Steve Jobs' Estranged Father Never Got Phone Call He Waited For

 

• View GalleryFILE - This 1977 file photo shows Apple co-founder Steve Jobs as he introduces the …
• View GalleryA man uses his iPhone to photograph flowers and a photocopy image of Steve Jobs that …estranged father, who had given up his infant son for adoption, had been hoping that his grown son would call him. That hope died today.

Abdulfattah John Jandali had emailed his son a few times in a tentative effort to make contact. The father never called the son because he feared Jobs would think the dad who had given him up was now after his fortune.

And Jobs never responded to his father's emails.

"I really don't have anything to say," Jandali, vice president at Boomtown Hotel Casino in Reno, Nev., told the International Business Times.

Jandali, a Syrian immigrant, had been quoted by the New York Post recently saying he didn't know until just a few years ago that the baby he and his ex-wife, Joanne Simpson, gave up grew to be Apple's CEO.

Jandali told the Post that had it been his choice, he would have kept the baby. But Simpson's father did not approve of her marrying a Syrian, so she moved to San Francisco to have the baby alone and give him up for adoption.

Steve Jobs Secretive Private Life

Jandali, who is 80, said at the time that he would have been happy to just have a cup of coffee with the son he never knew before it was too late. Stories of Jobs' battle with a form of pancreatic cancer and his liver transplant were public and Jobs' health had deteriorated to the point where he was forced to resign as CEO of Apple.
He was quoted as saying, "This might sound strange, though, but I am not prepared, even if either of us was on our deathbeds, to pick up the phone to call him."
Though he was one of the world's most famous CEOs, Steve Jobs has remained stubbornly private about his personal life, ignoring the media and the public's thirst for knowledge about him ever since he co-founded Apple Computer in 1976.
He was so successful at keeping the details of his life out of the celebrity pages that a Pew poll in June 2010 found that only 41 percent of Americans correctly identified Jobs as head of Apple. A CBS poll that year concluded that 69 percent of Americans didn't know enough about Jobs to have an opinion about him.
Jobs personal life was a story of extremes. Given up for adoption, he created a worldwide giant of a company in his garage, dated movie stars, and had a child out of wedlock who he denied for many years.
Many fans know that Jobs and his wife, Laurene Powell, have been married for more than 20 years; the two were married in a small ceremony in Yosemite National Park in 1991, live in Woodside, Calif., and have three children: Reed Paul, Erin Sienna, and Eve.