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:
“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)
“We only seem to learn from Life that Life doesn’t matter so much as it seemed to do—it’s not so burningly important, after all, what happens. We crawl, like blinking sea-creatures, out of the Ocean onto a spur of rock, we creep over the promontory bewildered and dazzled and hurting ourselves, then we drop in the ocean on the other side: and the little transit doesn’t matter so much.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“Our image has undergone change from David fighting Goliath to being Goliath.”
—Yitzhak Shamir (b. 1915)