Ted Jorgensen

Theodore Jorgensen (October 10, 1944 – March 16, 2015) was an American unicycle hockey player, the president of the world's first unicycle hockey club, and a bicycle shop owner-operator. He was the biological father of e-commerce magnate Jeff Bezos. Jorgensen was born in Chicago to a Danish-American family that moved to Albuquerque when he was a teenager. Jorgensen was a unicyclist who performed at the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, and in 1962 became the president of Albuquerque Unicycle Club, the world's first unicycle hockey club. He married Jackie Gise in 1963 and fathered Jeff with her in 1964, before divorcing her when Jeff was seventeen months old. After the separation, Jorgensen agreed to not contact either of them. Jorgensen lived with heart issues in his later life, ran a bicycle shop in Glendale, Arizona, and married to his new wife, Linda. In 2012, journalist Brad Stone informed Jorgensen that his biological son was an e-commerce billionaire, something he had discovered while researching for his book The Everything Store. Jorgensen died in 2015. Early life and circus career Jorgensen was born into a Baptist family in in Chicago and grew up with his younger brother Gordon. His paternal grandfather was a Danish veteran of the Spanish-American War. After his father took a purchasing job at Sandia National Laboratories, the family moved to Bernalillo, New Mexico, while the boys were in elementary school.