Sid McMath - Early Life

Early Life

McMath was born in a dog-trot log cabin on the old McMath home place near Magnolia, Columbia County, Arkansas, the son of Hal Pierce and Nettie Belle Sanders McMath. His paternal grandfather, Columbia County Sheriff Sidney Smith McMath, grand nephew of his Goliad namesake, had himself been killed in the line of duty the previous year, leaving a pensionless widow and eight children, Hal being the eldest. After years of wrangling horses and bad-luck wildcatting in the Southwest Arkansas oil fields, Hal McMath moved his family by wagon to Hot Springs in June 1922. There, he sold the last of his horses and took a job as a barber. Nettie went to work as a manicurist and for the Malco theatre as a ticket vendor. Sid and his sister, Edyth, attended Hot Springs public schools, where the boy excelled in boxing and drama and became an Eagle Scout, while shining shoes and hawking newspapers to supplement the family's meagre income. He was elected president of his class each of his high school years, the last of which he won the state Golden Gloves welterweight boxing title. He attended Henderson State College and the University of Arkansas, where he was elected president of the student body. He was also a member of the Arkansas Pershing Rifles Military Fraternity, Blue Key, and Sigma Alpha Epsilon. He graduated from the University's School of Law in 1936.

Read more about this topic:  Sid McMath

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    The city is loveliest when the sweet death racket begins. Her own life lived in defiance of nature, her electricity, her frigidaires, her soundproof walls, the glint of lacquered nails, the plumes that wave across the corrugated sky. Here in the coffin depths grow the everlasting flowers sent by telegraph.
    Henry Miller (1891–1980)