Early Life
John Service was born in the city of Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China, on August 3, 1909. The son of missionaries working for the Y.M.C.A., Service spent his childhood in the Chinese province. By the age of eleven, Service had mastered the local Chinese dialect, and then attended the Shanghai American School for high school. The Service family moved to California, where John graduated from Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California at the age of fifteen. Those who knew him say he always went by "Jack" and he never used his middle name.
In the fall of 1927, Service entered Oberlin College. He majored in both art history and economics, and still found time to be captain of the school's cross-country and track and field teams. After graduation, Service took and passed the Foreign Service Exam in 1933. In 1977, Oberlin awarded him an honorary degree.
Read more about this topic: John S. Service
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.”
—Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)
“They say the seeds of what we will do are in all of us, but it always seemed to me that in those who make jokes in life the seeds are covered with better soil and with a higher grade of manure.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)