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Rodolfo Rivera remembers the moment the course of his life turned toward a more promising future. He woke up on the day he was to begin seventh grade with the realization that he wanted to be a lawyer and that to become one he would have to study harder in school.
Rivera describes the moment as an epiphany.
“It was like finding Jesus,” he says. “I didn’t want the life of the factory. It’s not the work I wanted.”
Rivera, who goes by “Rudy,” grew up in Lorain, Ohio, where his grandfather worked for U.S. Steel, the city’s major employer. He lived with his mother and sister in a small apartment on 28th Street, across from the steel mill and above a country-western bar called the Sierra. The second-hand furniture in the apartment was sometimes propped up with coffee cans. He remembers mornings on the way to school when he and his sister would have to step over men passed out on the sidewalk in front of the bar.
“It was a rough neighborhood,” he says. “There were more bars in my neighborhood than probably the rest of the city. I learned every Hank Williams and Charlie Pride tune.”
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