Success Quote by Vernon Jordan

A line like this lands because it’s both mundane and seismic: a bus driver job application, stamped with a date, becomes a breadcrumb trail through American power. Vernon Jordan isn’t bragging about humble origins; he’s underlining distance traveled with the driest possible data point. “Last job I applied for” suggests that everything after 1957 wasn’t standard career laddering but something rarer: being recruited, sought out, pulled into rooms where résumés matter less than judgment, access, and trust.

The Chicago Transit Authority detail does cultural work. Public transit is the archetype of honest, urban labor - a job that literally moves a city but rarely moves the driver up. In 1957 Chicago, that image also carries the unspoken constraints of race and class. Jordan’s sentence quietly asks you to remember what “applying” meant for a young Black man then: the barriers, the smallness of the officially available horizons, the way ambition had to route around closed doors.

Calling it the “last” application is the power move. It implies a pivot from petitioning institutions to reshaping them. Jordan’s later life in civil rights leadership and corporate influence reframes the CTA anecdote as origin myth without the self-mythologizing. The intent isn’t nostalgia; it’s a calibrated reminder that his authority was earned in a country that didn’t design itself for his ascent, and that the most credible résumé line is sometimes the one that proves you once had to ask.