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".
Read more about this topic: Joan Ganz Cooney
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“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)
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“Unaware of the absurdity of it, we introduce our own petty household rules into the economy of the universe for which the life of generations, peoples, of entire planets, has no importance in relation to the general development.”
—Alexander Herzen (1812–1870)
“I envy neither the heart nor the head of any legislator who has been born to an inheritance of privileges, who has behind him ages of education, dominion, civilization, and Christianity, if he stands opposed to the passage of a national education bill, whose purpose is to secure education to the children of those who were born under the shadow of institutions which made it a crime to read.”
—Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)