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:
“I am admonished in many ways that time is pushing me inexorably along. I am approaching the threshold of age; in 1977 I shall be 142. This is no time to be flitting about the earth. I must cease from the activities proper to youth and begin to take on the dignities and gravities and inertia proper to that season of honorable senility which is on its way.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“Why hast thou nothing in thy face?
Thou idol of the human race,
Thou tyrant of the human heart,
The flower of lovely youth that art;”
—Robert Bridges (1844–1930)
“Our Indian said that he was a doctor, and could tell me some medicinal use for every plant I could show him ... proving himself as good as his word. According to his account, he had acquired such knowledge in his youth from a wise old Indian with whom he associated, and he lamented that the present generation of Indians “had lost a great deal.””
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)