Early Life
Graham was born Wolodia Grajonca in Berlin, the son of Frieda (née Sass) and Yankel Grajonca, an engineer. He was given the nickname Wolfgang by his family early in his life. He was the youngest son of a lower-middle-class Jewish family that had emigrated from Russia prior to the rise of Nazism. Graham's father died two days after his son's birth. Graham's mother placed her son and his younger sister in an orphanage in Berlin due to the increasing peril to Jews in Germany. The orphanage sent them to France in a pre–Holocaust exchange of Jewish children for Christian orphans. Graham's older sisters stayed behind with his mother. After the fall of France, Graham was among a group of Jewish orphans spirited out of France, some of whom finally reached America. But a majority of the children—including Graham's older sister Tolla—did not survive the difficult journey. Graham thus was one of the One Thousand Children, (OTC), those mainly Jewish children who managed to flee Hitler and Europe and then came directly to America, but whose parents were forced to stay behind. Nearly all these OTC parents were murdered by Hitler. Graham's mother was murdered in Auschwitz. Graham had five sisters, Rita, Evelyn, Sonja, Ester and Tolla, only two of whom survived. Ester moved to the United States and was very close to Graham in his later life. His sister Rita escaped, first to Shanghai and then (after the war) to the United States.
Once in the United States, Graham stayed in a foster home in The Bronx in New York City. After being taunted as an immigrant and being called a Nazi because of his German accented English, Graham first worked on his accent, eventually being able to speak in a perfect New York accent, and also changed his name to be more "American." (He found "Graham" in the phonebook, it was closest to his real surname "Grajonca." According to Graham, both "Bill" and "Graham" were meaningless to him). Graham graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and then obtained a business degree from City College. He was later quoted as describing his training as that of an "efficiency expert".
Graham was drafted into the United States Army in 1951, and served in the Korean War, where he was awarded both the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Upon his return to the States he worked as a waiter/maître d' in Catskill Mountain resorts in upstate New York during their heyday. He was later quoted as saying his experience as a maître d' and with the poker games he hosted behind the scenes was good training for his eventual career as a promoter. Tito Puente, who played some of these resorts, went on record once saying that Graham was avid to learn Spanish from him, but only cared about the curse words. It was during the 1950s that Graham became a champion mambo dancer in the mambo clubs of New York City.
Read more about this topic: Bill Graham (promoter)
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“At the earliest ending of winter,
In March, a scrawny cry from outside
Seemed like a sound in his mind.
He knew that he heard it,
A bird’s cry, at daylight or before,
In the early March wind.”
—Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)
“Everything one does in life, even love, occurs in an express train racing toward death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”
—Jean Cocteau (1889–1963)