Early Life
Goetz was born on November 7, 1947 in the Kew Gardens, Queens, a neighborhood of New York City, the son of Gertrude and Bernhard Willard Goetz, Sr. His parents were German-born immigrants who had met in the United States; Goetz's father was Lutheran; his mother, who was Jewish, converted to her husband's faith.
While growing up, Goetz lived with his parents and three older siblings in upstate New York, where his father ran a dairy farm and a bookbinding business. He and his sister attended boarding school in Switzerland for high school. Goetz returned to the United States in 1965 for college, and earned a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and nuclear engineering from New York University. By this time the family had relocated to Orlando, Florida; Goetz joined them and worked at his father's residential development business. He was briefly married, and after his divorce moved to New York City, where he started an electronics business out of his Greenwich Village apartment.
Read more about this topic: Bernhard Goetz
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