Early Life and Adulthood
Demara, known locally as "Fred", was born in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1921, at 40 Texas Avenue in the lower southwest Tower Hill Neighborhood. His father, Ferdinand Waldo Demara, Sr. was born in Rhode Island and worked in Lawrence's old Theatre District as a motion picture operator. In those days, his father did financially well and they lived on Jackson St in Lawrence, an upper class district with many larger-size, finer homes. However it was his uncle, Napoleon Louis Demara, Sr. who owned those theatres, where Fred's father, Ferdinand, Sr. was an active union member. At some point during the earlier stages of the 1930s depression, Fred's father lost virtually all he had and the family moved to poorer districts in the city. This angered the young man.
He ran away from home at the age of sixteen to join Cistercian monks in Rhode Island, where he stayed for several years. He joined the U.S. Army in 1941.
Read more about this topic: Ferdinand Waldo Demara
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or adulthood:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Young, and so thin, and so straight.
So straight! as if nothing could ever bend her.
But poor men would bend her, and doing things with poor men,
Being much in bed, and babies would bend her over,
And the rest of things in life that were for poor women,
Coming to them grinning and pretty with intent to bend and to kill.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“Personal change, growth, development, identity formation—these tasks that once were thought to belong to childhood and adolescence alone now are recognized as part of adult life as well. Gone is the belief that adulthood is, or ought to be, a time of internal peace and comfort, that growing pains belong only to the young; gone the belief that these are marker events—a job, a mate, a child—through which we will pass into a life of relative ease.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)