Early Life
Smith was born on May 12, 1914 in Ferriday in Concordia Parish in eastern Louisiana near Natchez, Mississippi, to Howard K. Smith, a nightwatchman descended from a poor but "gentleman-farming" family in Lettsworth in Pointe Coupee Parish north of Baton Rouge, and the former Minnie Gates, the daughter of a Cajun riverboat pilot.
Smith worked his way through Tulane University in New Orleans, having studied German and journalism. After his graduation in 1936, with both bachelor of arts degree, he signed on as a deckhand with a ship bound for Germany, where he briefly studied at Heidelberg University. In 1936, he spent a year as a reporter in New Orleans before securing a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford University's Merton College, from which he graduated in 1939. Smith became active in student politics, mostly protesting Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's seemingly soft attitude toward Nazism. While at Oxford, he was the first American ever to chair the university Labour Club.
Read more about this topic: Howard K. Smith
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“The science, the art, the jurisprudence, the chief political and social theories, of the modern world have grown out of Greece and Rome—not by favor of, but in the teeth of, the fundamental teachings of early Christianity, to which science, art, and any serious occupation with the things of this world were alike despicable.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)