Biography | Freddy Heineken — The Lyceum in Overveen He Left for the Brewery

People treat Freddy Heineken as a brand that arrived already green.

He was a schoolboy in Overveen first.

The Kennemer Lyceum still stands on Adriaan Stoopplein, a parent-founded school opened in 1920.

Dutch sources place his secondary education here, at the HBS stream, before he walked into the family brewery.

Alfred Henry Heineken was born in Amsterdam on 4 November 1923, the son of Henry Pierre Heineken.

By the time he finished this campus he was still a teenager.

On 1 June 1941, according to the English-language record of his life, he entered the service of Heineken.

Some Dutch obituaries put the same step in 1942.

Either way the direction was already set: the classroom here, then the malt rooms across the canal from his grandfather's villa.

The family no longer owned the company when he joined it.

Henry Pierre had sold the stake during the war.

The boy who left this square later spent a decade buying that control back, then another four decades making the name travel farther than the building.

The lyceum is still a working school, not a museum.

The monumental block on the plein is the thing to look at.

Photo: Smiley.toerist, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Rob Bogaerts / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons.