Early Life
Dan Gurney's father, John Gurney, was a prominent singer with the Metropolitan Opera in New York who retired in 1947 and moved the family to Riverside, California when Dan was a teenager. Young Dan quickly became caught up in the California hot rod culture. At age 19, he built and raced a car that went 138 miles per hour (mph) (222 kilometres per hour ) at the Bonneville Salt Flats. He then became an amateur drag racer and sports car racer. He served in the United States Army during the Korean War.
Read more about this topic: Dan Gurney
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“In the early forties and fifties almost everybody “had about enough to live on,” and young ladies dressed well on a hundred dollars a year. The daughters of the richest man in Boston were dressed with scrupulous plainness, and the wife and mother owned one brocade, which did service for several years. Display was considered vulgar. Now, alas! only Queen Victoria dares to go shabby.”
—M. E. W. Sherwood (1826–1903)
“At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashed, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)