Bill Everett - Early Life

Early Life

William Everett was born May 18, 1917 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Everett, a fabulist who spun fanciful stories of his youth, claimed at various points to have graduated from high school in Arizona, or instead to have joined the U.S. Merchant Marine from ages 15 to 17, among other tales. In actuality, he was born at the Cambridge Hospital (renamed Mount Auburn Hospital in 1947) and raised in nearby Watertown, Massachusetts, with his parents Robert Maxwell Everett and Elaine Grace Brown Everett, and his sister Elizabeth, born in 1915. His 300-year-old New England family included Everett, Massachusetts' namesake, Edward Everett, who after serving as president of Harvard University became governor of Massachusetts and, in 1852, the U.S. Secretary of State. It also includes Edward's son, Massachusetts Congressman William Everett; and the poet William Blake.

Everett's father ran a successful trucking business, and when Everett was young the family bought a large summer home in Kennebunkport, Maine. Both parents supported the artist talents of their son, whose reading tastes ran to the classics rather than pulp novels or comic strips, and included work by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Jack London. He would later find artistic influence in such commercial magazine artists as Meade Schaeffer, Dean Cornwell, and especially Floyd MacMillan Davis.

At 12, in 1929, Everett contracted tuberculosis, and was pulled from sixth grade to go with his mother and his sister to Arizona, to recuperate for four months. They then returned to Massachusetts, but a recurrence of the disease sent the trio back West, first to Prescott, Arizona and then to Wickenburg, 60 miles away. There, taking his first drink, Everett began the path to teenage alcoholism. Nonetheless, he became well enough by 16 to return home with his mother and sister to the Boston area, where his father, unscathed by the Great Depression, had a large house in West Newton. His alcoholism and natural rebelliousness caused his parents to remove him from high school at age 16, in his sophomore year, and enroll him at in 1934 at Boston's Vesper George School of Art. His inability to focus, however, led him to drop out in 1935, after a year-and-a-half of the program.

That same year, his father died of acute appendicitis, and the family, though remaining well-off, moved to an apartment back in Cambridge. Everett knew his father "always wanted me to be a cartoonist, and he died, unfortunately, before he saw that come true. But that was probably in back of the whole thing."