Early Life
Sanders was born on 9 September 1890 in a thin-walled, four room shack on a country road three miles east of Henryville, Indiana. He was the oldest of three children born to Wilbur David and Margaret Ann Sanders. Sanders was of Irish descent.
Sanders' father was a mild and affectionate man who tried to make a living as a farmer, but fell and broke his back and a leg and had to give it up. For two years he worked as a butcher in Henryville. One afternoon in the summer of 1895 he came home with a fever and died later that day. Sanders' mother took work in a tomato-canning factory, and the young Harland was required to cook for his family.
Sanders dropped out of school when he was 12. When his mother remarried in 1902 his stepfather beat him. So then, with his mother's approval, he left home to live with his uncle in Albany.
Read more about this topic: Colonel Sanders
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)
“In the early days of the world, the Almighty said to the first of our race “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread”; and since then, if we except the light and the air of heaven, no good thing has been, or can be enjoyed by us, without having first cost labour.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“There is no event greater in life than the appearance of new persons about our hearth, except it be the progress of the character which draws them.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)