Robert R. Young - Childhood, Education

Childhood, Education

Young's grandfather was a pioneer rancher in the Texas Panhandle. Young was the youngest boy of four children (John Stinson Young b. 1890, Kenneth Moody Young b. 1893, Robert Ralph Young b. 1897 and Florence Edith Young Exum b.1904) born to David John Young and the former Mary Arabella Moody in Canadian, the seat of Hemphill County in the eastern Panhandle. He was born in a house built by Temple Lea Houston, youngest son of Sam Houston, first president of the Republic of Texas and a later governor of Texas. Mary Moody Young's father built the Moody Hotel in Canadian, which still houses a few businesses. Mary died when Robert was only ten. David Young, a strict man and the first banker in Canadian, did not quite know how to control his precocious son, whom neighborhood boys nicknamed "Pumpkin" because of his auburn hair.

Though of Presbyterian family ties, Young attended the Baptist-affiliated Canadian Academy. In his teens, however, he was sent to Culver Military Academy in Culver, Indiana, from which he graduated at the head of his class in 1914. He then entered the University of Virginia in Charlottesville but dropped out before the end of his second year.