Reply #24: A little personal history about Warren.....

[RedEarth]

Always an Okie
Warren attended grade school in Norman, then skipped sixth grade when her family moved to Oklahoma City. Living on NW 25 Street, she learned to drive the family Studebaker in the parking lot of the brand new Shepherd Mall.
She graduated from Northwest Classen at 16 as a debate champ, which earned her a college scholarship.

She became a teacher to brain-injured children, but felt stifled by the administrative constraints of the New Jersey public school where she worked. During a Christmas visit to Oklahoma City, her former high school debate classmates urged her to attend law school.

After operating a private law practice, Warren returned to her first love of teaching.

"As a teacher at that level, you do research — that's just part of the job,” she said. "The area where I was teaching were all the money courses — commercial law, contract law, bankruptcy law. That's where my research was, and that's when I started doing research on families that went broke.”

It's a topic she knows something about. Before Warren was born, her parents lost most of their savings when a partner in a planned car dealership in Seminole absconded with their money.

Her father, a self-taught pilot who was a flight instructor in Muskogee during World War II, worked as a traveling salesman and in Oklahoma City, at Montgomery Ward. He was demoted after suffering a heart attack, and later took a job as a maintenance worker at an apartment house. The working-class family couldn't afford to send Warren to kindergarten, which at the time was offered only at private schools.

"Sure it was partly about my family, but it was about millions of other families,” the Harvard law professor said of her research. "That was the work I started doing. That's how I ended up where I am today.”

Warren has written numerous books and academic articles. Her work uncovered the fact that most American consumer bankruptcies are not filed by financial freeloaders, but by people whose finances have unraveled due to divorce, death or health crises.

.......more

http://newsok.com/an-okie-in-washington-riles-big-players-on-wall-street/article/3481347