Early Life and Influences
Parkinson's early life was affected by the Great Depression and the Second World War. Growing up in San Francisco as the son of a master-plumber union leader who was blacklisted during the General Strike of the late 1930s, Parkinson developed a respect for labor and a sensitivity to social injustice. He attended Lowell High School and some junior college, where he was inspired by gifted teachers. When WWII began, Parkinson enlisted in the Army, but was eventually discharged because he was too tall. In the years that followed, Parkinson worked a motley series of jobs, as an insurance agent, a ship's outfitter, and a lumberjack. And he continued to read widely and deeply. He eventually returned to UC Berkeley, where he completed his Bachelor's degree in three years.
Read more about this topic: Thomas Parkinson
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or influences:
“Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Parents vary in their sense of what would be suitable repayment for creating, sustaining, and tolerating you all those years, and what circumstances would be drastic enough for presenting the voucher. Obviously there is no repayment that would be sufficient . . . but the effort to call in the debt of life is too outrageous to be treated as anything other than a joke.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Professors of literature, who for the most part are genteel but mediocre men, can make but a poor defense of their profession, and the professors of science, who are frequently men of great intelligence but of limited interests and education, feel a politely disguised contempt for it; and thus the study of one of the most pervasive and powerful influences on human life is traduced and neglected.”
—Yvor Winters (1900–1968)