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 and, education, military and/or service:
“The Cairo conference ... is about a complicated web of education and employment, consumption and poverty, development and health care. It is also about whether governments will follow where women have so clearly led them, toward safe, simple and reliable choices in family planning. While Cairo crackles with conflict, in the homes of the world the orthodoxies have been duly heard, and roundly ignored.”
—Anna Quindlen (b. 1952)
“Law without education is a dead letter. With education the needed law follows without effort and, of course, with power to execute itself; indeed, it seems to execute itself.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“Stately as a galleon, I sail across the floor,
Doing the military two-step, as in the days of yore.”
—Joyce Grenfell (1910–1979)
“The masochist: “I send my tormentor hurrying hither and thither in the service of my suffering and desire.””
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)