Childhood
Earl Bascom was born in a sod-roofed log cabin on the Bascom 101 Ranch in Vernal, Utah. His father, John W. Bascom, had been a deputy sheriff in Utah who chased Butch Cassidy and the Wild Bunch Gang. Both sets of Earl's grandparents (Joel A. Bascom and C.F.B. Lybbert) were Mormon pioneers, ranchers and frontier lawmen.
Bascom's paternal ancestral background was a colorful aray of nationalities and ethnicities including Quaker, French Basque and Huguenot, as well as an American Colonial Governor, John Webster, and a Revolutionary War soldier, Oliver Greene. His maternal family was of Norwegian, Danish, Dutch and German ancestry. As a child growing up, he was sometimes affectionately addressed by his British-born aunts as "Lord Bascom - King of the Canadian Cowboys," as he was a descendant of European royalty back to Charlemagne.
While Bascom was still a child his family moved to the Bascom Bar-B-3 Ranch in Alberta, Canada. He quit school while in grade three to work on the Hyssop 5H Ranch. Although he was soon marched back to school by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Earl was reprieved to get the job of driving an old stagecoach each day to the surrounding ranches transporting fellow students to and from school.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“By contemplation’s help,not sought in vain,
I seem t’ have liv’d my childhood o’er again;
To have renew’d the joys that once were mine,”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“The quickness with which all the “stuff” from childhood can reduce adult siblings to kids again underscores the strong and complex connections between brothers and sisters.... It doesn’t seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we’ve traveled. Our brothers and sisters bring us face to face with our former selves and remind us how intricately bound up we are in each other’s lives.”
—Jane Mersky Leder (20th century)
“When we suffer anguish we return to early childhood because that is the period in which we first learnt to suffer the experience of total loss. It was more than that. It was the period in which we suffered more total losses than in all the rest of our life put together.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)