Early Years
Born in The Bronx, New York, Sweeney is the son of Joseph (a city bus driver) and Agnes (a domestic worker), both Irish immigrants. The family moved to Yonkers in 1944, where Sweeney attended St. Barnabas Elementary School and graduated from Cardinal Hayes High School. Sweeney's father took him to numerous union meetings, and it is there that Sweeney began his lifelong commitment to the American labor movement.
Sweeney enrolled at Iona College in New Rochelle in 1952. Sweeney worked as a grave-digger and building porter to pay his tuition, and joined his first union at this time. In 1956, he graduated with a degree in economics.
Read more about this topic: John Sweeney (labor Leader)
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her look like a public building.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)