A quarter share, bought as a hedge against not getting into Stanford
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
A 1957 or 1958 Cessna 182, bought jointly by Jonathan Hare, his brother and two friends as he was finishing at Cornerstone Research and preparing for Stanford.
The reasoning was characteristically layered. He was on financial aid — scholarships and Pell grants — and the disclosure form required reporting houses, cars, boats and the rest. It did not ask about aeroplanes.
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His position was Stanford or nothing. So the quarter share did double duty: if he did not get in, he would learn to fly and be a pilot. If he did, he would treat the stake as a loan — selling it down gradually to the other three, who could not have afforded the whole aircraft upfront anyway, and living on the proceeds through business school.
He was twenty-four, and applying. He got in, and that is exactly what happened. He learned to fly without ever qualifying as a pilot, and the plane funded a social life conducted, by his own account, entirely off campus — he never dated anyone at Stanford.
His grandfather Milton Dixon Hare owned a canvas-bodied plane in the late 1950s, through which Hare's father once put a foot mid-flight. Forty years later Hare owned a quarter of a Cessna. More recently his brother bought the same aircraft back, for his son — who is a pilot. The family are pilots.
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1990–92 — the faculty, the classmates, and the prize he gave up
Open →the previous aircraftRadar, chaff, and the Stanford lab at the center of Silicon Valley
Open →the job he was leavingExpert testimony, and where arguments learn to survive attack
Open →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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