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9:50 PM, Jun 18, 2013   |    comments   • Share   • Print   • -
A A A +  (USA Today) -- James Riddle Hoffa, the legendary but
controversial labor leader, was president of the International
Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1958-1971.  He was born in 1913 in
Brazil, Ind. The third of four children, his father was a coal-
mine driller who died when Hoffa was 7. His mother moved the
family to Detroit in 1924, where she worked in a laundry and in
auto plants.  Hoffa, a seventh-grade dropout, became a stocker
at Frank & Cedar's, a downtown Detroit department store. At age
16, he got a job at a Kroger warehouse at Fort and Green,
unloading produce from rail cars for 32 cents an hour.  In 1931,
at age 18, the feisty Hoffa organized a successful sit-down
strike that got dock workers better pay. The next year, he
became an organizer for the Teamsters and worked his way up the
ranks, eventually becomi