Pataki/Donohue for New York

Hard Work
Previous Page | 1 | 2 | 3 |4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | Next Page

After high school in Peekskill, George went on to college at Yale and later law school at Columbia. Even while he was attending some of the finest schools in the country, hard work was never something George Pataki shied away from. To help pay for college, he spent summers working various jobs at a local Peekskill factory. One summer, he was working on the coal cars, a job that he describes as "the hardest job I ever had.... We had to pry open the bottoms of the coal cars because they were all rusted shut. We had to get into the cars ourselves and use long iron pikes to poke the coal through the slats or shovel it out by hand because it no longer fell freely; and once in a while we'd fall through the car, past the railroad tracks, and down to the crusher below. Sometimes we could catch ourselves on one of the railroad tracks, but not always. Generally, there was enough coal in the crusher to keep ourselves from getting crushed; we could stand on the coal and pull ourselves out before it was all processed.... We came out of those pits totally black; coal dust was in our clothes, in our hair, in our nostrils, in our lungs." It was hard work, but the Pataki family embraced hard work; you find this family philosophy in his political career as well. When George Pataki finds something wrong, he does not shy away, but instead goes about fixing it.

Previous Page | 1 | 2 | 3 |4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | Next Page