Early Life and Name Change
Harry Lewiston was born Israel Harry Jaffe in Lithuania on April 2, 1900, and emigrated to the United States with his family in 1906. The eldest of four siblings, he was raised in Worcester, Massachusetts in a strict Orthodox Jewish household. In 1914, he ran away from home and joined the combined Sells Floto Circus / Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He claimed that he was seventeen years old in order to be allowed to stay with the circus, and was renamed "Lewiston," reportedly assigned based on the first major city he worked in, Lewiston, Maine. While the circus toured the United States, Lewiston worked as a pony groomer and led the animals in the parade, wearing what he called an "Arab costume" as part of that year's "East Meets West" theme.
Read more about this topic: Harry Lewiston
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or change:
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I have given the best of myself and the best work of my life to help obtain political freedom for women, knowing that upon this rests the hope not only of the freedom of men but of the onward civilization of the world.”
—Mary S. Anthony (1827–1907)
“A child... who has learned from fairy stories to believe that what at first seemed a repulsive, threatening figure can magically change into a most helpful friend is ready to believe that a strange child whom he meets and fears may also be changed from a menace into a desirable companion.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)