Early Life
Parsons was the only child of a rich but dysfunctional family. When he was a teenager his father walked out on his mother and him. Parsons landed a job with the Hercules Powder Company while still a senior in high school. The following year, he entered Pasadena Junior College and spent two years at the University of Southern California, although he did not graduate.
Read more about this topic: John Whiteside Parsons
Famous quotes related to early life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“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)