Biography|John Chambers — The Washington Street High School That Printed His Class of 1967

People treat John Chambers as a Silicon Valley chief who arrived already formed.

The dated public record starts on this block of East End Charleston.

John Thomas Chambers was born in Cleveland on 23 August 1949 and grew up across the Kanawha in Kanawha City after the family moved home.

Both parents practiced medicine. The boy who later ran a networking company spent the 1950s and 1960s in a state capital of about sixty thousand people.

At nine he was diagnosed with dyslexia. A reading specialist taught him how to work around it. He never became a reader by preference.

Charleston High School stood here at 1201 Washington Street East, on the parcel bounded by Washington, Brooks, and Lee, across from what is now CAMC General Hospital.

The 1926 building was the third Charleston High on the east side, the one locals called the big school.

Chambers finished in the class of 1967 as salutatorian, second in the class, according to later West Virginia accounts that name the rank rather than a grade-point figure.

Bloomberg's own timeline lists the same school and the same year.

The Mountain Lions closed in 1989 when Kanawha County consolidated Charleston High with Stonewall Jackson into Capital High.

The building came down that same year for a CAMC outpatient surgery center. The Lee Street entry arches, dated 1925, were saved and rebuilt on the Capital High campus.

A visitor standing here now sees hospital pavement, not a high-school quad. The pin is the demolished site, last confirmed against the county parcel and the school's own address record.

From this block he went first to Duke's engineering school for 1967 and 1968, then home to West Virginia University.

The later Cisco biography that calls him a career sales executive skips the salutatorian and the torn-down school. The yearbook year does not.

Photo: World Economic Forum / Remy Steinegger, John T. Chambers at Davos, 23 January 2013, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons