Early Life
Mayer was born in El Paso, Texas to Jesse and Margott Mayer. After his father died two years later, his penniless mother moved him and his brother Aubrey to New Orleans; she then entered nursing school and placed the children in an orphanage. As a teenager, Mayer attended a trade school where he trained as a tool and die maker. He then left New Orleans and spent much of the 1930s travelling from job to job from Nome, Alaska to the Caribbean, working in a rubber plant and in gold mines among other jobs. He was then drafted into the United States Navy in 1944 while living in Los Angeles, and spent two years stationed at the San Diego Naval Station. He was discharged as a fireman first class and returned to a life of drifting, working in Miami as a machinist in the mid-1950s, as a hotel maintenance man in Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and Jamaica during the 1960s, and as a helicopter mechanic in South Vietnam from 1969-1970. In 1971, he was seriously injured while working on an oil rig in Brunei and recuperated in Singapore before travelling across South Asia. In 1976, he was arrested in Hong Kong for possession of 20 kilograms (44 lb) of marijuana in a botched attempt to make a sale. Mayer researched the law in jail and after fifteen months managed to get his conviction reversed on a technicality. He was then deported back to the U.S., and returned to working in hotels.
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