Early Life
The eldest of eight children, Tammy Faye was born Tamara Faye LaValley in International Falls, Minnesota, to Pentecostal preachers Carl and Rachel Fairchild LaValley. Her parents were married in 1941, one year before Tammy Faye was born. Shortly after she was born, a painful divorce soured her mother against other ministers, alienating her from the church. After the divorce, Tammy Faye continued living in a strict atmosphere with her mother and brother. In 1948, when she was six, her mother married Fred Grover, who worked in paper mills. His salary increased their income, but the marriage also added six children to the household.
As a child in the 1950s, she helped her mother with household chores and babysat her younger siblings; but she was often spoiled by her favorite aunt, Virginia Fairchild, who was a retired department store manager. She attended her aunt's church in 1952.
When she was accompanied by a friend to the Assemblies of God church, at age 10, she said she "felt the glow of God's love and wanted to call herself upon the Lord." Her entire family gathered around her for celebrations, particularly Christmas, which was her favorite holiday. In 1956, she started spending summers at Bible camp and was voted "Queen". Also in 1956, she attended Falls High School, where she sang in the choir, and got an after-school job at Woolworth's. She didn't attend school dances, baseball games, or even movies, as her church did not allow it. Before she graduated in 1960, her mother suggested that Tammy Faye would become a minister.
Read more about this topic: Tammy Faye Baker
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“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)
“I sometimes have the sense that I live my life as a writer with my nose pressed against the wide, shiny plate glass window of the “mainstream” culture. The world seems full of straight, large-circulation, slick periodicals which wouldn’t think of reviewing my book and bookstores which will never order it.”
—Jan Clausen (b. 1943)