve lost consciousness moments later and was dead within minutes.

In the days following his death it was reported that Steve was buried at the Australia Zoo in Beerwah—and that would make an endearing follow-up (as well as a boon to the zoo’s business)—but you’ll be disappointed if you try to visit him there. Administrators of the zoo are tight-lipped about the subject and I’ve been dead-ended after a series of other goose chases, too. What’s the world coming to when the day’s preeminent grave researcher throws up his hands and admits he’s flummoxed?

FEBRUARY 24, 1955 – OCTOBER 5, 2011

Neither a hardware engineer nor a software programmer, Steve Jobs was a visionary who accelerated the integration of computer technology into society. Obsessed, arrogant, and tenacious, he was blessed with an intuitive understanding of the way in which the mass market might best integrate computing power into daily life. And then, melding the skills of a naturalborn leader, tireless manager, and master salesman, he prodded and cajoled and inspired thousands of minds at his Apple computer company to develop his visions into easy-to-use, aesthetically pleasing, well-built, and yes, even fun, consumer-ready electronic devices.

His worldview was shaped by the 1960s counterculture of the San Francisco Bay Area where he grew up, the adopted son of a mechanic and an accountant who tinkered with him in the garage and taught him to read before going to school. After a short stay at a college his parents could ill afford, Jobs worked briefly as a video-game designer for Atari before backpacking around India for seven months, furthering teenage experiments with psychedelic drugs and seeking spiritual enlightenment.

But by 1975, Jobs was spending much of his time hanging around with a high school friend, Steve Wozniak, at the Homebrew Computer Club, an informal collection of geeks who gathered to trade know-how and parts for do-it-yourself computing devices, which at that time just barely existed. In 1976, “the two Steves” as they had become known in that circle, co-founded Apple Computer with a shop in the suburban garage of Jobs’s parents. The following year they built and offered for sale—for $666.66 through an ad placed in
Scientific American
—the Apple II, which is considered to be the world’s first commercially available personal computer. Instead of the boxy wooden affairs that hobbyists offered, the Apple II was a breakthrough sleek plastic affair intended for the den or kitchen that was offered as a digital lifestyle. The computer sold by the millions, and clones sprung up overnight. Seven years later, Apple again set the industry on its head when it released its Macintosh, featuring a graphical user interface and mouse, which further popularized PCs for the masses. The computer revolution was on!

In 1985 after a corporate power struggle, Apple’s board stripped Jobs of managerial duties and he left his own company. “I don’t wear the right kind of pants to run this company,” he told a gathering of Apple employees before he left. He was barefoot as he spoke, and wearing blue jeans. Soon he announced a new venture, NeXT, and though that never became a significant computer-industry player, it had a huge impact—in 1990 a NeXT machine was used to develop the first version of the World Wide Web. In 1986, Jobs bought a computer graphics spinoff from the director George Lucas and built a team that became Pixar Animation Studios. Starting with
Toy Story
in 1995, Pixar produced a string of Academy Award winning movies and made the full-length computer-animated film a mainstream art form.

It had taken a while for the world to realize what an amazing treasure Steve Jobs was, though he knew it all along. By 1996, his beloved Apple was in a shambles, losing money left and right, and its market share declined as key employees left for greener pastures. Selling NeXT to Apple, Jobs triumphantly returned to the company and, by quickly introducing the iMac, ending Apple’s feud with archrival Microsoft, and demonstrating true leadership during such presentations as those at MacWorld, the company soon regained its buzz. Once in control of Apple again, Jobs set the company on the path to becoming a consumer-electronics powerhouse; in 2001 he pushed the company into the digital music business by introducing iTunes and the iPod MP3 player; in 2007 the iPhone and its touch-screen
interface set the standard for the mobile computing market, while 2010’s iPad culminated his vision for a more personal computing device.

In 2004 Apple announced that Jobs had a rare but curable form of pancreatic cancer and that he had undergone successful surgery, but four years later, questions about his health returned when he appeared at a company event looking gaunt and frail. Jobs waged a long and public struggle with the disease, remaining the face of the company even as he underwent treatment and, finally, stepping down from his duties after receiving a liver transplant in 2009.

“No one wants to die,” he said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University. “And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it.” In closing, Jobs described how
The Whole Earth Catalog
deeply influenced him as a young man and how it ends with the admonition “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” “I have always wished that for myself,” he said.

At 56, Steve Jobs died of his cancer, leaving his family, millions of devotees, and 49,000 Apple employees behind. Though many believe he was cremated and his ashes scattered in accordance with Eastern spiritual beliefs, his family maintains he was buried in an unmarked grave at Alta Mesa Memorial Park in Palo Alto, California.

OCTOBER 5, 1902 – JANUARY 14, 1984

After a seventeen-year career selling cups to restaurants in the Midwest, high school dropout Ray Kroc felt it was time to get out on his own, so he became the exclusive sales agent for a five-spindle multimixer. In 1953 Dick and Mac McDonald’s fast-food emporium in San Bernardino, California, bought eight of the mixing machines from Ray. His curiosity piqued, Ray later explained: “I had to see what kind of an operation was making 40 milkshakes at a time.”

When Ray went to see the restaurant the next year, he was entranced by the efficiency of the operation. There was only a very limited, low-priced menu and, though it was a hamburger restaurant, it was not of the popular drive-in variety; people had to get out of their cars to be served. A dyed-in-the-wool capitalist, Ray started dreaming about additional McDonald’s stores, each equipped with eight multimixers churning up a steady stream of cash. The following day he pitched the idea of opening several restaurants to the brothers, and when asked, “Who could we get to open them for us?” Ray was ready.

“Well, what about me?” he replied.

Eventually a deal was struck whereby Ray gave the McDonalds a small percentage of the gross, and in 1955 he opened his first McDonald’s restaurant in Des Plaines, Illinois. Business proved excellent, and by the time Ray bought the brothers out in 1961 for a paltry $2.7 million, there were 273 locations.

Free to run the business his own way, Ray never changed the fundamental format, but added his own wrinkles. First, from the parking lot to the kitchen floor to the bathrooms, everything was clean. Next, he applied team techniques to the food’s preparation. New restaurants were located in swiftly growing suburban areas, where family visits to the local McDonald’s became something of a tribal ritual. Finally, millions of dollars were poured into advertising, to the point where consumers were so preconditioned by the McDonald’s promotional blanket that, as one industry wag flippantly pointed out, “the hamburger would taste good even if they left the meat out.”

In choosing a franchise owner to manage a new outlet, Ray looked for someone who was good with people. “We’d rather get a salesman than a chef,” Ray explained. And when it came to training these franchise owners, Ray was unremittingly intense: At his own “Hamburger University,” a training course led to a “Bachelor of Hamburgerology with a minor in French fries.” Ray’s fastidious attention and passion paid off; by 1963 more than 1 billion hamburgers had been sold, and that same year, the 500th restaurant opened. Today there are more than 35,000 McDonald’s restaurants in 120 countries.