Early Life and Amputation
Armes was born Julian Armas to Mexican-American parents Pedro and Beatriz in Ysleta, a low-income area close to El Paso, Texas. At the age of thirteen, he and his friend Dick Caples, two years his senior, broke into a Texas & Pacific Railroad section house and stole railway torpedoes. Armes hit one with an ice-pick, detonating it and causing the mangling of both hands. Caples, who was standing nearby, was not injured. Armes was taken to Hotel Dieu Hospital in El Paso, where his hands were amputated.
Read more about this topic: Jay J. Armes
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or amputation:
“Names on a list, whose faces I do not recall
But they are gone to early death, who late in school
Distinguished the belt feed lever from the belt holding pawl.”
—Richard Eberhart (b. 1904)
“Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education, feel a politely disguised contempt for it; and thus the study of one of the most pervasive and powerful influences on human life is traduced and neglected.”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)
“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)