John R. Tunis - Early Years

Early Years

John Roberts Tunis was born December 7, 1889 to John Arthur and Caroline Greene Roberts Tunis, a teacher, in Boston, Massachusetts. John Arthur came from a well-to-do family, which he upset by leaving the Episcopalian church to become a Unitarian minister. His family disowned him when he married Caroline, the daughter of a waiter. When Tunis was seven and his brother Robert five their father died of Bright's disease; no one from the Tunis side of the family attended the funeral. After his death their mother taught at Brearley School for girls in Manhattan, later moving the family to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she ran a boarding house.

Tunis' maternal grandfather encouraged the brothers to take an interest in baseball. Two of young Tunis' heroes were Boston Nationals' baseball players Billy Hamilton and Fred Tenney. At age fourteen Tunis and his brother, too poor to pay the admission price, managed to watch a Davis Cup tennis match by climbing on top of a brewery wagon outside the courts. Tunis played tennis at Cambridge Latin School, then followed in his father's footsteps to Harvard where he competed in tennis and ran track. He graduated from Harvard with a B. A. in 1911, then got a job in a Newburyport, Massachusetts, cotton mill. Tunis became an officer in the U.S. Army, serving in France during World War I. On February 19, 1918, Tunis married Lucy Rogers in Cambridge, Massachusetts. They did not have any children.