Early Life
Born in Gainesville, Texas, Buck grew up in Dallas and excelled in geography, at the cost of "utter failure on all the other subjects of that limited Dallas curriculum." While still a child, Buck began collecting birds and small animals, and tried his hand at farming before getting a job as a cowpuncher. Accompanying a cattlecar to the Chicago stockyards, he refused to take the trip back to Texas, and spent the rest of his days supporting himself on various jobs while seeking adventure. In 1911, he won $3,500 in a poker game and decided to go overseas for the first time, leaving his wife and setting out for Brazil. Bringing back exotic birds to New York, he was surprised by the amount of his profits. Trips to Singapore followed, and he traveled the world for 18 years, until the stock market crash of 1929 left him penniless. However, friends lent him $6,000 and soon he was back to his profitable work.
Read more about this topic: Frank Buck (animal Collector)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“But she is early up and out,
To trim the year or strip its bones;”
—Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
“What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history, letters, art and poetry, in all its periods from the Heroic and Homeric age down to the domestic life of the Athenians and Spartans, four or five centuries later? What but this, that every man passes personally through a Grecian period.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)