Boehner was born in Reading, Ohio, the son of Mary Anne (née Hall) and Earl Henry Boehner, the second of twelve children in a family of German and Irish descent.[2] He grew up in modest circumstances, having shared one bathroom with his eleven siblings in a two-bedroom house in Cincinnati. His parents slept on a pull-out couch.[3] He started working at his family's bar at age 8, a business founded by their grandfather Andy Boehner in 1938.[3] He has lived in Southwest Ohio his entire life. All but two of his siblings still live within a few miles of each other, two are unemployed and most of the others have blue-collar jobs.[4]
Boehner attended Cincinnati's Moeller High School and was a linebacker on the school's football team, where he was coached by future Notre Dame coach Gerry Faust.[5][6][7][8][9][10][11] Graduating from Moeller in 1968, when U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War was at its peak, Boehner enlisted in the United States Navy but was honorably discharged after eight weeks because of a bad back.[12] He earned his bachelor's degree in business from Xavier University in Cincinnati in 1977, becoming the first person in his family to attend college, taking seven years as he held several jobs to pay for his education.[3]
Shortly after his graduation in 1977, Boehner accepted a position with Nucite Sales, a small sales business in the packaging and plastics industry. He was steadily promoted and eventually became president of the firm, resigning in 1990 when he was elected to Congress.[13]
