Ted Cruz's Houston Past Molded Today's 2016 Contender

Long before he became a leading presidential candidate, Rafael Edward Cruz was a bright, ambitious teenager who memorized chunks of the U.S. Constitution and had a love for free market principles, as well as a penchant for occasional trouble.

Today, Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz — as he’s more widely known — ranks near the top of the polls in the crowded GOP presidential field and has amassed an impressive war chest for the 2016 race.

In Washington, though, he’s rankled leaders of his own party by calling out Republican colleagues on issues and taking seemingly contrarian positions on a litany of subjects. His 21-hour filibuster in 2013 over the Affordable Care Act led to a temporary government shutdown and cemented his anti-establishment role.

Ted Cruz celebrated Republican victories across the 
country at Harvard Law School in November 1994.

Cruz’s mercurial trajectory from bookish drama student to Senate rebel surprised few of those who knew him as a high school teen and into his college years at Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

“Ted was never a company man,’’ said Robert George, Cruz’s Princeton professor who supervised his thesis work. “He thinks for himself. He always did. He asks questions and, if he’s not satisfied with the party line, he’s going to break free.”

Ted Cruz in his senior year yearbook photo, 

attended Second Baptist HS in Houston, 

where he performed in plays and played 

varsity sports

Cruz’s questioning of authority and dogged stands on issues may have become evident in Princeton — where he was a debate champion — but they were forged while growing up in the well-to-do western stretches of Houston.

He was a self-described “geeky kid” in elementary and junior high, the child of two mathematicians and naturally good at school. But by junior high, Cruz decided to shake off his bookworm persona. He changed his name to “Ted” and got more involved in sports.

“Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd,” Cruz writes in his memoir, A Time For Truth.

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