Childhood and Youth
Charles Ray Hatcher was born in Mound City, Missouri, a small town 34 miles north of St. Joseph. He was the youngest of Jesse and Lula Hatcher's four children. His father was an ex-convict and an abusive alcoholic. Hatcher was bullied in school, and he would often inflict pain on his classmates.
In the spring of 1935, he and his older brothers were flying a kite with copper wire they had found in an old Model T Ford. His oldest brother, Arthur Allen, was about to hand the kite to him when it hit a high-voltage power line and electrocuted him. Arthur was pronounced dead at the scene. Soon afterward, his father left home and divorced his mother. His mother remarried several times, and in 1945, Hatcher moved with his mother and her third husband to St. Joseph.
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Famous quotes containing the words childhood and, childhood and/or youth:
“Childhood and youth are vanity.”
—Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes 11:10.
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“If I use the media, even with tricks, to publicise a black youth being shot in the back in Teaneck, New Jersey ... then I should be praised for it, and it’s more of a comment on them than me that it would take tricks to make them cover the loss of life.”
—Al, Rev. Sharpton (b. 1954)