Early Life
Lofton was raised by his widowed grandmother, Rosie Persons, in "the slums" of East Chicago, Indiana. His mother, Annie, had Lofton while she was in high school and he weighed just three pounds (1.4 kg) at birth. His mother moved to Alabama after she graduated from high school and kept in contact with Lofton. Of his father, Lofton said, "We, as a family, don't even talk about it." Persons had glaucoma and because of her failing eye sight was unemployed. She refused to go on welfare but did collect Social Security as a result from her husband's death in 1960 (of bronchial pneumonia). When Lofton made the majors he built a new home in East Chicago for his grandmother and other family members.
Lofton attended Washington High School in East Chicago and played on the school's baseball team as a pitcher and center fielder. He was an all-state basketball player.
Read more about this topic: Kenny Lofton
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.”
—Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)
“He was discontented and wasted his life into the bargain; and yet he rated it as a gain in coming to America, that here you could get tea, and coffee, and meat every day. But the only true America is that country where you are at liberty to pursue such a mode of life as may enable you to do without these, and where the state does not endeavor to compel you to sustain slavery and war and other superfluous expenses which directly or indirectly result from the use of such things.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)