[00:02.36]The Boy with the Billion-Dollar Secret怀有亿万美元秘密的男孩
[00:06.60]One day in 1965, when I was a librarian
[00:11.21]at View Ridge School in Seattle a fourth-grade teacher approached me.
[00:16.24]She had a student who finished his work before all the others
[00:19.51]and needed a challenge. “Could he help in the library?” she asked.
[00:23.47]I said, “Send him along.”
[00:25.74]Soon a slight, sandy-haired boy in jeans and a T-shirt appeared.
[00:29.46]“Do you have a job for me?” he asked.
[00:32.18]I told him about the Dewey Decimal System for shelving books.
[00:35.27]He picked up the idea immediately.
[00:37.46]Then I showed him a stack of cards for long-overdue books
[00:40.96]that I was beginning to think had actually been returned
[00:43.60]but were miss-shelved with the wrong cards in them.
[00:47.42]He said, “Is it kind of a detective job?”
[00:50.80]I answered “yes”. And he became an unrelenting sleuth.
[00:54.75]He had found three books with wrong cards
[00:57.48]by the time his teacher opened the door and announced,
[00:59.98]“Time for recess!” He argued for finishing the job;
[01:03.61]she made the case for fresh air. She won.
[01:06.66]The next morning, he arrived early.
[01:08.42]“I wanted to finish finding those books,” he said.
[01:11.13]At the end of the day, when he asked to be a librarian on a regular basis,
[01:15.73]it was easy to say yes. He worked untiringly.
[01:19.47]After a few weeks I found a note on my desk,
[01:22.29]inviting me to dinner at the boy’s home.
[01:24.72]At the end of a pleasant evening, his mother announced
[01:27.99]that the family would be moving to the adjoining school district.
[01:31.15]Her son’s first concern, she said, was leaving the View Ridge library.
[01:35.95]“Who will find the lost books?” he asked.
[01:38.59]When the time came, I said a reluctant good-bye.
[01:41.53]Though initially he had seemed an ordinary kid, his zeal had set him apart.
[01:46.25]I missed him, but not for long.
[01:48.77]A few days later he popped in the door and joyfully announced,
[01:52.36]“The librarian over there doesn’t let boys work in the library.
[01:56.10]My mother got me transferred back to View Ridge.
[01:58.83]My dad will drop me off on his way to work.
[02:01.22]And if he can’t I’ll walk.”
[02:02.98]I should have had an inkling such focused determination
[02:06.68]would take that young man wherever he wanted to go.
[02:09.43]What I could not have guessed, however,
[02:11.83]was that he would become a wizard of the Information Age:
[02:15.24]Bill Gates, tycoon of Microsoft and America’s richest man.
[02:19.83]