Joan Ganz Cooney - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Joan Ganz was born on November 30, 1929 in Phoenix, Arizona to Sylvan Ganz, a banker who became president of the First National Bank of Arizona, and Pauline (née Reddon), a homemaker. Her father was a native Phoenician who was born in the U.S. so that his mother could receive medical care after his birth. Her grandfather Emil Ganz was a tailor from Waldorf, Germany who immigrated to the U.S. in 1958 and was president of the First National Bank of Arizona and mayor of Phoenix for three terms. Joan Ganz was the youngest of three siblings. She described her childhood as "upper middle class, country club atmosphere" and stated, "I was raised in the most conventional way, raised to be a housewife and a mother, to work an interesting job when I got out of college, and to marry at the appropriate age, which would have been twenty-five".

She attended North High School in Phoenix, where she was active in school plays. She stated that her biggest influence as a teenager was her teacher Bud Brown, whose lectures about the Civil Rights movement, poverty, the free press, and anti-semitism in Europe "absolutely inflamed" her and changed her life. Brown was later investigated as a Communist. She went to the all-girls' Catholic institution Dominican College in San Rafael, California for a year before transferring to the University of Arizona in 1948. She stopped acting in college because her father refused to support her in that career, and chose Education, even though she was not interested in becoming a teacher, as her major on the recommendation of her mother and because as she later stated, "It was something that girls of my generation did because teaching was acceptable".