Is Vint Cerf related to Bennet Cerf?

September 11, 2005 3:24 PM

Is Vint Cerf related to Bennett Cerf, the publisher?

When I worked in the book trade Random House had gotten so big we often joked that "the Cerfs own your brain." Maybe it's more true than we suspected. I know that Vint has a son named Bennett, but I can't find any other evidence to connect the two. Does anyone here know?

posted by cali to Grab Bag (6 answers total)

Nope. Bennett had two children, Christopher and Jonathan.

Vinton did name one his children Bennett though.
posted by furtive at 3:37 PM on September 11, 2005

The ultimate development in communication has to be the InterPlanet project, enthusiastically endorsed by Vint Cerf, keynote speaker at Stanford University's recent conference, "The Internet: Today & Tomorrow". (Some of you may remember his father, Bennett Cerf, founder and publisher of Random House and a noted wit.)

???
posted by null terminated at 4:26 PM on September 11, 2005

That would make his Bennett 45 years old when Vint was born. Just saying.
posted by furtive at 8:56 PM on September 11, 2005

I see no other basis for the quote I pulled from the site above. It just seems very strange that the site would pull that info out of its ass.
posted by null terminated at 8:59 PM on September 11, 2005

The facts don't really match up either (not to mention such a fact would surely be mentioned in Vint's Wikipedia entry). Vint was born in New Haven and went to a public high school in LA. It's would be more than odd for a son of a well known New York publisher to go to a public school in LA in the late 50s/early 60s? Except for the one unverified references all signs point to "no".
posted by geoff. at 9:24 PM on September 11, 2005

According to IMDB, he had two kids, neither of which are named Vint.
posted by SteveInMaine at 5:53 AM on September 12, 2005