Bill Gates Sr., 94, was son’s inspiration

Bill Gates Sr., a lawyer and the father of Microsoft’s co-founder, who stepped in when appeals for charity began to overwhelm his billionaire son and started what became the world’s largest philanthropy, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, died on Monday at his beach home on Hood Canal, in the Seattle area. He was 94.

The cause was Alzheimer’s disease, his family said in an announcement announced on Tuesday.

In 1994, Gates was 69 and planning to retire from his prestigious law practice in a few years when, one autumn evening, he and his son, Bill, and his daughterin-law, Melinda, went to a movie. Standing in the ticket line, Bill Gates Jr. told his father that he was being inundated with appeals for charity but that he was far too busy running Microsoft to answer them.

His father suggested that he, Gates Sr., could sift through the paperwork and, with his son’s approval, send out some checks. Gates Jr. agreed.

What Gates Sr. found later were dozens of cardboard boxes filled with requests for money, many with heartbreaking stories of need. A week later, Gates Jr. set aside $100 million to open what was initially called the William H. Gates Foundation. His father, sitting at his kitchen table, wrote the first check: $80,000 for a local cancer program.

Over the next 13 years, while Bill Gates focused primarily on Microsoft, his father managed the foundation day to day, conferring with its executives and philanthropic experts, sending his son lists of proposed grants, writing checks and shaping the charity’s major goals: improving health and education and alleviating poverty in America and the third world.