Beginnings
After immigrating to the United States with his family at the age of six, Draper ran away from home at the age of 17 to dig ditches at Woodstock in New York. His aunt persuaded him to turn his life around by taking an engineering course at Polytechnic Institute, but he ended up quitting after only one year. He later started to work odd jobs around New York. He was an assistant music critic, and briefly became an instructor at an Arthur Murray dance school. Paul Draper then began his extensive and mostly self-taught tap dancing career.
Read more about this topic: Paul Draper (dancer)
Famous quotes containing the word beginnings:
“These beginnings of commerce on a lake in the wilderness are very interesting,—these larger white birds that come to keep company with the gulls.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The frantic search of five-year-olds for friends can thus be seen to forecast the beginnings of a basic shift in the parent-child relationship, a shift which will occur gradually over many long years, and in which a child needs not only the support of child allies engaged in the same struggle but also the understanding of his parents.”
—Dorothy H. Cohen (20th century)
“The beginnings of altruism can be seen in children as early as the age of two. How then can we be so concerned that they count by the age of three, read by four, and walk with their hands across the overhead parallel bars by five, and not be concerned that they act with kindness to others?”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)