Biography | Bob Chapek — The Altar Boy at St. John the Baptist in Whiting

Public accounts do not agree on the year.

English-language summaries now often say 1959.

Older profiles, Wikimedia Commons, and several language Wikipedias give 21 August 1960 in Hammond, Indiana.

What is not in dispute is the neighborhood.

Robert Alan Chapek grew up in Robertsdale, the Hammond–Whiting edge of the Calumet industrial belt, on the south shore of Lake Michigan.

His father, Bernard, machined at the Whiting oil refinery.

His mother, Marie Lofay Chapek, worked at an insurance office in East Chicago.

Both parents working made him, in later public remarks, a latch-key child at a time when that was still unusual on these blocks.

The family house sat on 119th Street.

That street is still ordinary private housing, so this pin is not the front door.

It is the parish church a few blocks away.

St. John the Baptist, at 1849 Lincoln Avenue in Whiting, is where he served as an altar boy.

He finished the parish grade school in 1973.

The parish, founded in 1897 and long staffed by the Missionaries of the Precious Blood, later combined with nearby St. Adalbert.

The brick church is still a working parish in the Diocese of Gary.

The landscape that paid for the nicer things in the house was the refinery and the mills.

Ambition in the Region, as he later described it, often stopped at a union job that could feed a family.

Annual December drives to Walt Disney World in the family Chevrolet were the exception, not a career plan.

A kid from Robertsdale was not supposed to run that company.

The church is the public building that still stands for that childhood.

Photo: elisfkc2, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (Chapek at Walt Disney World, 3 February 2020)