Early Life and Education
John Pastore was born in the Federal Hill neighborhood of Providence, Rhode Island. The second of five children, he was the son of Michele and Erminia (née Asprinio) Pastore, who were Italian immigrants. His father, a tailor who had moved from Potenza to the United States in 1899, died when John was nine, and his mother went to work as a seamstress to support the family. She married her late husband's brother, Pasquale, who also ran a tailoring business. As a child, Pastore worked delivering coats and suits for his stepfather, as an errand boy in a law office, and as a foot-press operator in a jewelry factory.
Pastore graduated with honors from Classical High School in 1925, and spent a year working a $15-a-week job as a claims adjuster for the Narragansett Electric Company. In 1927, he enrolled in an evening law course given by Northeastern University at the Young Men's Christian Association in Providence. He received a Bachelor of Laws degree in 1931, and was admitted to the bar the following year. He then established a law office in the basement of his family's home, but attracted few clients due to the Great Depression.
Read more about this topic: John O. Pastore
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)
“If we live in the Nineteenth Century, why should we not enjoy the advantages which the Nineteenth Century offers? Why should our life be in any respect provincial?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.”
—H.G. (Herbert George)