Judy Biggert - Early Life, Education and Career

Early Life, Education and Career

Biggert was born Judith Gail Borg in Chicago on August 15, 1937, the second of four children of Alvin Andrew Borg and Marjorie Virginia (Mailler) Borg. Her father Alvin A. Borg worked for the Chicago-based Walgreen Co., the largest drugstore chain in the United States, for 41 years from 1928 to 1969, and served as its president from 1963 to 1969, succeeding Charles R. Walgreen, Jr. and succeeded by Charles R. Walgreen III.

She grew up in Wilmette, Illinois, a North Shore Chicago suburb, and graduated from New Trier High School in 1955, then went to Stanford University, where she received a B.A. in international relations in 1959, then worked for a year in a women's apparel store. She then attended Northwestern University School of Law where she was an editor of the Northwestern University Law Review from 1961 to 1963, earned a J.D. in 1963, then clerked for federal judge Luther Merritt Swygert of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit from 1963 to 1964.

Biggert left her federal court law clerkship to have her children, but later did some legal work from her home for family and friends on wills, trusts and real estate. She served on numerous boards of voluntary and civic organizations.

Read more about this topic:  Judy Biggert

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

    “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed
    And the great star early drooped in the western sky in the night,
    I mourned, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.
    Ever-returning spring, trinity sure to me you bring,
    Lilac blooming perennial and drooping star in the west,
    And thought of him I love.”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “The fetish of the great university, of expensive colleges for young women, is too often simply a fetish. It is not based on a genuine desire for learning. Education today need not be sought at any great distance. It is largely compounded of two things, of a certain snobbishness on the part of parents, and of escape from home on the part of youth. And to those who must earn quickly it is often sheer waste of time. Very few colleges prepare their students for any special work.”
    —Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958)

    “I doubt that I would have taken so many leaps in my own writing or been as clear about my feminist and political commitments if I had not been anointed as early as I was. Some major form of recognition seems to have to mark a woman’s career for her to be able to go out on a limb without having her credentials questioned.”
    —Ruth Behar (b. 1956)