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:
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)