Biography|John Morgridge — The Milwaukee Avenue School That Sent Him Up Bascom Hill

People treat John Morgridge as a Silicon Valley chairman who arrived already formed.

The dated public record starts on this block of Milwaukee Avenue in Wauwatosa.

John Philip Morgridge was born on 23 July 1933.

One biographical register places the birth in Elmhurst, Illinois; the family story that he himself later told is a Wauwatosa childhood.

His parents, L. D. Morgridge and Ruth Gordon Morgridge, were both teachers.

He grew up here, in the Milwaukee suburb, and attended the high school that still occupies 7500 Milwaukee Avenue.

The brick pile facing the street went up between 1928 and 1931 as Wauwatosa Senior High School.

The East name arrived only in 1961, after a west-side rival opened.

So the diploma, if one still exists in a drawer, would not say East.

The jobs around the building were not internships.

He washed equipment in a sweet-pea cannery, dug stone at the quarry in Lannon, washed walls at Milwaukee's Pabst Brewery, worked road construction on Highway 64, and took a turn as a railroad brakeman.

Those details come from a Milwaukee Magazine profile he sat for, later reused by the IT History Society and the university that still claims him.

The school is public.

A visitor can stand on the sidewalk and see the same massing that was already here when he left for Madison.

In the autumn of 1951 he abandoned a plan to stay in Milwaukee for college.

He enrolled at the University of Wisconsin–Madison to be near Tashia Frankfurth, the Wauwatosa classmate he would marry four years later.

The high school is the last local address before that turn.

It is also the last address that does not yet know what a router is.

Photo: AlanKHG, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons