Everyone in Robertsdale knows the town’s most famous export: Tim Cook, the Apple CEO who grew up here and graduated from Robertsdale High School in 1978 as salutatorian of his class. What fewer people know is that Cook wasn’t even the top student in his own graduating class. That distinction belonged to a young woman named Teresa Prochaska, who edged him out for valedictorian honors and has spent the decades since building a life that, in its own quiet way, mirrors and diverges from her famous classmate’s in equal measure.
Prochaska and Cook were, by most accounts, the two brightest students at Robertsdale High during their senior year. Both held top offices in the school’s chapter of the National Honor Society, with Cook serving as president and Prochaska as vice president. Classmates would go on to vote them “Most Studious” in the yearbook, a superlative the pair leaned into by staging a photo of themselves pretending to cheat off hidden notes at their desks.
Their shared drive showed up outside the classroom, too. As seniors, both were unhappy with their chemistry class, taught by a football coach who used only the first few minutes of each period for instruction before declaring the rest “free time” to chat with his players. Worried the class wouldn’t prepare them for college, the two walked together to the school counselor’s office to raise the issue. The counselor’s advice, as Prochaska remembers it, was simple: don’t worry about it, you’ll do fine. They did. That spring, Cook was named salutatorian and Prochaska valedictorian of Robertsdale High’s Class of 1978.
From there, their paths ran remarkably parallel for a while. Both were born in Mobile and raised in Robertsdale. Both went on to Auburn University, both earned degrees in industrial engineering, and both began their careers in the technology and manufacturing world. Prochaska recalls seeing Cook only a handful of times at Auburn despite being in the same academic program — the campus was simply too large, she said, for their paths to cross regularly in class or on the concourse. The last time she remembers seeing him in person was during her freshman year, when she stopped by his apartment to pick up a copy of their high school yearbook, which he had helped produce. She didn’t hear about him again until 2009, when he briefly took the reins at Apple while Steve Jobs was on medical leave.
After graduating — Cook in 1982 and Prochaska a year later, delayed by a co-op program that had her alternating semesters at Auburn with work terms to help pay for school — their careers began to diverge. Prochaska took a job in manufacturing engineering at General Electric, a position she accepted after a letter from IBM inviting her to interview arrived too late at an old address. Cook, meanwhile, went to work at IBM. Prochaska has said she believes IBM might have been the better fit for her as well, though she has no regrets about how things turned out.
After a few years at GE, Prochaska moved to Huntsville to do logistics support work for a defense contractor, where she got her first taste of computer programming — a field that barely existed as a formal discipline when she was in college. It was in Huntsville, singing and playing guitar in a Catholic church choir, that she met her husband, Walt Huntsman, a native of Seattle who had been working in the news industry. The two have been married for nearly three decades.
When Walt decided to pursue a Ph.D., the couple relocated to Illinois. After that path didn’t pan out, they faced a bigger question: where did they actually want to live? Neither wanted to return to a big city like Seattle, and Alabama’s humidity was a dealbreaker. So they turned to an old resource — a thick reference book called the “Places Rated Almanac” that ranked American cities across categories like climate, crime, employment and entertainment. Prochaska, who describes herself as “a spreadsheet person,” built out rankings for the cities that interested them. Boise, Idaho, never topped any single category, but it consistently landed in the top 10 or 20 across the board. The couple made the move and have called Idaho home ever since.
Prochaska now works as an IT application developer supporting financial systems, a role she has held for several years on top of roughly a decade and a half of programming experience overall. She says the appeal of the work is the quiet satisfaction of solving problems that look simple from the outside but rarely are.
Music, though, has remained the constant thread running through her life since she picked up a $50 guitar from Sears at age 14 to play at her Catholic church in Robertsdale, back when the congregation was shifting from organ-led hymns to more contemporary worship music. She still plays daily, favoring a carbon-fiber guitar that holds its tuning better than wood in cold, dry conditions.
That lifelong hobby eventually turned into something more. In 2014, Prochaska and her husband formed a band, Seattle Goes South, built around his songwriting and her guitar work. In the band’s early days, Walt — who didn’t play an instrument himself — would sing melodies to Prochaska, and she would work out how to translate them to guitar, a process the two describe as painstaking but rewarding. Walt has since taken guitar lessons and learned to play his own chord progressions, which Prochaska says has made their songwriting process considerably smoother.
The duo blends original songs — often labeled loosely as “Americana” because the genre tag is broad enough to cover their range — with covers of artists like James Taylor, Eric Clapton, John Prine, U2, the Eagles and Elton John. They self-produce all of their music, released as singles, and have performed at small venues and coffee shops around the Boise area since debuting at an event hosted by the Idaho Songwriters Association. Prochaska has said the goal was never to make money from the music but simply to be heard, particularly for Walt as a songwriter.
These days, with their son grown and out of the house and Walt retired, Prochaska continues to work full time while helping produce and engineer the band’s recordings from a home studio. She has said she’s especially drawn to the technical side of sound engineering, which lets her blend her analytical, programming-oriented mind with a creative outlet. She plans to devote considerably more time to the band once she eventually retires.
Listeners can find Seattle Goes South’s music on streaming platforms including Spotify, Google Play and Apple Music — the same company now run by the Robertsdale High School Class of 1978’s salutatorian.