Intel Chief Plunges into Memory

Walt Whitman once boasted about being a very lazy swimmer: “My forte was…in floating. I possessed almost unlimited capacity for floating on my back… I was a first-rate aquatic loafer.”
CCNY alum Andrew S. Grove’s views on natation are utterly different. The word “driven” comes immediately to mind when one thinks of the founder and current chairman of Intel, who was named Time’s “Man of the Year” in 1997, and the sources of his extraordinary energy and industriousness emerge clearly in the pages of his new memoir, Swimming Across, about his childhood in Nazi- and then Soviet-occupied Hungary, his family’s flight to America, and his first years in New York City.
When his alma mater honored him in 1998, Grove reminisced poignantly about his experience on the CCNY campus (reported in the Fall 1998 issue of CM), and Swimming Across fills out one of the more remarkable success stories in the annals of immigration to New York City. In its pages Grove—who was then Andris Grof—describes his bout with scarlet fever when a four-year-old, his Jewish family’s refuge from Nazis with a Christian family on the outskirts of Budapest, and recalls cowering in cellars when Soviet bombs were falling. For Grove’s family the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising was the final straw.

The last chapter leaves him just before his three-and-a-half-year climb to first in his graduating class at City College, with a degree in chemical engineering. One amusing anecdote from this time concerns his change of name, which, to his dismay, was pronounced Gruff (without the long “o” in Hungarian): “I started doodling with different spellings. The most obvious thing to do was stick an “e” after my name. G-r-o-f-e. I showed this to a classmate and asked him how he would pronounce it. He said, ‘Oh, Gro-fay, like the composer of The Grand Canyon suite.’ I went back to the drawing board.”

He then tried another version: “I wrote G-r-o-v-e. I took it back to the same boy. He said, ‘Oh, that’s how you say it. Grove.’ It was a serviceable rendition of how G-r-o-f was pronounced in Hungarian and was certainly a lot closer than Gruff.”

In a moving epilogue, Grove notes that he has never returned to Hungary but also brings us up to date on the many people who figured in his early life. Lest there be any doubt that Grove is inclined to loaf, his last paragraph is just four words long: “I am still swimming.”