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:
“The great difficulty is first to win a reputation; the next to keep it while you live; and the next to preserve it after you die, when affection and interest are over, and nothing but sterling excellence can preserve your name. Never suffer youth to be an excuse for inadequacy, nor age and fame to be an excuse for indolence.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)
“The delicious faces of children, the beauty of school-girls, “the sweet seriousness of sixteen,” the lofty air of well-born, well-bred boys, the passionate histories in the looks and manners of youth and early manhood, and the varied power in all that well-known company that escort us through life,—we know how these forms thrill, paralyze, provoke, inspire, and enlarge us.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“We live in an age when to be young and to be indifferent can be no longer synonymous. We must prepare for the coming hour. The claims of the Future are represented by suffering millions; and the Youth of a Nation are the trustees of Posterity.”
—Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)