Youth
Forrest was born in Mexia, Texas, the second son of Robert E. and Gertrude Klug Forrest. One of his ancestors was Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. His father was severely injured as a United States Army Air Service pilot in World War I, and his brother Robert fought in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II and survived capture by the Germans.
Forrest left Mexia when he was a young boy. The oil business led his father to move the family to Houston, Texas; Saginaw, Michigan; and Olney, Illinois. At Olney High School, he was a scholar and an athlete, joining the National Honor Society and playing varsity basketball and football. A swimmer, he worked summers as a lifeguard. Forrest was president of his senior class and the debate club, and voted "most popular."
Read more about this topic: John F. Forrest
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“A glimpse through an interstice caught,
Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a barroom around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremarked seated in a corner,
Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand,
A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and
oath and smutty jest,
There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little,
perhaps not a word.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
“Better to endure hardship in youth than poverty in old age.”
—Chinese proverb.
“I cannot give them my confidence; pardon me, gentlemen, confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom: youth is the season of credulity.”
—William, Earl Of Pitt (1708–1778)