Bliss Dayton's four children. He is a great-grandson of businessman George Dayton, the founder of the Dayton's department store chain. His father, Bruce Dayton, served as the chairman and CEO of Dayton Hudson Corporation, the company that later became the Target Corporation. Bruce Dayton also founded the B. Dalton bookstore chain in 1966. Mark Dayton was raised in Long Lake, Minnesota and graduated from the Blake School in Minneapolis, where he was an all-state ice-hockey goaltender as a senior. Dayton attended Yale University, where he played varsity hockey until an accident on the ice. During his time at Yale, he joined the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (alongside future President George W. Bush) and received his B.A. in psychology in 1969. After college, Dayton worked as teacher in the Lower East Side of New York City from 1969 to 1971, and then as the chief financial officer of a social service agency in Boston from 1971 to 1975. Early political career Dayton first became politically active in the 1960s. He protested the Vietnam War in April 1970 at one of Minnesota's major antiwar protests against Honeywell, where he was maced by police. Dayton's father served on the Honeywell board of directors and the two had a strained relationship after the incident. From 1975 to 1976 he was a legislative aide to Senator Walter Mondale, until Mondale's election as Vice President of the United States. From 1977 to 1978, Dayton served as an aide to Minnesota Governor Rudy Perpich. In 1978, Perpich appointed Dayton to head the Department of Economic Development and then the Department of Energy and Economic Development. In 1998, Dayton ran an unsuccessful campaign for governor, losing the Democratic nomination to Hubert Humphrey III. In 2000, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, defeating Republican incumbent Rod Grams. As senator, Dayton voted against the authorization for Iraq War, and was the first senator to introduce legislation creating a cabinet-level United States Department of Peace. In 2006, he chose not to seek reelection, citing his disillusionment with Washington, D.C. and fundraising. Minnesota State Auditor Dayton was elected Minnesota State Auditor in 1990 and served until 1995. U.S. Senate Elections Dayton first ran for the United States Senate in 1982 but lost to Republican incumbent David Durenberger. He defeated former U.S. Senator Eugene McCarthy in the Democratic primary, and the general election became one of the most expensive in state history.