Get to Know Sen. Sam Brownback

Oct. 18, 2007 — -- Growing up in the tiny town of Parker, Kan., Sam Brownback dreamed of a future on the family farm, until economic hardship led him to law school, and eventually public service.

ABC's Charles Gibson spoke with Brownback as part of a new series called "Who Is," which features one interview a week with a presidential hopeful from now until December, with the focus on their private lives.

Brownback spent his childhood on the family farm, situated a mile and a half outside of Parker, Kan., a town of only 250 people. It seemed only natural that he too would grow up to be a farmer, a destiny that Brownback welcomed.

"My dad farmed, my granddad was a farmer," he told Gibson. "I wanted to be a farmer."

Childhood on a farm meant getting his hands dirty.

"I'd pull my little brother on our motorcycle on an inner tube behind it. We would go fishing, we would hunt some, growing up. Mostly it's work though. I mean on a farm of that size in that generation, you've got to take care of the livestock, you got to take care of the crops, and it's work," he said.

"It started out with chickens, taking care of those, and later I really got the duty with the pigs and raising those," Brownback said. "You got to do everything. You feed them, you take care of them, you make sure they stay in the pen to start with, because they're a very smart animal, and they get out all the time."

His chores helped the farm succeed. It did well enough that he was able to go to college at Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kan., where he served as the state president of Future Farmers of America, a position that helped him decide to go into politics.

"[Future Farmers of America] paid for a trip to come back to Washington to meet our congressman and to participate in the conference, and I met my congressman then. They didn't come around to towns of my size, so I'd never met one before, but when I met [Rep.] Joe Skubitz, I thought, 'That really seems like it would be an interesting thing to do. I wonder how you get a job like that?' And that's where it started," he said.