Early Life
She was one of five children born to Olga Nelson, the daughter of a Swedish immigrant to the United States. Her older sister Helen and two other sisters were fathered by Thomas Cowley, an Englishman working for the Standard Oil Company in Chicago, Illinois. After he died in 1920, her mother married Burton Northrup, a traveling salesman, and gave birth to Sara and another sister, Nancy. In 1923 the family moved to Pasadena, a destination said to have been chosen by Olga using a Oujia board. Although she later remembered her childhood with warmth, Sara's upbringing was marred by her sexually abusive father, who was imprisoned in 1928 for financial fraud. In 1933, at the age of 22, her sister Helen met the 18-year-old Jack Parsons, a brilliant chemist who went on to be a noted rocket scientist and an avid student and practitioner of the occult. They were engaged in July 1934 and married in April 1935.
Read more about this topic: Sara Northrup Hollister
Famous quotes related to early life:
“... 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)