Childhood
Richard Lynn Carpenter was born to parents Agnes Reuwer Tatum and Harold Bertram Carpenter at Grace-New Haven Hospital (now called Yale-New Haven Hospital) in New Haven, Connecticut, the same hospital where Karen was later born. He was named after his father's younger brother, Richard Lynn Carpenter. Carpenter and his uncle both married women named Mary.
He frequently played the piano while his sister, Karen, played baseball outside. He and Karen also liked to listen to the children's records his father bought for him when he was young. He was introduced to Perry Como and Ella Fitzgerald, among many others, and by age 12, he knew he wanted to be in the music industry.
The Carpenter family moved from New Haven to Downey, California, in June 1963. They wanted Richard to further his music career, and the family was fed up with the cold New England winters. At the time, Richard was 16 years old. Richard studied music at the California State University at Long Beach. There, he met Frank Pooler, a conductor and composer. Pooler wrote the lyrics to the Christmas classic "Merry Christmas Darling" in 1968. He also met good friend John Bettis, who co-wrote songs with Richard.
Read more about this topic: Richard Carpenter (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)
“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)
“Modern children were considerably less innocent than parents and the larger society supposed, and postmodern children are less competent than their parents and the society as a whole would like to believe. . . . The perception of childhood competence has shifted much of the responsibility for child protection and security from parents and society to children themselves.”
—David Elkind (20th century)