Childhood
The son of Bohemian immigrants, Joseph Stecher was born on April 4, 1893 on a 400-acre (1.6 km2) farm in Dodge, Nebraska. Joe was the youngest of the family’s eight children, and as a youth, he excelled in numerous sports, including swimming, golf, tennis, and baseball. While the boys were still young, Frank Stecher enrolled his three sons in a wrestling course at the local Fremont YMCA, and Joe’s older brothers soon emerged as accomplished amateur grapplers. Joe’s eldest brother, Ernest, would earn a commission to Annapolis, and as a Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, he was eventually recognized as the National Intercollegiate Light Heavyweight Wrestling Champion. Moreover, Anton (“Tony”) Stecher starred as the premier wrestler at Fremont High School; and as a result, Joe was determined to follow in his brothers’ large footsteps. From the moment he took the mat, it was clear that Joe Stecher was a natural wrestling talent, as he utilized his strong body and long limbs to outclass his opponents. Then in 1909, as a high school senior at just age 16, he nearly defeated “Doc” Benjamin Roller, one of the world’s top turn-of-the-century grapplers, in a hard-fought exhibition bout while Roller was touring the Midwest.
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Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“We find that even the parents who justify spanking to themselves are defensive and embarrassed about it....I suspect that deep in the memory of every parent are the feelings that had attended his own childhood spankings, the feelings of humiliation, of helplessness, of submission through fear. The parent who finds himself spanking his own child cannot dispel the ghosts of his own childhood.”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“The route through childhood is shaped by many forces, and it differs for each of us. Our biological inheritance, the temperament with which we are born, the care we receive, our family relationships, the place where we grow up, the schools we attend, the culture in which we participate, and the historical period in which we live—all these affect the paths we take through childhood and condition the remainder of our lives.”
—Robert H. Wozniak (20th century)
“If a child were kept in a place where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pineapple, has of those particular relishes.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)