Childhood and Inheritance
Vincent endured a difficult childhood. His vain mother was embarrassed by his resemblance to his father and would humiliate him in public. In addition his parents' marriage was less than perfect. Vincent's only sister, Ava Alice Muriel Astor, was reportedly Ava Astor's child by a New York society man named Sidney Hatch—though others argued her biological father was Ava's future second husband, Lord Ribblesdale—while Vincent's father, a friend wrote in a letter to her husband, had numerous affairs and morals shockingly loose for a warden of the Episcopal church. They divorced in 1909 and on September 9, 1911 Jack Astor married Madeleine Talmadge Force, an 18-year-old beauty six months younger than his son. In 1919, Ava married a recently widowed English nobleman, Thomas Lister, Baron of Ribblesdale. While a student at Harvard University in 1912, Vincent inherited an estimated $69 million when his father went down with the Titanic. After his father's death, he quit college to manage his family's vast properties. He also wore his father's recovered gold pocket watch and wore it the rest of his life. Astor at the time was called "the richest boy in the world."
Read more about this topic: Vincent Astor
Famous quotes containing the words childhood and, childhood and/or inheritance:
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“Indeed, my mother’s beautiful face still shone with youthfulness that night when she so softly held my hands and sought to stop my tears; but, precisely, it seemed to me that this should not have happened, her anger would have saddened me less than this new sweetness that my childhood had never known; it seemed to me that, with a hidden and impious hand, I had just traced the first wrinkle and made appear the first grey hair in her soul.”
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