Early Years
Born in Kansas City, Missouri, the son of Latvian immigrants, Goodman Ace (he inverted his first non de plume, Asa Goodman) grew up wanting to write, proving it as the editor of his high school newspaper. Ace was also a roller skating messenger for Montgomery Ward while he studied journalism at Kansas City Polytechnic Institute. He also wrote a weekly column called "The Dyspeptic" for the school newspaper. In due course, after also working at the post office and a local haberdashery to support his mother and sisters after his father's early death, he became a reporter and columnist for the Kansas City Journal-Post.
Jane Epstein was his high school sweetheart; the problem for Ace was that the romance was one-sided until he became a local newspaper reporter. Jane wanted to attend the sold-out performance of Al Jolson in Kansas City; her boyfriends were unable to get tickets, but Ace had access to the concert via his press pass. The Jolson concert was the couple's first date; they married six months later, in 1922.
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Famous quotes containing the words early years, early and/or years:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“For my people lending their strength to the years: to the gone
years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding;”
—Margaret Abigail Walker (b. 1915)