Childhood and Early Life
Atwater was born in Atlanta, Georgia, to Harvey Dillard, an insurance adjustor, and Alma "Toddy" Page Atwater. He had two siblings, Ann and Joe. He grew up in Aiken, South Carolina, where his childhood was marred with tragedy when his three-year-old brother, Joe, was scalded to death, when he pulled a deep fryer full of hot oil on himself.
As a teenager in Columbia, South Carolina, Atwater played guitar in a rock band, The Upsetters Revue. Even at the height of his political power, he would often play concerts in clubs and church basements, solo or with B.B. King, in the Washington, D.C. area. He released an album called "Red, Hot And Blue" on Curb Records, featuring Carla Thomas, Isaac Hayes, Sam Moore, Chuck Jackson, and B.B. King, who got co-billing with Atwater. Robert Hilburn wrote about the album in the Los Angeles Times on April 5, 1990: "The most entertaining thing about this ensemble salute to spicy Memphis-style '50s and '60s R&B is the way it lets you surprise your friends. Play a selection such as 'Knock on Wood' or 'Bad Boy' for someone without identifying the singer, then watch their eyes bulge when you reveal that it's the controversial national chairman of the Republican Party... Lee Atwater."
During the 1960s Atwater briefly played backup guitar for Percy Sledge, and frequently played with bluesmen such as B.B. King.
In 1970, Atwater graduated from Newberry College, a small private Lutheran institution in Newberry, South Carolina, where he was a member of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity. At Newberry, Atwater served as the governor of the South Carolina Student Legislature. Atwater earned a master of arts degree in communications from the University of South Carolina in 1977. Atwater married his wife, Sally Dunbar, in 1978; they had three children, Sara Lee, Ashley Page, and Sally Theodosia.
Read more about this topic: Lee Atwater
Famous quotes containing the words childhood and, childhood, early and/or life:
“... all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed, and the gloom connected with everything associated with the name of religion, the church, the parsonage, the graveyard, and the solemn, tolling bell.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)
“When you have really exhausted an experience you always reverence and love it. The two things that nearly all of us have thoroughly and really been through are childhood and youth. And though we would not have them back again on any account, we feel that they are both beautiful, because we have drunk them dry.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)
“It is so very late that we
May call it early by and by. Good night.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“One of the fundamental reasons why so many doctors become cynical and disillusioned is precisely because, when the abstract idealism has worn thin, they are uncertain about the value of the actual lives of the patients they are treating. This is not because they are callous or personally inhuman: it is because they live in and accept a society which is incapable of knowing what a human life is worth.”
—John Berger (b. 1926)