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 and, childhood, early and/or life:
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“She that but little patience knew,
From childhood on, had now so much
A grey gull lost its fear and flew
Down to her cell and there alit,
And there endured her fingers’ touch
And from her fingers ate its bit.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“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)