Diana Oughton - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

Oughton was born in Dwight, Illinois, the eldest of four daughters. She played the piano and the flute as a child, and enjoyed the operas and plays that her parents took her to see in Chicago. As a child, Oughton's father taught her to handle a shotgun to be used during the pheasant season with her father at the family's shooting preserve, and sometimes in the surrounding countryside of Dwight. Oughton learned to ride horses and had been a 4-H member. She grew up in Dwight, where her family had been prominent for decades. Her mother was Jane Boyce Oughton, and her father was James Henry Oughton, Jr., vice-president of the family bank and owner of a successful restaurant. James Oughton was a member of the Republican Party and was elected to the Illinois General Assembly, serving from 1964 to 1966. One of Diana’s great-grandfathers (on her father's side) was the founder of Dwight’s Keeley Institute for Alcoholics, and another great-grandfather, William D. Boyce, founded the Boy Scouts of America.

Diana Oughton left Dwight at the age of 14 to finish her high school education at the Madeira School in McLean, Virginia. Madeira provided a conservative education. In her senior year at Madeira, she was accepted by all of the Seven Sisters colleges. Oughton graduated high school in 1959, entering Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania as a German-language major. Oughton supported her Republican family's political values by opposing federal banking regulations, social security, and anything associated with big government. When she was 19, Oughton went to West Germany, under a program sponsored by Wayne State University of Detroit, to spend her junior year of college at the University of Munich. She rented a room from the former rector of the university, Gerhard Weber. Oughton became close friends with some of the German students. One such student was Peter, with whom she had conversations late into the night. In the family-authorized biography, Diana: The Making of a Terrorist, author Thomas Powers noted Diana's recollection of a conversation with Peter that resonated with her: "He said...Hurrah for Socialism!" After her study abroad, Oughton returned to Bryn Mawr for her senior year. It was during this year that it became apparent to her that America's young people had grown up in the silent fifties as observers and listeners. In the early sixties, young people saw that what they had been taught to believe had fallen short. During this time, Oughton and many other students read and were influenced by the book Black Like Me. The author, John Howard Griffin, gave an account of what he encountered going to the Southern United States, disguised as an African American. The book had a profound effect on Oughton, prompting her to volunteer in 1962 to tutor African American children in an impoverished section of Philadelphia. Once, Oughton told her sister Carol how amazed she was that there were seventh graders she was tutoring who couldn't read.