Education and Military Service
One of eight children, Cotton was born in tiny Corley in Logan County, Arkansas. He graduated in 1917 from high school in Fort Smith, the seat of Sebastian County.
He then joined the United States Navy and served as the chief commissary steward on the USS Oklahoma off the coast of France. In November 1999, he was awarded for his valor during the Great War the National Order of the Legion of Honor, the highest designation honor bestowed by the French on foreign nationals.
After he was discharged from the Navy in 1919, Cotton enrolled at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville, where he studied accounting for two years. He then went to work for Shipley Bakery in Fort Smith.
In 1929, Cotton wed the former Genevieve Hathorn, who died on December 11, 1963. At the time of Cotton's death, he was married to the former Mae C. Compton (born 1918).
Read more about this topic: William F. Cotton
Famous quotes containing the words education, military and/or service:
“Our children will not survive our habits of thinking, our failures of the spirit, our wreck of the universe into which we bring new life as blithely as we do. Mostly, our children will resemble our own misery and spite and anger, because we give them no choice about it. In the name of motherhood and fatherhood and education and good manners, we threaten and suffocate and bind and ensnare and bribe and trick children into wholesale emulation of our ways.”
—June Jordan (b. 1939)
“The domestic career is no more natural to all women than the military career is natural to all men.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“The gods’ service is tolerable, man’s intolerable.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)