Early Life and Career
Charles Duane Baker, Jr. was born November 13, 1956, in Elmira, New York. He bore the fourth generation of his name: His great-grandfather, Charles D. Baker (1846–1934), was an Assistant United States Attorney in New York, who served several years in the New York State Assembly. His grandfather, Charles D. Baker, Jr. (c. 1890–1971), was a prominent politician in Newburyport, Massachusetts. His father Charles D. Baker (born 1928), a Harvard graduate, was a buyer for the Westinghouse Electric Corporation, while his mother Betty Baker remained at home. Baker grew up with two younger brothers Jonathan and Alex in Needham, Massachusetts, with a second home in Rockport. He grew up playing football, hockey, and baseball; he has described his childhood as "pretty all-American".
Baker's father was a conservative Republican, his mother a liberal Democrat, and the family was often drawn into political arguments at the dinner table. His father became vice president of Harbridge House, a Boston management consulting firm, in 1965. In 1969, the family moved to Washington, D.C., where the elder Baker was named Deputy Under Secretary of the Department of Transportation under President Richard Nixon, and the next year became the department's Assistant Secretary for Policy and International Affairs.
The family returned to Needham in 1971, where Baker attended Needham High School. In high school he served on the student council and joined DeMolay International, a youth fraternity organization. He reluctantly attended Harvard University "because of the brand", graduating in 1979 with a BA in English. He later reflected negatively on the experience, writing, "With a few exceptions ... those four years are ones I would rather forget." He then attended Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management, where he received an MBA in Management. After graduating, Baker served as corporate communications director for the Massachusetts High Technology Council. (His father went on to serve as Undersecretary of the United States Department of Health and Human Services under President Ronald Reagan.)
Read more about this topic: Charles D. Baker, Jr.
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:
“Early to rise and early to bed makes a male healthy and wealthy and dead.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“The nature of women’s oppression is unique: women are oppressed as women, regardless of class or race; some women have access to significant wealth, but that wealth does not signify power; women are to be found everywhere, but own or control no appreciable territory; women live with those who oppress them, sleep with them, have their children—we are tangled, hopelessly it seems, in the gut of the machinery and way of life which is ruinous to us.”
—Andrea Dworkin (b. 1946)
“A black boxer’s career is the perfect metaphor for the career of a black male. Every day is like being in the gym, sparring with impersonal opponents as one faces the rudeness and hostility that a black male must confront in the United States, where he is the object of both fear and fascination.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)