of the Oakland Motor Car Company, which became the Pontiac division of General Motors, and finally of the Nash Motor Company before his 1925 retirement. Jerry Voorhis began school in Ottawa, but also attended school in Oklahoma City, Peoria, Illinois and Pontiac, Michigan. He attended the Hotchkiss School, an elite boys' boarding school in Connecticut with close ties to Yale University, and subsequently attended Yale, graduating in 1923. Voorhis was elected as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, was president of the Christian Association, and was greatly influenced by the Social Gospel movement. Voorhis resisted all encouragement toward a business or management career, much to his father's disappointment. While attending Yale, he came to believe that "the Christian Gospel is to be taken seriously, and that needless poverty and suffering on the one hand and special privilege and inordinate power on the other are entirely contrary to its precepts". He later stated that he lacked the faith in his own judgment to leave Yale and get a job in "the real world [which] lay beyond the college walls". However, once he graduated, Voorhis engaged a room at a boarding house and went to work as a receiving clerk, a job he soon exchanged for one as a freight handler. Later in 1923, he was laid off. In 1923 and 1924, he served as a traveling representative for the YMCA in Germany, though his stay was cut short by illness. Suffering from pneumonia, Voorhis spent six weeks recovering in a London nursing home. Charles Voorhis's job with Nash had taken him to a new home in Kenosha, Wisconsin; Jerry Voorhis joined his parents there on his return from Europe. As part of his recovery from his illness, he spent several weeks in northwestern Wyoming, working on a ranch. In Kenosha, he met a social worker named Alice Louise Livingston and married her on November 27, 1924, in her hometown of Washington, Iowa. Resuming his blue-collar career after his marriage, Voorhis moved to North Carolina with his wife and went to work in a Ford plant in Charlotte until being offered work as a teacher in an Illinois school for underprivileged boys, teaching three grades, coaching sports, and giving religious talks in the school's chapel each morning. This was followed by a year in Laramie, Wyoming, where the Voorhises founded and ran an orphanage for boys. In 1927, the now-retired Charles Voorhis