Early Years
Rosenthal was born on May 2, 1922, in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario to a family of Jewish descent. His father was a farmer named Harry Shipiatsky who emigrated to Canada in the 1890s and changed his name to Rosenthal. His father worked as a fur trapper and trader around Hudson Bay, where he met and married Sarah Dickstein.
Rosenthal was the youngest of six children. When he was still a child, his family moved to the Bronx, New York, where Rosenthal's father found work as a house painter. During the 1930s, though, tragedy would hit the family, with Rosenthal's father dying in a job accident and four of his siblings dying from various causes. Rosenthal developed the bone-marrow disease osteomyelitis, causing him extreme pain. After several operations Rosenthal recovered enough to attend public schools in New York and attend City College. In 1943, while at City College, he became the campus correspondent for The New York Times. In 1944, he became a staff reporter.
According to his son, Andrew Rosenthal, Rosenthal was a member of the Communist Party youth league briefly as a teenager in the late 1930s.
Read more about this topic: A. M. Rosenthal
Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“To be honest, I knew that there was no difference between dying at their years old and dying at seventy because, naturally, in both cases, other men and women will live on, for thousands of years at that.... It was still I who was dying, whether it was today or twenty years from now.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)