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:
“Make-believe is the avenue to much of the young child’s early understanding. He sorts out impressions and tries out ideas that are foundational to his later realistic comprehension. This private world sometimes is a quiet, solitary
world. More often it is a noisy, busy, crowded place where language grows, and social skills develop, and where perseverance and attention-span expand.”
—James L. Hymes, Jr. (20th century)
“Thus when I come to shape here at this table between my hands the story of my life and set it before you as a complete thing, I have to recall things gone far, gone deep, sunk into this life or that and become part of it; dreams, too, things surrounding me, and the inmates, those old half-articulate ghosts who keep up their hauntings by day and night ... shadows of people one might have been; unborn selves.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)