Early Life
Carlin was born in Manhattan, the second son of Mary (Beary), a secretary, and Patrick Carlin, a national advertising manager for the New York Sun. Carlin was of Irish descent and was raised a Roman Catholic; he called himself Irish Catholic.
He grew up on West 121st Street, in a neighborhood of Manhattan which he later said, in a stand-up routine, he and his friends called "White Harlem", because that sounded a lot tougher than its real name of Morningside Heights. He was raised by his mother, who left his father when Carlin was two months old. He attended Corpus Christi School, a Roman Catholic parish school of the Corpus Christi Church, in Morningside Heights. After three semesters, at the age of 15, Carlin involuntarily left Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx and briefly attended Bishop Dubois High School in Harlem. Carlin had a difficult relationship with his mother and often ran away from home. He later joined the United States Air Force and was trained as a radar technician. He was stationed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Bossier City, Louisiana.
During this time he began working as a disc jockey at radio station KJOE, in the nearby city of Shreveport. He did not complete his Air Force enlistment. Labeled an "unproductive airman" by his superiors, Carlin was discharged on July 29, 1957. During his time in the Air Force he was court martialed three times, and also received many disciplinary punishments.
Read more about this topic: George Carlin
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“For universal love is as special an aspect as carnal love or any of the other kinds: all forms of mental and spiritual activity must be practiced and encouraged equally if the whole affair is to prosper. There is no cutting corners where the life of the soul is concerned....”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)