Early Life
John Alvin Ray was born in Dallas, Oregon, spending part of his childhood on a farm, lived in Dallas, Polk County, Oregon with parents Elmer and Hazel Ray and older sister Elma Ray, and attended grade school there, eventually moving to Portland, Oregon where he attended high school. Ray was not of Native American origin: it was rumored that his great-grandmother was a full-blooded Blackfoot Indian, but in a response to a reporter questioning his heritage in 1952, Ray, puzzled, looked down at his shoes and said "Blackfoot". His great-grandfather was Oregon pioneer George Kirby Gay of Berkeley, Gloucestershire, England.
He became deaf in his right ear at age 13 after an accident during a Boy Scout "blanket toss," a variation of the trampoline. (Ray later performed wearing a hearing aid. Surgery performed in New York in 1958 left him almost completely deaf in both ears, although hearing aids helped his condition.)
Read more about this topic: Johnnie Ray
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fail that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing “fixes” a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child’s long life ahead.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“If Mr. Vincent Price were to be co-starred with Miss Bette Davis in a story by Mr. Edgar Allan Poe directed by Mr. Roger Corman, it could not fully express the pent-up violence and depravity of a single day in the life of the average family.”
—Quentin Crisp (b. 1908)