Youth
Robert David Muldoon was born to parents Jim and Amie Muldoon in Auckland in 1921.
At age five Muldoon slipped while playing on the front gate, damaging his cheek and resulting in a distinctive scar. At age eight, Muldoon's father was admitted to hospital, where he died nearly 20 years later. This left Muldoon's mother to raise him on her own. During this time Muldoon came under the strong formative influence of his fiercely intelligent, iron-willed maternal grandmother, Jerusha, a committed socialist. Though Muldoon never accepted her creed, he did develop under her influence a potent ambition, a consuming interest in politics, and an abiding respect for New Zealand's welfare state. A brilliant student at school, Muldoon won a scholarship to attend Mount Albert Grammar School from 1933 to 1936. He left school at age 15, finding work at Fletcher Construction as an arrears clerk.
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Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Better to endure hardship in youth than poverty in old age.”
—Chinese proverb.
“When a god is once beguiled
By beauty of a mortal child,
And by her radiant youth delighted,
He is not fooled, but warily knoweth
His love shall never be requited.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)