Personal Life
Paul married Virginia Webb in 1938. They had two children, Gene (Lester Jr.), born in 1941 and named after actor-songwriter Gene Lockhart, and Russell (Rusty), born 1944, before divorcing in 1949. Later that year, Paul and Mary Ford (born Iris Colleen Summers) were married. They adopted a girl, Colleen, in 1958 and their son Robert (Bobby) was born the following year. They had also lost a child, who was born prematurely and died only four days old. Les Paul and Mary Ford divorced in 1963.
Paul was the instructor of rock guitarist Steve Miller of the Steve Miller Band, to whom Paul gave his first guitar lesson. Miller's father was best man at Paul's 1949 wedding to Mary Ford.
Paul resided for many years in Mahwah, New Jersey.
Read more about this topic: Les Paul
Famous quotes containing the words personal life, personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up—or else all go down—as one people.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“What is the flesh and blood compounded of
But a few moments in the life of time?
This prowling of the cells, litigious love,
Wears the long claw of flesh-arguing crime.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)