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:
“Foolish prater, What dost thou
So early at my window do?
Cruel bird, thou’st ta’en away
A dream out of my arms to-day;
A dream that ne’er must equall’d be
By all that waking eyes may see.
Thou this damage to repair
Nothing half so sweet and fair,
Nothing half so good, canst bring,
Tho’ men say thou bring’st the Spring.”
—Abraham Cowley (1618–1667)
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)