Florio Rooted in Working Class

Gov. James J. Florio is the grandson of Italian immigrants and the son of a Brooklyn Navy Yard ship painter. Thus, he says, he shares the struggles of working people.

One of his most traumatic memories as a child, he says, was watching a union “shape-up” with his father. He recalls it as “a very, very degrading process. A hundred people showed up in the hall, and they would pick five people out of the 100. It was almost like a slave market.”

Florio dropped out of high school, he says, because “I was bored. Thought I didn’t need it.” But when he considered becoming a New York City policeman after a three-year stint in the Navy, Florio discovered that his lack of education closed that and many other opportunities.

So Florio took correspondence courses that enabled him to pass the General Education Development, or high-school equivalency test. College took him to New Jersey, where he attended Trenton State College on the GI Bill, and he went to law school in Camden.

In Camden, he also got his introduction to politics. Elected to the New Jersey Assembly in 1969, he ran for Congress and lost in 1972. He tried again and won the first of his seven elections to Congress two years later. He won the governorship in 1989.