Industrial Background Quotes

My father was a die maker for 39 years, so I had a basic understanding of the automobile industry and what the manufacturing world was like, just from the opportunity to spend time with him - just talking, because he was a car buff.

I grew up with a bunch of factory workers.

My parents had a factory, so I was linked to the textile and fashion industry.

When I see a shoe, I deconstruct it in my head. It comes from spending childhood summers around my grandad's denim factory in Bury, watching the machinists turn fabric into clothes.

I come from a family of coal miners.

I worked in the mechanical factories repairing cement trucks. The Cuban government wanted me to work in the university as a teacher in literature, but I declined because I wanted a more sense of the countryside.

I left school when I was 16; then I worked for my father, who was a welder. And I was a welder for three years, you know, welder of fabrication, metal 'cause it was a big industrial town, Sheffield. It was much steel and coal and stuff like that.

My mother was a sociologist and an intellectual, and my father was an industrialist with a business in copper and aluminum wire. He was very strict and he wanted me to work in the family business - for him, the worst thing was having a daughter who worked in fashion.

I come from a coal-mining, working-class background. My father was a coal miner.

It was great to go to Stanford. Until that point, I'd spent my whole life in southeast Michigan, working for General Motors. I was in a different part of the country. People didn't know what General Motors was, didn't care, or if they did, they might not have had a favorable impression. I saw people driving nondomestic vehicles.

I was a Dow Chemical baby. My dad designed chemical plants for Dow Chemical.

I grew up in a factory town - Urbana, Ohio.

I started at General Motors at 18 years old as a co-op student at the General Motors Institute, which is now Kettering.

My family was in two businesses - they were in the textile business, and they were in the candy business. The conversations around the dinner table were all about the factory floor and how many machines were running and what was happening in the business. I grew up very engaged in manufacturing and as part of a family business.

I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work.