Biography | Tim Cook — The Cub Drive School That Graduated Baldwin County's Salutatorian

People treat Apple's operations chief as a Silicon Valley product.

He was formed in this Baldwin County town, not on Infinite Loop.

Timothy Donald Cook was born on 1 November 1960 in Mobile.

His father, Donald Cook, worked as a foreman at Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding on Pinto Island.

His mother, Geraldine, worked in a drugstore.

The family spent short spells in Mobile and in Pensacola, then settled in Robertsdale in 1971 so the three boys could stay in one school system.

The house on East Silverhill Avenue is still a private address.

This pin stays on the public school.

The high school Cook left in 1978 stood on this older campus, now Robertsdale Elementary School at 1 Cub Drive.

A Baldwin County schools documentary records that the 1928 high-school building served secondary students into the early 1990s, then became the elementary school when the district opened a new high-school campus.

Do not look for his classrooms on Golden Bear Drive.

That later high school is a different lot.

He finished second in the Class of 1978, the salutatorian behind Teresa Prochaska.

Local papers working from the yearbook he also staffed recorded trombone in the Golden Bear band, the National Honor Society, Boys State, and the most-studious vote from seventh grade through twelfth.

A senior English teacher later told the Press-Register the school barely had a computer.

The next stop was Auburn, which already has its own pin.

The first public building in the file is this one.

Photo: Tim Cook after the Macworld Expo keynote, January 2009, Valery Marchive, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

No rights-clear 1978 photograph of this facade was found on Commons as of 5 September 2026. The cover is the person, not the 1978 building.