Jerry Siegel - Early Life

Early Life

Jerry Siegel was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the youngest of six children of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania, Sarah (née Fine) and Mitchell Siegel He was preceded by sisters Minerva and Roslyn, both in Lithuania, and brothers Harry and Leo and sister Isabel. His father was a sign painter who opened a haberdashery and encouraged his son's artistic inclinations. Mitchell died of a heart attack brought on by the robbery of his store, when Jerry was in junior high school. Siegel was a fan of movies, comic strips, and especially science fiction pulp magazines. He became active in what would become known as fandom, corresponding with other science fiction fans, including the young future author Jack Williamson. In 1929, Siegel published what might have been the first SF fanzine, Cosmic Stories, which he produced with a manual typewriter and advertised in the classified section of Science Wonder Stories. He published several other booklets over the next few years.

Siegel attended Glenville High School in Cleveland, Ohio and worked for its weekly student newspaper, The Torch. He was a shy, not particularly popular student, but he achieved a bit of fame among his peers for his popular Tarzan parody, "Goober the Mighty." At about age 16, while at Glenville, he befriended his later collaborator, Joe Shuster. Siegel described his friendship with the similarly shy and bespectacled Shuster: "When Joe and I first met, it was like the right chemicals coming together."

The writer-artist team broke into comics with Major Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson's landmark New Fun, debuting with the musketeer swashbuckler "Henri Duval" and the supernatural-crimefighter strip Doctor Occult in issue #6 (Oct. 1935).