Early Life and Education
Cindy Lou Hensley was born in Phoenix, Arizona, to James Hensley, who founded Hensley & Co., and Marguerite "Smitty" Hensley (née Johnson). She was raised as the only child of her parents' second marriages and grew up on Phoenix's North Central Avenue in affluent circumstances. (Dixie L. Burd, who is the daughter of Marguerite Smith through a prior relationship, is her half-sister, as is Kathleen Hensely Portalski, daughter of Jim Hensley and his first wife, Mary Jeanne Parks.) Cindy Hensley was named Junior Rodeo Queen of Arizona in 1968. She went to Central High School in Phoenix, where she was named Best Dressed as a senior and graduated in 1972.
Hensley enrolled at the University of Southern California. She joined the socially conservative Kappa Alpha Theta sorority as a freshman, and had many leadership roles in the house during her four years there. Hensley graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in education in 1976. She continued on at USC, and received a Master of Arts in special education in 1978. There she participated in a movement therapy pilot program that laid the way for a standard treatment for children with severe disabilities; she published the work Movement Therapy: A Possible Approach in 1978. Declining a role in the family business, she worked for a year as a special education teacher dealing with children with Down syndrome and other disabilities at Agua Fria High School in Avondale, Arizona.
Read more about this topic: Cindy Mc Cain
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I taught school in the early days of my manhood and I think I know something about mothers. There is a thread of aspiration that runs strong in them. It is the fiber that has formed the most unselfish creatures who inhabit this earth. They want three things only; for their children to be fed, to be healthy, and to make the most of themselves.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Had I but died an hour before this chance
I had lived a blessed time; for from this instant
There’s nothing serious in mortality.
All is but toys. Renown and grace is dead;
The wine of life is drawn, and the mere lees
Is left this vault to brag of.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“I think the most important education that we have is the education which now I am glad to say is being accepted as the proper one, and one which ought to be widely diffused, that industrial, vocational education which puts young men and women in a position from which they can by their own efforts work themselves to independence.”
—William Howard Taft (1857–1930)