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:
“Good habits formed at youth make all the difference.”
—Aristotle (384–322 B.C.)
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“An English family consists of a few persons, who, from youth to age, are found revolving within a few feet of each other, as if tied by some invisible ligature, tense as that cartilage which we have seen attaching the two Siamese.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)