Harold Gray - Early Life

Early Life

Born in Kankakee, Illinois, Gray grew up on a farm near the small town of Chebanse, Illinois. His parents, Ira L. Gray and Estella M. Rosencrans, both died before he finished high school in 1912 in West Lafayette, Indiana, where the family had moved. In 1913, he got his first newspaper job at a Lafayette daily. He graduated from Purdue University in 1917 with a Bachelor of Science degree in engineering, but as an artist, he was largely self-taught. In 1917, he found a position with the Chicago Tribune at a salary of $15 a week. During World War I, he served as a bayonet instructor with the rank of lieutenant. Discharged from the military, he returned to the Chicago Tribune and stayed until 1919 when he left to freelance in commercial art. In 1923, while residing in Lombard, Illinois, he became a Freemason.

Read more about this topic:  Harold Gray

Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:

    [My early stories] are the work of a living writer whom I know in a sense, but can never meet.
    Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)

    There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.
    Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679)