Early Life
Connor was born in Wollongong, New South Wales, where he lived all his life and which he represented in the New South Wales and Australian Parliaments. Descended from Irish Catholics (though not himself a practising Catholic in adulthood), he was educated at state schools, including Wollongong High School, of which he graduated as dux, despite contracting pneumonia in his final year.
Due to his father's death in 1925, he gave up his intention of becoming an analytical chemist and became an articled clerk. He qualified in law, but was twice rejected for registration as a solicitor, the result of his dismissal by his former employer. Instead he went into business as a car dealer and later took up farming. Despite these middle-class occupations he was a dedicated socialist. In 1931 he married Amelia Searl. From 1938 to 1945 he was an Alderman on the Wollongong City Council.
Read more about this topic: Rex Connor
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“By the time we hit fifty, we have learned our hardest lessons. We have found out that only a few things are really important. We have learned to take life seriously, but never ourselves.”
—Marie Dressler (1873–1934)