Terry Robbins - Early Life

Early Life

Terry Robbins was raised in a Queens County, New York by his mother Olga, a Hunter College alumna and his father Sam who worked at a garment factory. When Robbins was age six, his mother began to suffer from breast cancer which eventually caused her death three years later. As Olga's health was deteriorated, Robbins’s father hired a domestic worker who was nicknamed "Auntie Annie" by Robbins and his sister. "Auntie Annie" remained in the Robbins employ for two years until Olga died.

Two years after his mother’s death, Robbins' father had found a new wife. These traumatic and rapid shifts severely damaged the family dynamic. The two children each coped with the emotional upheaval in different ways as Barbra acted out by becoming disruptive and uncooperative, while Robbins became withdrawn and buried himself in schoolwork. He started achieving honors recognition and found a group of friends that continued to push each other above and beyond the standard curriculum. Robbins also began to turn to poetry and music as his refuge, with his sister and cousins they discovered the musical world of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Barbra Streisand. His passion for language drew him into studying the lyrical content of the music. Robbins, an avid pop music fan and drew particular inspiration from a 1965 US Top 40 Subterranean Homesick Blues, a 1965 Top 40 single by Columbia Records artist Bob Dylan which would have a profound influence in forming the identity and SDS/Weathermen identity.

After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island Robbins attended Kenyon College in Ohio, in the fall of 1964 and majored in English. In his first year of college, Robbins heard about Dickie Magidoff, an member of a far left political group called Students for a Democratic Society who was working in the Cleveland area. In the summer of 1965, he joined Magidoff and became involved in the He moved into the Cleveland ERAP house and began helping raise capital to support their efforts. The fall of 1965, the beginning of his sophomore year, Robbins was eager to start up his own SDS chapter at the Kenyon College campus; he was the only official SDS member during his time there. The following 1966 spring semester he was able to team up with the chaplain of the school and organize a Student-Faculty Committee on the Vietnam War. In an informal letter to Dickie Magidoff, Robbins spoke of his successful strategy at the Kenyon College campus and how he was able to get the support of “five faculty members and at least eighteen students to gather together and attempt to make a case for a critical approach to American foreign policy.”