Meet John Goodman
Legislative/Communications Intern

As a seven-year-old, I
thought that my best friend’s invitation to attend our
county’s Junior Grange Camp would simply give me
something to do over the summer months. Hardly could I
imagine that all these years later, I would end up
working in our national headquarters.
I grew up in the
Hookstown Grange in Beaver County, Pennsylvania. As a
Junior Granger, I to do was show up, play the piano and
sing!
I attended South Side
High School in Southwestern Pennsylvania, and when I
wasn’t playing drums in the marching band, I spent most
of my time dreaming of a career in ministry and/or
politics. This remained my dream as a foreign exchange
student in Hong Kong for my senior year of high school,
and in fact, I still study in both of these fields – in
the church, I’m a licensed local ministerial candidate,
and as for my undying thirst for politics, I currently
attend American University as a freshman in the School
of Public Affairs with a major in Interdisciplinary
Studies: Communications, Legal Institutions, Economics,
and Government.
I don’t consider working
for the National Grange to be anything less than a
privilege. I know that it’s rare to garner such great,
real world experience in your field of study during the
first year of college, and I can honestly say that I
genuinely look forward to waking up and heading to work
every Tuesday and Friday morning.
That’s probably all you
need to know about me, but if I had to throw in one more
thing just for the fun of it, I’d tell you that I
collect neckties. So far, I own 180 of them, and they
all hang from the ceiling of my dorm room.
But on a more serious
note, there aren’t too many causes I support more than
that of promoting rural America. As a proud product of
rural America, I view it as an honor to have the
opportunity to further our interests here in the Capital
of our Nation, and I’m really looking forward to doing
so over the coming months.