1988 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Carol Burnett
Entertainer
Carol Burnett was born in 1933 in San Antonio, Texas. Her parents separated before she turned four, and she lived with her grandmother until the age of seven. She moved with her grandmother to Hollywood, where her mother, an as...
1969 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Winston A. Burnett
Chairman and President
Winston A. Burnett Organization Ltd.
Winston Burnett's childhood home was a second-floor rear apartment in a Harlem tenement, across the street from the local hangout and around the corner from the Baptist church. That church became a major influence in young Burn...
1986 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Harold Burson*
Chairman of the Board
Burson-Marsteller
Harold Burson was the eldest child of English immigrants who had been in America only one year before he was born in Memphis, Tennessee. Burson was eight when the Great Depression forced his parents to close their small hardwar...
1954 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
John A. Bush*
Chairman of the Board
Brown Shoe Company
John A. Bush started working for the Brown Shoe Company in his late teens, assisting in shoemaking and cost supervision of the factory office. He was promoted to assistant in the advertising department and then sold shoes on th...
1983 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Robert C. Byrd*
United States Senator from West Virginia, Minority Leader
Born Cornelius Calvin Sale Jr. in North Wilkesboro, North Carolina, in 1917, Robert Byrd lost his mother, who had contracted influenza, before he was a year old. He was adopted by an aunt and her coal-miner husband, Dalton Byrd...
2003 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Sherian Grace Cadoria
Brigadier General (Retired)
United States Army
Sherian Cadoria was born in 1940 in Marksville, Louisiana, a small town that is centrally located within the state and that is where her parents worked as tenant farm laborers. When she was three months old, her father was inju...
1996 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Herman Cain*
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Godfather's Pizza, Inc.
Herman Cain was born in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1945, and he spent most of his youth in Atlanta. His father worked three jobs as a porter, custodian, and barber to keep the family out of housing projects. Herman and his brother ...
1962 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
James R. Caldwell*
Chairman of the Board
Rubbermaid, Inc.
James Caldwell was born on a small tobacco farm in Enfield, Connecticut. He paid his way through Georgetown University by tutoring. After serving in the U.S. Navy during World War I, he resumed his studies at Trinity College. ...
1978 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
Wofford B. Camp*
Founder
W.B. Camp & Sons, Inc.
Wofford B. Camp was born on a farm in Cherokee County, South Carolina, the fifth of eight children. The family's cash crop was cotton, which never generated more than $1,000 annually. When he was nine, Camp earned his first dol...
2013 Horatio Alger Award Recipient
John A. Canning, Jr.
Chairman and Co-Founder
Madison Dearborn Partners
John Canning, the eldest of four, was born in Tucson, Arizona, in 1944. At the time, his father was serving as a captain in the U.S. Army Air Forces. When World War II ended, the Canning family moved to Bayport, New York, a rur...
