Macrosoft Heart Community-Minded Allen Saves Seahawks

Paul Allen, the Seattle billionaire who has an option to buy the Seattle Seahawks, is no Jerry Jones, the flamboyant, ego-driven owner of the Dallas Cowboys.

He is a shy, bushy-bearded technology genius who 21 years ago talked childhood pal Bill Gates into forming a computer software company they called Microsoft.

The introverted Allen hates the spotlight. This is a quiet and gentle man who left Microsoft when he was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease and came face to face with his own mortality. He relaxes by reading, scuba diving, playing chess and blasting away on an electric guitar in private jam sessions at his downtown Seattle recording studio with his amateur rock ‘n’ roll band, “The Threads.”

Close friends use one word more than any other in describing Allen - “eclectic.”

“He’s the most brilliant guy I’ve ever known,” says Vern Rayburn, who heads the Paul Allen Group, a management and consulting company in Bellevue, Wash., that coordinates Allen’s investments and develops synergy among the dozens of enterprises in which he has a stake.

“He has a range of interests that is extremely broad,” Rayburn says.

“He has the ability to absorb information and integrate information that very, very, very, very, very few people in the world even come close to. You are reticent to use words like Renaissance man because they have become so trite. But the traditional definition is someone who combines art and science with many areas of study. And that is Paul.”

Certainly, the 43-year-old Allen, a bachelor, can afford to drop a couple hundred million dollars for an NFL team; with more than $6.5 billion, he is the fourth richest American.

But why would he want to? He already owns the Portland Trail Blazers professional basketball team, a sport which he is passionate about.

He recently bought a new, custom-made Boeing 757 to fly his beloved Blazers to road games. The jet is large enough to carry 239 people, more than two-thirds of the league’s players. But it has been redesigned to seat about 35 in pampered luxury.

Although he owns a luxury suite at the Kingdome and has long attended Seahawks games with family and friends, he does not have the same passion for football.

Seahawks fans, however, will be relieved to know the only thing he has in common with Ken Behring, the California real estate developer who has agreed to give Allen an option to buy the team, is a taste for expensive cars.

His limited-edition 1988 white Porsche 959 is worth $1 million. Unfortunately, Allen has never gotten to drive this rare 200 mph turbocharged racing machine. It sits in a customs warehouse on a San Francisco dock because it is not street-legal in this country. Gates has one, too, gathering dust in the same warehouse.

But the prize car in Allen’s collection is a 1963 Buick Electra that was the first new car ever bought by his late father, a librarian at the University of Washington. He keeps the Buick, along with several Ferraris and a Lamborghini, at his six-acre estate on Mercer Island.

This waterfront Xanadu includes his home of nearly 10,000 square feet, a 6,500-square-foot home he had built for his mother, a $6 million sports complex with a pro-size basketball court, a 20-seat movie theater and an extensive art gallery.

If Allen decides to entertain his new NFL brethren, he can do so on his 150-foot yacht, the Charade. She’s a spectacular, glistening white ship built by the exclusive yacht builder, FeadShip - the most innovative launched by the company.

He would rather spend time with his 75-year-old mother, Faye, and his sister, Jody Patton, 37, who often accompany him on his many business and pleasure trips.

And when he’s not flying off to Hawaii or France or Fiji in his private twin-engine, 12-passenger Challenger 601 jet, Allen is hard at work turning his vision of what he calls a Wired World into a reality.

From a modest office in Bellevue, where Allen usually arrives alone in his commute car, a BMW, wearing his trademark black leather jacket, he commands a conglomerate of more than two dozen companies, not counting his nearly 10 percent of Microsoft worth $5.5 billion.

He owns 80 percent of Ticketmaster, the largest ticketing company in the world. But he also has invested in small companies such as Storyopolis, a Beverly Hills start-up that is developing multimedia and film products with leading authors of children’s books.

Rayburn and others close to Allen say he’s one of the nicest people they have ever met.

So why would such a man, one of the pioneers of the personal computer industry, want the Seahawks?

“He has an interest in football and he enjoys football. It is just not at the same level of passion as basketball,” Rayburn says.

Civic duty, he says, is more likely motivating Allen now.

That is evidenced by Allen’s recent gift of $20 million to the city for development of the Seattle Commons park complex. Or his financial backing of a $60 million high-tech rock ‘n’ roll museum dedicated to his music idol, Jimi Hendrix. It will be built at the Seattle Center and should be open by 1999.

“Paul is very quiet about this,” Rayburn says, “but in the last year, his actions are speaking for themselves. Paul is very civic-minded. Of the three Microsoft billionaires - Gates, Allen and Steve Ballmer - and the thousands of millionaires, you would have to put Paul … at the top of the list of those who want to do something for the community because it’s for the community.”

Rayburn has known Allen since 1977 when he would call on Microsoft as a customer. The fledgling company had just moved a few blocks from a low-rent building next to a massage parlor to the eighth floor of the new Two Park Central Tower in Albuquerque, N.M.

