Howard Moscoe - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Moscoe's father, Alexander, was born to a Jewish family in Łódź, Poland, moved to Canada as a child before the First World War. His uncle, Joe Moscoe, was the first licensed taxi driver in Toronto (cab license #1).

Moscoe was a high school art teacher with the North York Board of Education before entering political life, and was president of the North York Elementary Teachers' Federation and a governor of the Ontario Teachers' Federation. He campaigned for a seat on the North York Hydro Commission in 1974, and ran for the Ontario legislature in 1975 and 1977 as the Ontario New Democratic Party candidate in Wilson Heights. Moscoe initially supported extension of the Spadina Expressway to reduce traffic in his riding, but opposed further extension once the freeway was partially completed and renamed as Allen Road.

Moscoe is also a successful businessman as a designer and producer of election signs. In the late 1980s, he personally designed a brand of plastic sleeves to prevent rainwater damage during campaigns. He claimed 78 candidates as customers in the 1988 municipal election, and a further eighteen in the 1988 federal election. Moscoe later said that he supplied every sign used by the New Democrats in the 1999 provincial election. He is an active member of the Canadian Jewish Congress, and has served on its community relations committee. His daughter Cheryl Moscoe was a school trustee in North York from 1988 to 1991.

Read more about this topic:  Howard Moscoe

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

    Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    “next to of course god america i
    love you land of the pilgrims” and so forth oh
    say can you see by the dawn’s early my
    country ‘tis of centuries come and go
    and are no more what of it we should worry
    in every language even deafanddumb
    thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
    by jing by gee by gosh by gum
    —E.E. (Edward Estlin)

    You are told a lot about your education, but some beautiful, sacred memory, preserved since childhood, is perhaps the best education of all. If a man carries many such memories into life with him, he is saved for the rest of his days. And even if only one good memory is left in our hearts, it may also be the instrument of our salvation one day.
    Feodor Dostoyevsky (1821–1881)

    Like the old soldier of the ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away, an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Goodbye.
    Douglas MacArthur (1880–1964)