Early Life and Education
Richard Halliburton was born in Brownsville, Tennessee to Wesley, a civil engineer and real estate speculator, and Nelle Nance Halliburton. A brother, Wesley Jr., was born in 1903. The family moved to Memphis, where the brothers, who were not close, spent their childhood. He attended Memphis University School. Richard's favorite subjects were geography and history; he also showed promise as a violinist, and was a fair golfer and tennis player. In 1915 Richard developed a rapid heart condition and spent some four months in bed before its symptoms were relieved. This included some time at the Battle Creek Sanitarium in Michigan, run by the innovative John Harvey Kellogg, whose philosophy of care featured regular exercise, sound nutrition, and frequent enemas. In 1917, family tragedy further shaped Richard's already present sense of life's utter transience when, following an apparent bout of rheumatic fever, his brother, thought strong and in fine health, suddenly died.
At 5' 7" (170 cm) and about 140 pounds (64 kg), Halliburton was throughout his life never robust, but would seldom complain of sickness or poor stamina. He graduated from The Lawrenceville School where he was chief editor of The Lawrence. In 1921 he graduated from Princeton University, where he was on the editorial board of The Daily Princetonian, and chief editor of The Princetonian Pictorial Magazine. He also attended courses for public speaking and considered a career as a lecturer.
Read more about this topic: Richard Halliburton
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early, life and/or education:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“You seem to have no real purpose in life and won’t realize at the age of twenty-two that for a man life means work, and hard work if you mean to succeed.”
—Jennie Jerome Churchill (1854–1921)
“Man is endogenous, and education is his unfolding. The aid we have from others is mechanical, compared with the discoveries of nature in us. What is thus learned is delightful in the doing, and the effect remains.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)