Biography | Jim Farley — The Abbey Class of 1981 on Corys Lane

People treat a Detroit car chief as someone formed beside the Rouge.

James D. Farley Jr. finished school on a Benedictine campus above Narragansett Bay.

He was born on 10 June 1962 in Buenos Aires, where his father was posted as a banker.

The family then settled in Greenwich, Connecticut, and sent him to board in Rhode Island.

Portsmouth Abbey School sits at 285 Corys Lane on a 525-acre monastery campus founded in 1926.

The school's own pages list Farley as a member of the Class of 1981.

He played football, hockey and golf there, and captained the SENE championship golf side in Sixth Form.

His senior yearbook thanked his grandfather Emmet Tracy.

Tracy had been an early Ford employee and later ran a dealership.

Michigan summers with him, not a factory floor in Dearborn, were the first automotive classroom.

The yearbook line recorded a teenage preference for a 427 Cobra.

That is a school document, not a later press myth.

The campus remains a working school and abbey, not a private house.

The Church of St. Gregory the Great and the Holy Lawn are the public face of the place.

A visitor can stand on the lawn without entering dormitories or the monastery enclosure.

From here Farley went to Georgetown College, class of 1985, then to an MBA at UCLA Anderson in 1990.

Toyota hired him that same year.

Ford hired him in 2007.

None of those later titles change what this pin records.

This is the school years.

The commencement speech he gave on the same lawn in 2025 is a different moment and a different memory.

Photo: Portsmouth Abbey Church, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons