Early Life
McConnell was born to a farming family in the Muskoka Region of Ontario. He left home as a boy of fourteen to find employment in the city of Toronto. His first job paid $3 a week but as an employee at Standard Chemical Co. he worked his way up to a management position that eventually led to a transfer to Montreal in 1901. The then 23-year-old for a time lived in a room at the Montreal YMCA, an institution that he would later thank through his volunteering to help lead a successful fund-raising campaign. In 1905, he married Lily May Griffith. They had four children.
Read more about this topic: John Wilson McConnell
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“I cannot and do not live in the world of discretion, not as a writer, anyway. I would prefer to, I assure you—it would make life easier. But discretion is, unfortunately, not for novelists.”
—Philip Roth (b. 1933)