Youth
Heffron was born in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the third of five children to Joseph (a prison guard) and Anne. His parents were Irish and Catholic, and the family went to Mass every Sunday and the children went to Sacred Heart Catholic School. He attended South Philadelphia High School, but had to drop out to earn money during the Great Depression.
He went to work at New York Shipbuilding in Camden, New Jersey, sandblasting cruisers in preparation for them to be converted to light aircraft carriers. Because of his job he had a 2B exemption from military service, but he didn't use it, since he wanted to go with his friend, Anthony Cianfrani, into the airborne. When a teenager, he had also developed an intermittent medical condition with which his hands and fingers would curl under and lock-up, causing severe pain (possibly, the onset of Dupuytren's Contracture), but he never told anyone about this because he wanted to keep playing football in school. Either the exemption or the medical condition would have allowed him to remain stateside, but he refused to stay home when his brothers (Joseph, James, and John), friends, and neighbors were all doing their duty. Heffron enlisted on November 7, 1942 in his hometown.
Read more about this topic: Edward Heffron
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, whiles memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“For youth is a frail thing, not unafraid.
Firstly inclined to take what it is told.
Firstly inclined to lean. Greedy to give
Faith tidy and total. To a total God.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“What’s a man’s age? He must hurry more, that’s all;
Cram in a day, what his youth took a year to hold.”
—Robert Browning (1812–1889)