Jan Brewer - Early Life

Early Life

Brewer was born Janice Kay Drinkwine on September 26, 1944, in Hollywood, California. She is the daughter of Edna C. (née Bakken) and Perry Wilford Drinkwine, a civilian supervisor at the Hawthorne Army Depot in Hawthorne, Nevada. Brewer and her older brother, Paul, lived solely in Hawthorne until she was ten years old. Perry died of lung disease when she was eleven years old, having been ravaged by the constant exposure to chemicals while at the depot. Shortly before her father's death, the family moved to California, seeking "dry desert air and clean ocean breezes." She graduated from Verdugo Hills High School in 1962. Brewer is of English and Norwegian descent. Her maternal grandfather, Emil Theodore Bakken, was from Norway, and her maternal grandmother, Carrie Nelson, was from Minnesota and the daughter of Norwegian immigrants. Meanwhile, her paternal grandmother, Sarah Rosina Ford (original surname Wilford), was an Englishwoman from Buckinghamshire.

She married John Leon Brewer in Nevada, and worked briefly in Glendale, California, before moving to her husband's hometown of Phoenix, Arizona, in 1970. The couple later relocated to Glendale, Arizona, where John became a successful chiropractor, in addition to finding some real estate success. Settling in the Deer Valley section of Phoenix, the couple have three children.