Early Life
Walter Frederick Mondale was born in Ceylon, Minnesota, the son of Claribel Hope (née Cowan), a part-time music teacher, and Theodore Sigvaard Mondale, a Methodist minister. His paternal grandparents were Norwegian, and his mother, the daughter of an immigrant from Ontario, was of Scottish and English descent. The surname "Mondale" comes from Mundal by Fjærland, in the Sogndal Commune of Norway. He attended public schools. His half-brother Lester Mondale was a Unitarian minister.
Mondale was educated at Macalester College in St. Paul and the University of Minnesota, where he earned his B.A. in political science, graduating in 1951. He did not have enough money to attend law school. He enlisted in the U.S. Army and served for two years at Fort Knox during the Korean War, reaching the rank of corporal. Through the support of the G.I. Bill, he was able to attend law school, and graduated from the University of Minnesota Law School in 1956. While at law school he served on the Minnesota Law Review and as a law clerk in the Minnesota Supreme Court under Justice Thomas F. Gallagher. He began practicing law in Minneapolis, and continued to do so for four years before entering the political arena.
Read more about this topic: Walter Mondale
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“With boys you always know where you stand. Right in the path of a hurricane. It’s all there. The fruit flies hovering over their waste can, the hamster trying to escape to cleaner air, the bedrooms decorated in Early Bus Station Restroom.”
—Erma Bombeck (20th century)
“What was lost in the European cataclysm was not only the Jewish past—the whole life of a civilization—but also a major share of the Jewish future.... [ellipsis in source] It was not only the intellect of a people in its prime that was excised, but the treasure of a people in its potential.”
—Cynthia Ozick (b. 1928)