Early Life
Pujol was born in the Catalan city of Barcelona, Spain on 14 February 1912 (or possibly 28 February 1912) to Juan Pujol, a Catalan who owned a factory that produced dye, and Mercedes Guijarro Garcia, from the Andalusian town of Motril in the Province of Granada. The third of four children, Pujol was sent at age seven to the Valldemia boarding school run by the Marist Brothers in Mataró, twenty miles from Barcelona and remained there for the next four years. The students were only allowed out of the school on Sundays if they had a visitor, so his father made the trip every week.
His mother came from a very strict Catholic family who took communion every day, but his father was much more secular and had liberal political beliefs. At age thirteen, he transferred to a school in Barcelona run by his father's card-playing friend Father Mossen Josep, where he remained for three years. After an argument with a teacher, he decided that he no longer wished to remain at the school, and became an apprentice at a hardware store.
Pujol engaged in a variety of occupations prior to and after the Spanish Civil War, such as studying animal husbandry at the Royal Poultry School in Arenys de Mar and managing various businesses, including a cinema.
His father died a few months after the Second Republic's birth in 1931, while Pujol was completing his education as a poultry farmer. Pujol's father left his family well-provided for, until his father's factory was taken over by the workers, around the Spanish Civil War's start.
Read more about this topic: Joan Pujol Garcia
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... business training in early life should not be regarded solely as insurance against destitution in the case of an emergency. For from business experience women can gain, too, knowledge of the world and of human beings, which should be of immeasurable value to their marriage careers. Self-discipline, co-operation, adaptability, efficiency, economic management,—if she learns these in her business life she is liable for many less heartbreaks and disappointments in her married life.”
—Hortense Odlum (1892–?)
“We early arrive at the great discovery that there is one mind common to all individual men: that what is individual is less than what is universal ... that error, vice and disease have their seat in the superficial or individual nature.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Bourgeois society is infected by monomania: the monomania of accounting. For it, the only thing that has value is what can be counted in francs and centimes. It never hesitates to sacrifice human life to figures which look well on paper, such as national budgets or industrial balance sheets.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)