Early Life
Eric Cooke was born on 25 February 1931 in Victoria Park, a suburb of Perth, and was the eldest of three children.
Cooke was born into an unhappy, violent family; his parents married solely because his mother was pregnant with him, and his alcoholic father beat him frequently, especially when the boy tried to protect his mother from the elder Cooke's drunken rages. Cooke was frequently hospitalized for head injuries and had suspected brain damage. He also suffered from recurrent headaches and was once admitted to an asylum.
Cooke was born with a hare lip and a cleft palate, for which he had one operation when he was three months old and another when he was 3½. Surgical operations to repair the deformities were not totally successful, and left him with a slight facial deformity, and he spoke in a mumble; these handicaps made him the target of bullying at school. He left school at 14 to work in order to support the family. As a teenager, Cooke spent his nights involved in petty crimes and vandalism; he would later serve 18 months in jail for burning down a church after he was rejected in a choir audition. At the age of 18, Cooke was sentenced to three years in prison after being arrested for arson and vandalism.
At the age of 21, Cooke joined the regular Australian Army, but was discharged three months later after it was discovered that, before enlistment, he had had a juvenile record for theft, breaking and entering, and arson.
On 14 October 1953, Cooke, then aged 22, married Sarah (Sally) Lavin, a 19-year-old waitress, at the Methodist Church in Cannington. They had seven children.
Cooke was arrested several times as a "peeping tom" and for other minor offences. In 1955 he was arrested for stealing a car and sentenced to two years hard labour. After his release, he took to wearing woman's gloves while committing crimes to avoid leaving fingerprints.
Read more about this topic: Eric Edgar Cooke
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“Whenever [Leonard Bernstein] entered or exited a country he would fill in on his passport form not composer or conductor, but musician. Of course people in the press spent a lot of Lenny’s life telling him what he should have done; he should have been a concert pianist, he should have composed more.... And people wouldn’t let him live his own life. But he created his own career, in his own image.”
—John Mauceri (b. 1945)