Rachael Ray

  b. 1968 | American cook/entertainer

At The Bottom

— 1995

Lacking a college degree and without much experience outside of working in grocery stores, Ray was now just another young woman living back home.

Rachael Ray had grown up in upstate New York and believed, like so many other young people, that she could make it in the Big Apple. The daughter of successful restaurant owners, Ray entertained vague dreams of becoming a hit in her own right in the competitive atmosphere of New York City.  She was able to find work — first at the candy counter at Macy’s Marketplace, then as a manager at an upscale grocery store — but she was young and didn’t have a clearly defined career plan.  Then the 27-year-old Ray was mugged outside her apartment in Queens.  As she explained to a journalist years later, “This kid comes in behind me next thing I know he shoves my face up against the door, jams a gun into my back and says, ‘Give me your bag.'”  Ray managed to escape after spraying him with mace, but the mugger returned the following weekend, dragged her down an alley and struck her numerous times with the handle of his gun.  Ray was terrified, but her attacker fled when a dog began barking in a nearby apartment.  Spooked by the experience, Rachael Ray left New York City for good a week later and returned to her mother’s house in Lake George, the tiny upstate community where she’d grown up.  Lacking a college degree  and without much experience outside of working in grocery stores, Ray was now just another young woman  living back home.