Early Life
Jeshua Muchnick was born in the Ukraine to a Jewish family on August 22, 1905, but moved to the United States in 1911. He grew up in St. Louis, and his name was changed to Samuel when his father decided that Jeshua (Jesus, or Joshua) was an inappropriate name for a Jewish child. While attending school, he worked various jobs to help out his family before earning his high school degree (though he ditched his graduation to attend a live wrestling event at the Odeon Theatre, where he watched the great Wladek Zbyszko in action). In 1924, he took a job with the U.S. Postal Service; and in 1926, he joined the sports staff at the St. Louis Times newspaper, where he covered the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team while developing many influential acquaintances (including Babe Ruth, Al Capone, and others). Muchnick also covered professional wrestling, where he formed a friendship with Tom Packs, who was the Midwest’s top sports promoter. In 1932, the Times merged with the rival St. Louis Star, and Muchnick left the paper for a position as Packs’ publicist, where he handled public relations, finances, and even booking duties.
Read more about this topic: Sam Muchnick
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”
—Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
“In a period of a people’s life that bears the designation “transitional,” the task of a thinking individual, of a sincere citizen of his country, is to go forward, despite the dirt and difficulty of the path, to go forward without losing from view even for a moment those fundamental ideals on which the entire existence of the society to which he belongs is built.”
—Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev (1818–1883)