Early Life
Born Ralph Waldo Greene, Jr. in Washington D.C., the son of Ralph Waldo Greene Sr and Jacqueline Abernathy Greene. Greene was raised by his maternal grandmother who he referred to A'nt Pig .
Greene attended Stevens Elementary School and Cardozo Senior High School in Washington. He dropped out of high school in the ninth grade and enlisted in the United States Army at age 16 in 1947. He served in the Korean War as a medic and was honorably discharged from service in 1953.
In January 1960, Greene was convicted of armed robbery at a grocery store in Washington and sentenced to ten years imprisonment at Lorton Reformatory in Fairfax County, Virginia. There he became the prison disc jockey which made him popular and well liked by fellow prisoners. His loquaciousness soon proved beneficial in other ways. In May 1966, Greene persuaded a fellow inmate to climb to the top of the prison water tower and threaten suicide, so that Greene would be able to "save his life" by talking him down. "It took me six months to get him to go up there", he later recalled on his talk show. This act, combined with his generally good behavior, earned him a reduction in his prison sentence and parole the following week.
Read more about this topic: Petey Greene
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