Biography|Greg Hayes — The Historic High School on Main Street in Williamsville

People treat Fortune 500 chief executives as products of coastal finishing schools.

Greg Hayes came out of a public high school on Main Street in a Buffalo suburb.

Williamsville South High School stands at 5950 Main Street, a Colonial Revival pile that opened on 11 September 1950 as Williamsville Junior-Senior High.

The district later built North High, in 1968, and this building kept the South name.

The campus is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as Williamsville Junior and Senior High School.

Hayes grew up in Williamsville, on the east side of Buffalo, and finished here with the class of 1978.

He later told an Economic Club audience that the town was middle class, with one grandfather a plumber and the other a machinist at Bell Aerospace.

The next move was not a bank training program.

He left for Cornell thinking he would study law, then transferred west.

The school on this lot is still a working public high school, not a museum of a vanished career.

A visitor can stand on Main Street and see the same brick massing that a 1970s teenager walked into.

The football field and the front lawn are ordinary suburban plantings, which is the point.

Hayes's later map — Purdue, Rockford, Hartford, Arlington — starts at a district school that still takes ninth-graders.

Do not treat the pin as a private address.

It is a public campus on a numbered state road, open as a school on school days, and quiet after the buses leave.

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