Pizza magnate Herman Cain is in the spotlight for the White House race in 2016, and his penchant for breaking all the molds started early. He wasn’t averse to getting his hands dirty long before politics entered the picture. Here are seven pre-politics highlights from the life of potential 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Herman Cain:
1. Herman Cain and his father both worked for Coca-Cola,
according to Biography.com. His father was a chauffeur, and he was a systems analyst.
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2. Cain’s mostly known for his business background,
but Business Insider noted he also worked for the Navy early in his career, designing fire-control systems for ships and aircraft — while he was working toward a master’s in computer science at Purdue University.
3. He was a vice president at Pillsbury when he took over the company’s ailing Philadelphia-area Burger King restaurants, but Business Insider said he was just as likely to be in the kitchen broiling hamburgers. The Philadelphia region went from Burger King’s least profitable to its most profitable division under Cain’s leadership. Likewise,
notes the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Cain did the same during his turnaround of Pillsbury’s struggling Godfather’s Pizza chain — stepping out of the executive suite to cook pizzas in test kitchens and individual stores.
4. Though he “grew up in the shadow of segregation,” college student Herman Cain for the most part ignored the civil rights movement,
according to The Washington Post. Instead, he concentrated on business classes and the part-time jobs he worked to cover tuition at Morehouse College.
5. That doesn’t mean Herman Cain ignored racial issues. The Washington Post said that, as CEO of Godfather’s Pizza in Omaha, Nebraska, he was active in the Urban League, an advocate of economic empowerment for minority people.
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6. Young Herman Cain rebelled against racism in his own way. He practiced reading on the segregationist signs on city buses in 1950s Atlanta and,
as he told The Daily Caller’s Matt Lewis, he and his brother drank from the whites-only drinking fountains despite instructions from their mother. Lewis quoted Cain: “We looked at each other and said: ‘The water tastes the same! What’s the big deal’?”
7. Herman Cain made his splash on the national political stage in 1994 when, as a National Restaurant Association head, he publicly criticized President Clinton on the impact of healthcare reform on business.
As a bio on a Cain website, The New Voice Inc. put it, Cain told Clinton: “Quite honestly Mr. President, your calculations are incorrect. In the competitive marketplace, it simply doesn’t work that way.”
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