life and education John Glover Roberts Jr. was born on January 27, 1955, in Buffalo, New York, the son of Rosemary (née Podrasky; 1929–2019) and John Glover "Jack" Roberts Sr. (1928–2008). His father had Irish and Welsh ancestry, and his mother was a descendant of Slovak immigrants from Szepes, Hungary. He has an elder sister, Kathy, and two younger sisters, Peggy and Barbara. Roberts spent his early childhood years in Hamburg, New York, where his father worked as an electrical engineer for the Bethlehem Steel Corporation at its large factory in Lackawanna. In 1965, ten-year-old Roberts and his family moved to Long Beach, Indiana, where his father became manager of a new steel plant in nearby Burns Harbor. Roberts attended La Lumiere School, a small but affluent and academically rigorous Catholic boarding school in La Porte, Indiana, where he was captain of the school's football team and was a regional champion in wrestling. He also participated in choir and drama, and co-edited the school newspaper. He graduated first in his class in 1973. Roberts then studied history at Harvard University, entering with sophomore (second-year) standing based on his high academic achievement in high school. One of his first papers, "Marxism and Bolshevism: Theory and Practice", won Harvard's William Scott Ferguson Prize for most outstanding essay by a sophomore history major, and in his senior year his paper "The Utopian Conservative: A Study of Continuity and Change in the Thought of Daniel Webster" won a Bowdoin Prize. He lived in Straus Hall and Leverett House, and each summer he returned home to earn money working at the steel plant his father managed. He graduated in 1976 with an A.B., summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. Roberts had originally planned to pursue a Ph.D. in history and become a professor but decided instead to attend Harvard Law School. He became managing editor of the Harvard Law Review and graduated in 1979 with a J.D., magna cum laude. Early legal career After graduating from law school, Roberts was a law clerk for Judge Henry Friendly of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1979 to 1980, then for Justice (later Chief Justice in 1986) William Rehnquist of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1980 to 1981. Following his clerkships, Roberts began working for the U.S. government in the Administration of President Ronald Reagan, first from 1981 to