Early Life
Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian with Jordanian citizenship born in Jerusalem, Mandatory Palestine. When he was 12 years old, his family emigrated, moving briefly to New York and then to California. He attended Eliot Junior High School (now known as Charles W. Eliot Middle School) in Altadena, California, John Muir High School and Pasadena City College. Sirhan's father, Bishara, was characterized as a stern man who often beat his sons harshly. Shortly after the family's move to California, Bishara returned alone to the Middle East. Sirhan has retained his Jordanian citizenship and has not become a U.S. citizen.
As an adult, Sirhan changed church denominations several times, joining Baptist and Seventh-day Adventist churches, and also allegedly dabbled in the occult. He was employed as a stable boy in 1965 at the Santa Anita race track in Arcadia, California.
Read more about this topic: Sirhan Sirhan
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition old. I have heard that whenever the name of man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced; it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the other side. But the inference from the working of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)