Stan was born on a dairy farm in Arkansas where hard work was not only expected, but required. On a small dairy farm, there are no vacations. Neither of his parents finished high school, but they were insistent that he would and just as insistent that he go to college. He did, and became the President of the Student Body at his university. During college, Stan took advantage of Summers to have a variety of work experiences, including being a missionary in California and a migrant worker in Wisconsin. For a brief period after college, he was the personnel director of a prison.
After serving as a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army, Stan went on to Vanderbilt Law School. Stan made the decision to become a lawyer without having ever met one. His career choice did not exactly please his parents who viewed lawyers as unsavory characters. But Stan had the sense that lawyers were people who had an outsized influence in making the world right, and that was something he knew he wanted to spend the rest of his life doing. At Vanderbilt, he was published twice in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law, and in his free time, worked in political campaigns. His first date with the woman who became his wife was to an election-night victory party where Stan’s candidate was crushed. The relationship survived that defeat, and he married his wife Patrice two years later.
