John Michael Hayes - Early Life

Early Life

Hayes was born in Worcester, Massachusetts to John Michael Hayes Sr. and Ellen Mabel Hayes. Hayes Sr. was a tool and die maker but had performed as a song and dance man on the Keith-Orpheum vaudeville circuit earlier in life.

As a child, Hayes missed much of his school career from second grade through fifth grade due to ear infections. During that time away from school, he discovered a love of reading. In junior high school, he became a staff writer on The Spectator, the school newspaper, and at age 16, he wrote for the high school yearbook as well as editing a Boy Scout weekly, The Eagle Trail. His work brought him to the attention of Worcester's Evening Gazette, and Hayes began penning articles about Boy Scout activities for the paper.

Later stints with the Worcester Telegram and a profile in The Christian Science Monitor led to a job with the Associated Press. Working diligently, Hayes managed to amass enough money to attend Massachusetts State College.

Read more about this topic:  John Michael Hayes

Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:

    Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...
    Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)

    Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.
    F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)

    For the soldier of time, it breathes a summer sleep,

    In which his wound is good because life was.
    No part of him was ever part of death.
    A woman smoothes her forehead with her hand
    And the soldier of time lies calm beneath that stroke.
    Wallace Stevens (1879–1955)