No matter how far Apple CEO Tim Cook goes, his thoughts usually return to his childhood in Robertsdale.
The 65-year-old head of the mammoth tech company recently sat for a profile with The Wall Street Journal, and reminisced about his beginnings in Alabama.
Cook is the son of a shipyard worker and a part-time pharmacist. For a time, the family moved to Pensacola before settling in on East Silverhill Avenue in Robertsdale when Cook was in middle school.
His first job? Delivering newspapers.
“I was about 12 years old,” he said in a video accompanying the profile. “Everybody was sort of expected to work in my family. I’d get up at three in the morning, pick up the stack of papers and start throwing. And usually come back and take a nap before school. Throwing papers helped start my college education.”
He was later salutatorian of his graduating class in 1978 and voted “most studious.” Cook said math was the first thing in which he remembered excelling.
“I was pretty a good student, and I loved math,” he said. “I loved figuring out complex equations and so forth, and I wanted to be an engineer.”
He planned to attend Auburn University even from childhood, despite the fact that both of his parents hadn’t gone to college.
“I knew that was a privilege that I needed not to waste,” Cook said. “Everyone saw college in those days, and hopefully today, as opening many doors.”
There, he studied industrial engineering, watched football and “learned to ask lots of questions.”
“I’ve gone from believing that if you ask questions, it meant you’re fundamentally not smart, to believing that the more you ask, the more curious you are, the smarter you get,” Cook said.
At Auburn, Cook reportedly learned to program and even created a system to improve the timing of traffic lights near the university.
Of course, that was many years before the host of products that Apple produced under the direction of the late Steve Jobs, and later, Cook himself. As the Journal observes, the iPhone alone generates more money per year than America’s biggest bank as well as half of Apple’s revenue. Then there are the other products – desktops, laptops, tablets, headphones, watches, hardware, software, products and services, as well as streaming media.
The Journal asked if he ever thinks what his childhood in Alabama would have been like if it had been filled with similar products.
“Yeah, I do,” he says quietly. “This was pre-internet, and just the idea that you can find people like you would have been an extraordinary idea at that point in time.”
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