Salem High School Roots Served Welch Well

SALEM, MA — In the 1953 yearbook for Salem Classical High School, Jack Welch was voted "most talkative and noisiest boy," according to the biography Jack Welch Speaks by Janet Lowe. But it was the school's literary magazine that had a more telling glimpse of his future: he had a "repressed" desire "to make a million."

Welch, who died Sunday at 84, did a lot more than make a million. At the time of his death, he had an estimated net worth of $750 million.

Welch was born in Peabody and raised in Salem. He was a three-sport athlete in Salem, captaining the hockey team and playing baseball and football. While he was nominated for a Navy ROTC college scholarship, he was turned down and instead enrolled in the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

"I don't know what my problem was. I didn't know enough people," Lowe quoted Welch as saying about his failure to get the scholarship. "I can remember my father calling our congressman and things like that. He didn't really know how to do it very well."

The Navy's loss was a gain for UMass and Salem High School: in 2001, he and his wife established the John and Grace Welch Endowed Scholarship fund in memory of his parents to award two graduating seniors from Salem High School scholarships to attend UMass-Amherst. The couple funded similar scholarships for Salem High grads attending the Salem State University School of Business.

"My years in Salem and at UMass were a very important part of my life, and I hope these scholarships will allow other young people from Salem to realize their dreams, just as UMass helped me realize mine," Welch told the Campus Chronicle in 2002.

Welch, at least temporarily, disappointed his mother Grace: she wanted him to become a priest or a doctor. But Welch's uncle was an engineer at the Salem power station, so he opted to enroll in the chemical engineering program at UMass.

"I had some kids in my high school who did better than I did, so instead of going to UMass, they went to MIT," Welch said. "And they ended up in the middle of the pack among some of the brightest kids in the country and didn't get the confidence and the reinforcing. I mean, I was a golden boy in chemical engineering at UMass, with very nice teachers, good people."