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.
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