Early Life
Raised in the town of Merrick on Long Island by his parents Frances and Irving, Cohen first met and befriended his future business partner, Jerry Greenfield, in a junior high school gym class in 1963. In his senior year, Cohen found work as an ice cream man before heading off to attend Colgate University upstate.
Over the next decade, Cohen pursued his interest in pottery as he mixed further education - Skidmore, the University Without Walls program, the New School, and NYU - with a vast variety of menial labor - gigs as a McDonald's cashier, a Pinkerton guard, deliverer of pottery wheels, a mop-boy at Jamesway and Friendly's, an assistant superintendent, an ER clerk, and a taxi driver - before eventually settling on work as a craft teacher at a private school for emotionally disturbed adolescents. It was during his three years at the Highland Community School that he began experimenting with making his own ice cream.
Read more about this topic: Ben Cohen (businessman)
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