Reuben Garrett Lucius Goldberg was born to Max Goldberg and Hannah Cohen in San Francisco, California. His father was a businessman and later served as a fire commissioner. He was one of seven children. This environment would later influence his perspective on the world around him.

Growing up in San Francisco provided Rube with a vibrant urban environment. The Goldberg family instilled values of hard work and community involvement. Details of his early childhood are scarce, but it's believed he was exposed to diverse perspectives which ultimately shaped his creative outlook.

Rube showed an early talent for art and drawing. After graduating from Lowell High School in San Francisco, he decided to pursue a formal education in engineering, bowing to his parent's concerns about the instability of an artistic profession.

Rube enrolled in the College of Mining at the University of California, Berkeley. Although he wasn't passionate about mining specifically, the engineering principles he learned would later inform his cartoon creations and contraptions. This period reveals the practical and problem-solving foundation beneath his imaginative work.