Childhood
Chester Leo Helms was born in Santa Maria, California, the eldest of three sons. His parents were Chester and Novella Helms. Helms' father, a manager at a local sugarbeet mill, died when he was 9. His mother took the boys to Missouri and then to Texas.
Helms spent the rest of his youth in Missouri and Texas, where he learned to organize events by helping to stage benefits for civil rights groups. He enrolled at the University of Texas and became part of the music scene there, a scene that included a very young and inexperienced Janis Joplin. Soon he dropped out of school and, inspired by the Beat Generation writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg to travel across America in search of freedom and inspiration, he set off wearing shoulder-length hair, beard and rimless glasses hitchhiking across the country. He ended up in San Francisco in 1962.
Later he was to return to Austin with his best friend at the time, Peter Haigh, to visit his friend Janis Joplin. He thought she could make it as a singer in San Francisco. After a week of partying, they convinced Janis to drop out of school and hitchhike back to San Francisco with them. Later he would bring her to the attention of Big Brother and the Holding Company
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“Having a child is the great divide between one’s own childhood and adulthood. All at once someone is totally dependent upon you. You are no longer the child of your mother but the mother of your child. Instead of being taken care of, you are responsible for taking care of someone else.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“...I really hope no white person ever has cause to write about me
because they never understand Black love is Black wealth and they’ll
probably talk about my hard childhood and never understand that
all the while I was quite happy.”
—Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943)