Tom Tancredo - Early Life, Education and Career

Early Life, Education and Career

Tancredo was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of Adeline (née Lombardi) and Gerald Tancredo. All four of his grandparents emigrated from Italy. He attended St. Catherine's Elementary School and Holy Family High School there. He graduated from the University of Northern Colorado with a degree in political science. Tancredo was active with the College Republicans and a conservative organization, Young Americans for Freedom (YAF).

As a Republican student activist Tancredo spoke in support of the Vietnam War. After graduating from the University of Northern Colorado he became eligible to serve in Vietnam in June 1969. Tancredo has said he went for his physical, telling doctors he had been treated for depression, and eventually got a "1-Y" deferment. Critics have noted that Tancredo's appearance before the draft board led it to rule him mentally unfit for duty due to generalized anxiety, depression, and panic disorders.

In 1976, while teaching history at Drake Junior High School in Arvada, he ran for and won a seat in the Colorado House of Representatives. He served two terms (1977–1981) and was one of the leaders of a vocal group of conservative legislators opposing the policies of Colorado Governor Dick Lamm. During the 1970s, Tancredo pioneered opposition to bilingual education, an issue that would remain a feature of his political orientation.

Tancredo was appointed by President Reagan to be the regional representative in Denver for the Department of Education in 1981. He stayed on through the first Bush Administration in 1992, and pared the office's staff from 225 to 60 employees. He became president of the Independence Institute in 1993, a conservative think tank based in Golden, Colorado, serving there until his election to Congress. He was a leader in the Colorado term limits movement.

Read more about this topic:  Tom Tancredo

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

    Humanity has passed through a long history of one-sidedness and of a social condition that has always contained the potential of destruction, despite its creative achievements in technology. The great project of our time must be to open the other eye: to see all-sidedly and wholly, to heal and transcend the cleavage between humanity and nature that came with early wisdom.
    Murray Bookchin (b. 1941)

    Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.
    June Jordan (b. 1939)

    Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.
    Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)