Childhood and Family Life
Kaplan was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. He had three siblings. His father died of tuberculosis, when Kaplan was only 9 years of age, leaving his mother to raise four children on her own. His mother struggled to make ends meet as a seamstress, but was forced to place the children in an orphanage at a young age. Hank Kaplan spent much of his early years growing up in the Hebrew Orphan Asylum of New York (HOA), also known as the Academy. He was an active member of HOA and participated in annual events throughout his entire lifetime. Kaplan and his siblings later moved back with their mother during his early teenage years, and she supported the children by working as a seamstress. She owned a business designing and sewing wedding gowns.
Kaplan became interested in boxing beginning from his early years in Brooklyn, after he suffered a bloody nose in his childhood from a fight with another smaller child at Camp Wakitan in upstate New York. He had his first and only professional boxing fight as an adolescent in Bridgeport, Connecticut in the early 1940s, which he won.
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