Childhood and Early Life
Atwater was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Harvey Dillard, an insurance adjustor, and Alma "Toddy" Page Atwater. He had two siblings, Ann and Joe. He grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, where his childhood was marred with tragedy when his three-year-old brother, Joe, was scalded to death, when he pulled a deep fryer full of hot oil on himself.
As a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina, Atwater played guitar in a rock band, The Upsetters Revue. Even at the height of his political power, he would often play concerts in clubs and church basements, solo or with B.B. King, in the Washington, D.C. area. He released an album called "Red, Hot And Blue" on Curb Records, featuring Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Sam Moore, Chuck Jackson, and B.B. King, who got co-billing with Atwater. Robert Hilburn wrote about the album in the Los Angeles Times on April 5, 1990: "The most entertaining thing about this ensemble salute to spicy Memphis-style '50s and '60s R&B is the way it lets you surprise your friends. Play a selection such as 'Knock on Wood' or 'Bad Boy' for someone without identifying the singer, then watch their eyes bulge when you reveal that it's the controversial national chairman of the Republican Party... Lee Atwater."
During the 1960s Atwater briefly played backup guitar for Percy Sledge, and frequently played with bluesmen such as B.B. King.
In 1970, Atwater graduated from Newberry College, a small private Lutheran institution in Newberry, South Carolina, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. At Newberry, Atwater served as the governor of the South Carolina Student Legislature. Atwater earned a master of arts degree in communications from the University of South Carolina in 1977. Atwater married his wife, Sally Dunbar, in 1978; they had three children, Sara Lee, Ashley Page, and Sally Theodosia.
Read more about this topic: Lee Atwater
Famous quotes containing the words childhood, early and/or life:
“Oh! mystery of man, from what a depth
Proceed thy honours. I am lost, but see
In simple childhood something of the base
On which thy greatness stands; but this I feel,
That from thyself it comes, that thou must give,
Else never canst receive. The days gone by
Return upon me almost from the dawn
Of life: the hiding-places of man’s power
Open; I would approach them, but they close.”
—William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,—a sort of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility, a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The changes in our life must come from the impossibility to live otherwise than according to the demands of our conscience ... not from our mental resolution to try a new form of life.”
—Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910)