Early Life
Robert Emmet (Mychal) Judge was the son of Irish Catholic immigrants from County Leitrim and the firstborn of a pair of fraternal twins. With his twin sister Dympna and his older sister Erin, he grew up in Brooklyn, during the Great Depression. His lifelong affinity for the poor began at a young age; he often gave his only quarter to beggars on the street.
At the age of six, he watched his father die of a slow and painful illness. To compensate for his father's inability to work, Judge shined shoes at New York Penn Station from where he would visit St Francis of Assisi Church on West 31st Street. Seeing the Franciscan friars there, he later said, "I realized that I didn't care for material things ... I knew then that I wanted to be a friar."
Read more about this topic: Mychal Judge
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Very early in our children’s lives we will be forced to realize that the “perfect” untroubled life we’d like for them is just a fantasy. In daily living, tears and fights and doing things we don’t want to do are all part of our human ways of developing into adults.”
—Fred Rogers (20th century)
“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)