Al Franken - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Franken was born in New York City to his mother, Phoebe G. (née Kunst), a homemaker and real estate agent, and his father, Joseph P. Franken, a printing salesman. The family first moved to Albert Lea, Minnesota in 1955, when he was four, then to St. Louis Park, Minnesota, a suburb near Minneapolis. Franken had a Jewish upbringing. His paternal grandparents were immigrants from Germany, and his mother's family was from Russia. His older brother Owen is a photojournalist, and MSNBC's Bob Franken is his cousin. Franken graduated in 1969 from The Blake School; while there was on the wrestling team. He attended Harvard College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts cum laude in 1973 in political science.

Read more about this topic:  Al Franken

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:

    Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!”
    David Elkind (20th century)

    It is not in the world of ideas that life is lived. Life is lived for better or worse in life, and to a man in life, his life can be no more absurd than it can be the opposite of absurd, whatever that opposite may be.
    Archibald MacLeish (1892–1982)

    The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.
    Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)