Early Life
Salter was born in Hong Kong, where her mother and father, Robert Semple, were doing missionary work. Robert died of dysentery and malaria shortly before her birth, and her mother named her Roberta Star — "Roberta" in her father's memory and "Star" because she had brightened what her mother perceived to be a grim future.
Roberta inherited her mother's "brilliant smile," biographer Daniel Mark Epstein noted in his 1993 book Sister Aimee. She led children's services at her mother's revivals. Roberta also hosted a radio program and wrote a youth column, "Aunt Birdie," for the church newspaper.
Read more about this topic: Roberta Semple Salter
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or just felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.”
—Gerald Early (20th century)
“The power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implications of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern, the condition of feeling life in general so completely that you are well on your way to knowing any particular corner of it—this cluster of gifts may almost be said to constitute experience.”
—Henry James (1843–1916)