Early Life and Education
Lawrence's parents and grandparents were from Tennessee. Lawrence's father attended Vanderbilt University, where he was a noted student-athlete who graduated in 1924. Lawrence was a native of Nashville, and attended local schools. When in the fourth grade, Lawrence composed a poem called Little Fly:
- Little Fly
- I saw a little fly up on the wall.
- I said to him "Little fly, aren't you afraid you'll fall?"
- He looked at me a minute, then winked his eye.
- And then he shifted into second, and then into high.
Lawrence distinguished himself as a student athlete at Nashville's West High School, and in 1947 turned down a scholarship at Yale University to attend the United States Naval Academy.
Read more about this topic: William P. Lawrence
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I got a little secretarial job after college, but I thought of it as a prelude. Education, work, whatever you did before marriage, was only a prelude to your real life, which was marriage.”
—Bonnie Carr (c. early 1930s)
“They are girls. Green girls.
Death and life is their daily work.
Death seams up and down the leaf.
I call the leaves my death girls.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“It’s fairly obvious that American education is a cultural flop. Americans are not a well-educated people culturally, and their vocational education often has to be learned all over again after they leave school and college. On the other hand, they have open quick minds and if their education has little sharp positive value, it has not the stultifying effects of a more rigid training.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)