Biography | Tim Cook — The Wilters Street Campus Where He Finished Second in His Class

People treat Robertsdale High School as the brick campus on Golden Bear Drive.

That building opened in 1992, fourteen years after he left town.

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

His father worked as a shipyard foreman on Pinto Island. His mother worked in a drugstore.

The family lived briefly in Mobile and in Pensacola, then settled in Robertsdale around 1971 so the three sons could stay in one school system.

The high school he attended stood on this Wilters Street block.

A 1927 building had gone up here on land first owned by the Stoddard family. That campus, not the later Highway 59 site, is where the Class of 1978 finished.

Cook graduated salutatorian.

He kept the yearbook books, played trombone in the Golden Bear band, and finished second in the class to Teresa Prochaska.

Teachers later remembered a school that did not yet have a computer in the building.

The high school moved off this block in the fall of 1992.

The Wilters Street address stayed in school use. Robertsdale Elementary and the C. F. Taylor alternative program have occupied the old campus numbers.

The family house on East Silverhill Avenue is a private residence and is not this pin.

He left Alabama next for Auburn, then for IBM in North Carolina, then for Apple in 1998.

The public record of the boy from this block starts with a class rank and a yearbook ledger, not with a product launch.

Photo: Robertsdale welcome sign, Soulpatroller, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Portrait: Tim Cook at WWDC 2012, Mike Deerkoski, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.