Biography | Tim Cook — Salutatorian of Robertsdale High School, Class of 1978

People who meet the chief executive of Apple tend to place him in Cupertino.

The record starts here, in a Baldwin County farm town of a few thousand people, at the public high school on Golden Bear Drive.

Timothy Donald Cook was born in Mobile on 1 November 1960, the middle of three sons of Donald and Geraldine Cook.

His father worked as a foreman at the Alabama Dry Dock and Shipbuilding Company on Pinto Island.

His mother worked in a drugstore.

The family lived briefly in Mobile and in Pensacola before settling in Robertsdale around 1971, so the boys could attend one school all the way through.

Some national summaries still list Robertsdale as the birthplace. That is the hometown, not the birth city.

The family house on East Silverhill Avenue was a private home then and is not the pin.

This campus is.

Cook delivered newspapers before dawn, worked in a local restaurant, and helped his mother at the drugstore.

He played trombone in the marching band and served on the yearbook staff.

In 1978 he finished second in his class and was voted most studious from seventh grade through twelfth.

Fay Farris, who taught him senior English that year, later said the school probably did not have a computer in the building.

The industrial-engineering career that followed was not visible from this parking lot.

What was visible was a small-town public school that still stands, under a later building and a later enrollment, on the same plot.

Cook has kept coming back through the Pensacola airport to see family.

In 2022 he gave $100,000 so the Golden Bear band could buy instruments for a program that had outgrown its inventory.

The gift is one of the few public traces he has left on the school that formed him.

Stand at 1 Golden Bear Drive and the scale of the later life drops away.

This is where the salutatorian was still a student who had to be in class on time after a paper route.

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