Early Life and Education
Brown was born on September 12, 1959, in Kittery, Maine and grew up in Wakefield, Massachusetts. He often spent his summers in Newburyport, Massachusetts, where his father served as a city councilor for 18 years. Brown's father, Claude Bruce Brown, and mother, Judith Ann “Judi” (née Rugg), divorced when he was about a year old. Both his parents have since remarried three times. His father and his grandfather were Republicans. His father has said that young Scott became interested in running for political office in the mid-1960s while accompanying him on a campaign for state office. Scott Brown recalls holding campaign signs for his father.
Brown had a difficult childhood; after her divorce, his working mother received welfare benefits. Brown experienced sexual abuse from a camp counselor who threatened to kill the 10-year-old boy if he told anyone—which he did not disclose, even to his family, until his autobiography Against All Odds (2011)—and physical abuse from his stepfathers. During various periods of his childhood, Brown lived with his grandparents and his aunt. He shoplifted many times, and was arrested for stealing record albums and brought before Judge Samuel Zoll in Salem, Massachusetts at the age of 13 or 14. Zoll asked Brown if his siblings would like seeing him play basketball in jail and required Brown to write a 1,500-word essay on that question as his punishment. Brown later said, "that was the last time I ever stole."
He graduated from Wakefield High School in 1977. He received a Bachelors of Arts in History, cum laude from Tufts University in 1981 and a Juris Doctor from Boston College Law School in 1985. During his undergraduate career at Tufts, Brown was a member of the Kappa Chapter of Zeta Psi International Fraternity.
Read more about this topic: Scott Brown
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed children’s adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“For Jeremy, direct, unmediated experience was always hard to take in, always more or less disquieting. Life became safe, things assumed meaning, only when they had been translated into words and confined between the covers of a book.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.”
—Aleister Crowley (1875–1947)