Rick Santorum, a former Republican presidential candidate and U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, will be honored by the Lido Civic Club as Man of the Year at its 95th Annual Past Presidents Night Gala. The event will be held on November 22 at the Mclean Hilton.
Santorum is the second of three children born to Catherine Dughi Santorum and Aldo Santorum, a clinical psychologist who emigrated to the United States at age seven from Riva in Trentino, Italy. Catherine, an administrative nurse, was of Italian and Irish ancestry.
He grew up on the grounds of Veterans hospitals, first in Martinsburg, West Virginia, then Butler, Pennsylvania, where he attended elementary school at Butler Catholic School and then at Butler public schools. He was nicknamed “Rooster,” supposedly for both a cowlick strand of hair and an assertive nature, particularly on important political issues. After his parents transferred to the North Chicago Veterans hospital in northern Illinois, he attended and graduated from Carmel High School, in Mundelein, Illinois in 1976.
Santorum attended Pennsylvania State University, graduating with a BA degree, with honors in Political Science in 1980. He then completed a one-year M.B.A. program at the University of Pittsburgh’s, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, graduating in 1981. In 1986, Santorum received a J.D. degree, with honors, from Dickinson School of Law.
After graduating, Santorum was admitted to the Pennsylvania bar and practiced law for four years at the Pittsburgh law firm Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, a firm renowned for producing a governor and a Supreme Court Justice, in addition to Santorum.
In 1990, he was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives for Pennsylvania’s 18th congressional district and was re-elected in 1992.
At age 36, Santorum won election to the U.S. Senate in 1994, the youngest elected senator in Pennsylvania’s history. He was re-elected in 2000.
Santorum ran a remarkable low budget grass-roots campaign for president in 2012, winning the Iowa caucus while being outspent 10 to 1. That made him the first Italian American to win a state in a presidential primary. He went on to win ten other states, finishing second to Mitt Romney.
An accomplished author, Rick has written four books, including a New York Times best-seller It Takes a Family. A devout Catholic, he advocates for Catholic moral precepts in public policy. Rick and Karen were married in 1990. They are the parents of eight children and nine grandchildren.
Rick and Karen were invested as Knight and Dame of Magistral Grace of the Knights of Malta in a ceremony in 2004 at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.
