Childhood
Kramer was born in 1958 in New York City to a single Jewish mother. His birth father was Joey Bonner, a record promoter during the 1960s and 70s who was once the tour manager for Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and other soul/R&B artists of the era. At age 2, Kramer was adopted by Gary & Rosalyn Kramer of Long Island; Kramer did not learn of his origins until 2008.
Through his birth father, who died in 2007, Kramer has mixed African American, Polish and Native American ancestry. Kramer has an older brother by birth, from the same set of parents, who was a senior VP in charge of radio promotions at New York City's Jive Records. Kramer's great-great-great-grandfather Essex Bonner fought in an all-black battalion in the US Civil War, and his great-grandmother Pinky Gowakawa was a full-blooded Native American from a tribe based in Virginia.
Kramer's adoptive father, Gary Kramer, sold cars, while Rosalyn Kramer was a Long Island housewife who worked sometimes as a bookkeeper. Kramer graduated from Sachem High School in 1976, then moved to New York City, where he would remain a resident until 2003, living mostly in the Tribeca district.
Read more about this topic: Kramer (musician)
Famous quotes containing the word childhood:
“[Children] do not yet lie to themselves and therefore have not entered upon that important tacit agreement which marks admission into the adult world, to wit, that I will respect your lies if you will agree to let mine alone. That unwritten contract is one of the clear dividing lines between the world of childhood and the world of adulthood.”
—Leontine Young (20th century)
“Childhood lasts all through life. It returns to animate broad sections of adult life.... Poets will help us to find this living childhood within us, this permanent, durable immobile world.”
—Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962)
“It is not however, adulthood itself, but parenthood that forms the glass shroud of memory. For there is an interesting quirk in the memory of women. At 30, women see their adolescence quite clearly. At 30 a woman’s adolescence remains a facet fitting into her current self.... At 40, however, memories of adolescence are blurred. Women of this age look much more to their earlier childhood for memories of themselves and of their mothers. This links up to her typical parenting phase.”
—Terri Apter (20th century)