Background
By his own account, Paul Watkins lived "a pretty standard middle-class American upbringing," the exceptions being, in his own view, a religious orientation and early years spent in Sidon, Lebanon, where his father worked on a pipeline.
The move to Lebanon took place when Watkins was an infant. After four years in Lebanon, the Watkins family moved to Beaumont, Texas, and then to Thousand Oaks, California. When Watkins was a child, he enjoyed attending church and hiking in the oak groves near his home.
During his adolescence, Watkins became a Bible student and was active in youth organizations and church camps. At age 13, he became involved in evangelicalism, at first because he enjoyed the music and singing. By the time he enrolled in high school, his musical interests had become a "passion"; his religious interests had "waned."
Watkins dropped out of high school during his senior year, in which school officials distressed by his use of psychedelic drugs terminated his stint as student-body president, a position he held in every grade from first through eleventh. Having come to find his studies less interesting than music and marijuana, he became, as he would later write, "a fugitive flower child in search of enlightenment and truth." In the same December 1967 week in which he was put on probation after an arrest for marijuana possession, two friends of his were returned dead from the Vietnam war.
Read more about this topic: Paul Watkins (Manson Family)
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I had many problems in my conduct of the office being contrasted with President Kennedy’s conduct in the office, with my manner of dealing with things and his manner, with my accent and his accent, with my background and his background. He was a great public hero, and anything I did that someone didn’t approve of, they would always feel that President Kennedy wouldn’t have done that.”
—Lyndon Baines Johnson (1908–1973)
“Pilate with his question “What is truth?” is gladly trotted out these days as an advocate of Christ, so as to arouse the suspicion that everything known and knowable is an illusion and to erect the cross upon that gruesome background of the impossibility of knowledge.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)