Early Life
Michael Landon was born Eugene Maurice Orowitz in Forest Hills, a neighborhood of Queens, New York. Landon's father, Eli Maurice Orowitz, was an actor and movie theater manager, and his mother, Peggy (O'Neill), was a dancer and comedienne. Eugene was the Orowitz's second child; his sister, Evelyn, was born three years earlier. His father was a Jewish American actor and his mother was from an Irish Catholic family. In 1941, when Landon was four years old, he and his family moved to the Philadelphia suburb of Collingswood, New Jersey. He attended and celebrated his Bar Mitzvah at Temple Beth Shalom, a Conservative synagogue, in Haddon Heights, an area that did not allow Jews until after World War II. His family recalls that Landon "went through a lot of hassle studying for the big event, which included bicycling to a nearby town every day to learn how to read Hebrew and do the chanting." He later attended Collingswood High School.
During his childhood, Landon was constantly worried about his mother's suicide attempts. Once the family went on a vacation on a beach, and his mother tried to jump off a cliff and drown herself, but a lifeguard was present and she was rescued. Soon after the attempt his mother acted as if nothing had happened. After a few minutes, Michael threw up. It was the worst experience of his life.
Stress overload from the suicide attempts of his mom caused Landon to battle the childhood problem of bedwetting, that was documented in his biography, Michael Landon: His Triumph and Tragedy. His mother put his wet sheets on display outside his window for all to see. He ran home every day and tried to remove them before his classmates could see. This served as the inspiration for the 1976 made-for-television movie The Loneliest Runner.
In high school, Landon was an excellent javelin thrower, his 193’ 4” toss in 1954 being the longest throw by a high schooler in the United States that year. This earned him an athletic scholarship to the University of Southern California, but he subsequently tore his shoulder ligaments, ending his javelin throwing career and his participation on the USC track team.
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