Deval Patrick

Part of his 2009 commencement speech: Our youngest daughter Catherine graduated from high school a couple years ago. Sitting at her graduation, I couldn't help but think about the difference between her journey and my own nearly 35 years earlier. I grew up on welfare on the South Side of Chicago in my grandparents' two bedroom tenement. I shared a room and set of bunk beds with my mother and my sister who is here today -- so we would rotate from the top bunk to the bottom bunk to the floor, every third night on the floor. I went to overcrowded, sometimes violent public schools. I can't think of a time when I didn't love to read. But I don't actually remember ever owning a book until I got my break in 1970 when I came to Massachusetts on a scholarship to a boarding school..Now, our Catherine, by contrast has always had her own room, most of that time in a house in a leafy neighborhood outside of Boston. By the time she got to high school, she had traveled on four continents, she knew how to use and pronounce concierge, and she had shaken hands in the White House with the President of the United States. Show less «