Dan Rowan - Early Life and Career

Early Life and Career

Born on a carnival train near the small town of Beggs, Oklahoma, under the name of "Daniel Hale David", Rowan toured with his parents, Oscar and Nellie David, who performed a singing and dancing act with the carnival. He was orphaned at age 11, spent four years at the McClelland Home in Pueblo, Colorado, then was taken in by a foster family at age 16 and enrolled in Central High School (Pueblo, Colorado). After graduating from high school in 1940, he hitchhiked to Los Angeles, California, and found a job in the mailroom at Paramount Pictures, quickly ingratiating himself with studio head Buddy DeSylva. A year later he became Paramount's youngest staff writer.

Read more about this topic:  Dan Rowan

Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or career:

    In early times every sort of advantage tends to become a military advantage; such is the best way, then, to keep it alive. But the Jewish advantage never did so; beginning in religion, contrary to a thousand analogies, it remained religious. For that we care for them; from that have issued endless consequences.
    Walter Bagehot (1826–1877)

    Death or life or life or death
    Death is life and life is death
    I gotta use words when I talk to you
    But if you understand or if you dont
    That’s nothing to me and nothing to you
    We all gotta do what we gotta do
    —T.S. (Thomas Stearns)

    John Brown’s career for the last six weeks of his life was meteor-like, flashing through the darkness in which we live. I know of nothing so miraculous in our history.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)