Rayburn became the first president of Microsoft’s consumer products division two years later, then left to run his own company before going to work for Allen.

He still sees in Allen what he first got a glimpse of nearly 20 years ago in Albuquerque, a trait that may have had a role in Allen even considering owning a football team.

“He would fundamentally enjoy the atmosphere of ownership of an NFL team and the idea of building a winner,” Rayburn says. “Paul likes to win.”

Just like Gates.

Gates and Allen, who would not talk to the Post-Intelligencer for this report, are approaching middle age, these two old friends whom Fortune magazine said last year have created more wealth than any business partners in the history of capitalism. But they were just a couple of smart, nerdy kids who shared a love of science fiction when they met at Lakeside School in 1968.

Gates’ parents could afford to send him to Seattle’s prestigious private school. They were rich. Allen’s parents were not.

His father, Kenneth S. Allen, was born in Anadarko, Okla. He was a star athlete there, lettering in four sports and playing center on his high school football team until suffering a serious knee injury.

The senior Allen graduated from the University of Washington in 1951 and began his career there as a reference librarian. He became the associate director of libraries, serving in that position for more than 20 years before retiring in 1982.

Faye was an elementary school teacher who also worked for a time at the UW library. Paul was born in Seattle on Jan. 21, 1953.

The family lived in a two-story home in the Wedgwood neighborhood north of the UW.

The young Allen was introduced early to books. His mother began reading to him when he was 3 months old. “Paul has read more books than probably anyone you could find,” says Steve Wood, one of the first employees of Microsoft, who now has his own company, Notable Technologies, in Bellevue.

Allen also got an appreciation of the arts from his parents, who often took him to plays, museums and concerts.

Each year beginning in the mid-1960s, the Allens would pile into the family’s Buick Electra and drive to Ashland for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. They would stay for a week or more to take in every play. Allen still goes to Ashland each year with his mother and sister and in 1992, donated $1.25 million to the festival, which enabled the organization to build a new pavilion.

An introverted boy, Allen spent more time with himself and his books than with other kids.

He found public school boring. Faye Allen recalls her son sitting in the back of elementary classrooms, reading books to pass the time. His mind needed a challenge. Lakeside School provided one in 1968.

That was the year Allen, a 10thgrader, first saw Jimi Hendrix creating “Purple Haze” magic on his electric guitar in a driving Seattle rainstorm.

“Jimi was so great. Like a bolt out of the blue,” Allen would say later.

Like Hendrix, who was born in Seattle, grew up in the Central Area and attended Garfield High School, Allen taught himself to play the guitar as a teenager. Also like Hendrix, Allen took to wearing a black leather coat and hat to school.

But something else happened in 1968 that would prove far more significant in Paul Allen’s life.

Lakeside administrators that year bought a teletype machine and stuck it in a tiny room in MacAlister Hall. Using a clunky keyboard, students could type commands on the teletype and communicate via telephone line with a minicomputer in downtown Seattle.

The teletype machine transported Allen into another universe.

Although Allen didn’t talk a lot or play football or have a hot car like many of the school’s affluent students, he stood out at Lakeside.

Most knew the electronics whiz kid with long sideburns, glasses and Fu Manchu mustache who was always lugging around a huge leather briefcase and hanging out in the teletype room with the skinny, freckled-face kid two years younger named Bill Gates.

“Paul was cool,” recalls a classmate, who was not one of the computer room crowd. “He was a nerd who didn’t look like a nerd. He was always more approachable and friendlier than Bill. … You would run into him in the hallways and he would actually stop and talk to you.”

In the summer of 1973, the boyhood friends landed their first real job. TRW, the giant government defense contractor, had set up offices in Vancouver, Wash., across the Columbia River from Portland. The company hired Gates and Allen to help debug a minicomputer that was supposed to control and distribute power from hydroelectric dams.

Allen was in his second year at Washington State University. He was weary of college life and restless. He wanted to get out in the real world and start a computer company with Gates. But Gates’ parents wanted him to go to Harvard, which he did that fall.

The next year, Allen dropped out of WSU, packed up his Chrysler New Yorker and, with his girlfriend, drove cross country in three days to take a computer programming job at Honeywell in Boston, across the Charles River from Harvard.

On a cold December day in 1974, Allen was walking across Harvard Square in Cambridge on his way to visit Gates when he stopped at a kiosk and spotted the upcoming January issue of “Popular Electronics,” a magazine he had read since childhood. On the cover was a picture of the Altair 8800, a rectangular machine with toggle switches and lights. It was being billed as the world’s first personal computer.

“I bought a copy, read it and raced back to Bill’s dorm to talk to him,” Allen said in a 1991 interview. “I told Bill, ‘Well, here’s our opportunity. …”’

Microsoft was born later that summer in Albuquerque, where Allen had gone to work for the company that made the Altair.

At Allen’s urging, Microsoft moved to Bellevue in 1979.