July 2004

Techtonic Shifts
There may not be as many Internet whiz kids getting rich as there were in the late '90s—but that doesn't mean they're not out there.

story by Dan Eldridge
photography by Richard Kelly

B.J. Pinchbeck is slouched into his father’s enormous easy chair, his left hand wiggling a wireless mouse while the rest of his body sinks deeper into the cushions. A keyboard—also wireless—sits in the center of his lap, and it makes a familiar clicka-click-click as B.J. (everyone calls him Beege) scrolls through a zillion computer files on a massive monitor that looks like a television. All of a sudden, a black-and-white movie is zooming by, and there’s Beege up on the screen, clowning around with three friends in an empty gravel pit. Small clumps of shaggy hair are falling into his eyes as he looks straight into the camera and grins. “I’m a horrible actor,” he says quietly, with one leg now hanging over the chair, the keyboard still sitting on his lap. “I always laugh.”

Beege is 17 years old, and a senior at New Brighton Area High School, which is an hour north of Pittsburgh, on the way to Beaver Falls. New Brighton itself is a tidy, unexceptional town, and B.J.’s house is mostly what you’d expect: neat as a pin, with wall-to-wall carpeting and a few subtle touches of rural American decorating here and there. A wide entertainment center is given prominent placement in the living room. The dining-room table looks barely used. A postage-stamp-sized lawn is somehow freshly green, even at the tail end of winter. But it was inside the cramped room just off the front entrance—nothing more than a small study, really—where, eight years ago, at age 9, B.J. launched a Web site that would change his life for good.

“It was a spur-of-the-moment thing,” says B.J.’s dad, Bruce, who’s in the car now, talking on his cell phone and coming home from the office. “It was not something that we gave great thought to. I helped him with the links, and he took it from there.”

“ B.J. Pinchbeck’s Homework Helper” is the Web site Bruce is talking about, and he’s right: In the beginning, it was a weekend project. A two-day thing. Nothing more. After all, Beege was just a regular kid. Nine years old. Needed help with his homework. After school, Bruce and B.J. would hack their way through the Internet, looking for reliable information about school stuff, like science, geography, current affairs. Back then, in 1996, the Web was sparse, disorganized and lawless, so after downloading a free program that would easily let them build their own Web site, Bruce and B.J. had a brainstorm: They’d clock some serious time scouring the Internet for educational information, and both of them would decide if a particular site was any good or not. Then they’d forget about the bad sites and list the good ones—like Bill Nye the Science Guy or Artcyclopedia.com—on their Web page. That way, Beege would always have a site to visit when he needed help with a project or a book report, and Bruce would log some quality time to boot. Couldn’t miss. And as it turns out, it didn’t.

“It was weird,” says B.J.’s mother, Vicki, who’s standing in the driveway. “Because he was my little B.J.!” The media circus started early, when Beege was still in elementary school. To this day, no one in the family can quite decide how the site caught on as it did. “Homework Helper” was really nothing more than a collection of well-organized links—but nonetheless, roughly 10,000 visitors stopped by a day at one point, and B.J. occasionally sees hundreds of e-mail messages a week from fans, who ask about his hobbies or wonder if he’d like to be pen pals. About four years ago, a camera crew from the Oxygen Network came to videotape B.J. zooming around the neighborhood on a pair of in-line skates. A host from “Good Morning America” interviewed him on the stoop of his parents’ house and asked if he had lots of girlfriends now that his Web site was such a smash. “I don’t know!” he said, embarrassed. He was 12 years old.

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