Family History and Early Life
The Fonda family had migrated from Genoa, Italy, to the Netherlands in the 15th century. In 1642 they immigrated to the Dutch colony of New Netherland on the East Coast of North America. The Fondas were among the first Dutch population to settle in what is now upstate New York, establishing the town of Fonda, New York. By 1888, most of the Fondas had relocated to Nebraska.
Henry Fonda was born in Grand Island, Nebraska, to advertising-printing jobber William Brace Fonda and his wife, Elma Herberta (née Jaynes), in the second year of their marriage.
Fonda was brought up as a Christian Scientist, though he was baptized an Episcopalian at St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Grand Island. He said, "y whole damn family was nice." They were a close family and highly supportive, especially in health matters, as they avoided doctors due to their religion. Despite having a religious background, he later on became an agnostic. Fonda was a bashful, short boy who tended to avoid girls, except his sisters, and was a good skater, swimmer, and runner. He worked part-time in his father's print plant and imagined a possible career as a journalist. Later, he worked after school for the phone company. He also enjoyed drawing. Fonda was active in the Boy Scouts of America; Teichmann reports that he reached the rank of Eagle Scout. When he was about 14, his father took him to observe a lynching, from the window of his father's plant, of a young black man accused of rape. This enraged the young Fonda and he kept a keen awareness of prejudice for his entire adult life. By his senior year in high school, Fonda had grown to more than six feet tall, but remained a shy teenager. He attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism, but he did not graduate. He took a job with the Retail Credit Company.
Read more about this topic: Henry Fonda
Famous quotes containing the words early life, family, history, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“The Family is the Country of the heart. There is an angel in the Family who, by the mysterious influence of grace, of sweetness, and of love, renders the fulfilment of duties less wearisome, sorrows less bitter. The only pure joys unmixed with sadness which it is given to man to taste upon earth are, thanks to this angel, the joys of the Family.”
—Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–1872)
“To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.”
—George Orwell (1903–1950)
“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. So simple. You’ve got to catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house. The ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s “Pastoral.” A letter scribbled on her office stationery that you carry around in your pocket because it smells of all the lilacs in Ohio.”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“He was a man of Spartan habits, and at sixty was scrupulous about his diet at your table, excusing himself by saying that he must eat sparingly and fare hard, as became a soldier, or one who was fitting himself for difficult enterprises, a life of exposure.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)