Personal Life
Willie Smith had 10 brothers and a sister (including half-siblings). His older brother Jerome would die at the age of 15. His other older brother, George, became an officer in Atlantic City, and he would pass away in 1946. Willie said of George, "Our paths didn't cross very often in later life. His friends and connections were always on the other side of the fence from mine." His half-brother Robert owned a bar on West Street in Newark. His half-brother Melvin lived on Mulberry Street in Manhattan. As for his other two half-brothers, Norman and Ralph, he had no idea what became of them. All of the other siblings lived to the ages of 3 to 7.
He worked for a short period as a Hebrew cantor in a Harlem Synagogue.
Read more about this topic: Willie "The Lion" Smith
Famous quotes containing the words personal and/or life:
“Wherever the State touches the personal life of the infant, the child, the youth, or the aged, helpless, defective in mind, body or moral nature, there the State enters “woman’s peculiar sphere,” her sphere of motherly succor and training, her sphere of sympathetic and self-sacrificing ministration to individual lives.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)