John Holmes (pornographic Actor) - Early Life

Early Life

John Holmes was born John Curtis Estes on August 8, 1944 in the small rural town of Ashville, Ohio, located a few miles south of the state capital of Columbus. John was the youngest of four children born to 26-year-old Mary June Holmes (née Barton); the name of his father was not listed on his birth certificate. Mary and her husband, Edward Holmes, the father of Holmes' three older siblings, Dale, Edward and Anne, were separated numerous times throughout their marriage. Mary changed John's surname to Holmes when he was a child. It was not until 1986, prior to a trip to Italy and while applying for a US passport to travel abroad, when his mother provided him with the hand-written copy of his original birth certificate that Holmes learned the name of his biological father, Carl Estes. John's mother was a devout Southern Baptist, who regularly attended the Milport Chapel Church along with her children, where John had perfect attendance.

John's stepfather, Edward Holmes, was an alcoholic who would come home inebriated, stumble about the house, and even vomit on the children. As a child, John enjoyed a reprieve from his turbulent home life when he would visit his maternal grandparents. Mary Holmes divorced her husband when Holmes was three or four and moved with her children to Columbus, Ohio, where they lived in a low-income apartment project with a friend of Mary's and her two children. The two women worked as clerks and waitresses in order to support their young children. When Holmes was eight, his mother married Harold Bowman. Shortly after, Holmes and his family moved from Columbus and settled in the small town of Pataskala, Ohio about 10 miles east of Columbus. Holmes recalled that Bowman was a good father until his younger half-brother, David, was born, at which point Bowman lost interest in his non-biological children and began neglecting them.

Because he was the youngest, John began to suffer several beatings at the hands of Bowman (who is said by Laurie Holmes in the John Holmes biography A Life Measured in Inches, 2008, to have had bipolar disorder) that continued well into his late adolescence. By the time he reached his teenage years, Holmes, who was very tall and strong for his age, fought back after Bowman had thrown him down a flight of stairs. After this incident, Holmes ran away from home at age 16, and after several days of living on the streets, returned home and informed his mother that if he moved back in he would probably kill Bowman should he strike him again. With his mother's written permission, Holmes dropped out of high school and enlisted in the U.S. Army at age 16. After Advanced Individual Training at Fort Gordon, Georgia, he spent three years in West Germany in the Signal Corps. Upon his honorable discharge, Holmes moved to Los Angeles, where he worked in a variety of jobs, including selling goods door-to-door and tending the vats at a Coffee-Nips factory. It was during his stint as an ambulance driver that he met a nurse named Sharon Gebenini in December 1964. They married in August 1965.

Holmes found work as a forklift driver at a meat packing warehouse in nearby Cudahy, California. However, repeated exposures to inhaling the sub-freezing air in the large walk-in freezer after being outside inhaling the desert-hot air caused severe health problems, leading to a pneumothorax of his right lung on three separate occasions between seven to nine months during the two years he worked there. According to Sharon Holmes, during the first 17 months of Sharon's marriage to John, she suffered three miscarriages.