My father was very strong. I don't agree with a lot of the ways he brought me up. I don't agree with a lot of his values, but he did have a lot of integrity, and if he told us not to do something, he didn't do it either.
John and I were lucky because our mother was a strong woman with high expectations and a strong sense of values. She encouraged us to pursue things we were interested in and not think about what other people wanted us to do.
He didn't call his father and mother 'Father' and 'Mother' but Harold and Alberta. They were very up to date and advanced people. They were vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers, and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on the beds and the windows were always open.
My formative years were all shaped by a mother who was very sad and had a drinking problem, while my father was lonely and angry. He was an Episcopal priest and raised four kids on his own.
My father worked for IBM. My mother raised us kids. There were six of us, and a couple of extra foster kids at any given time.
My mother is a very strong woman. We were seven kids; five of them passed away. My elder brother and I are alive. My mother lost five kids, her husband, her parents and siblings. But she is so strong, she is living for the people who are alive.
I'm used to very strong women because my mother was particularly strong, and my father was away all the time. My mother was a big part of bringing up three boys, so I was fully versed in the strength of a powerful woman, and accepted that as the status quo.
I was the seventh child in a family of eight siblings. We lost our father very young, and my mother had pretty much single-handedly brought us up.
I was brought up by a father and mother who were radically different.
I didn't grow up around my father. I didn't really grow up around my mother, either. I was raised by a community of people. Spiritually speaking, my father is in Heaven, and that is who I look to for all my answers. And that's why my faith is very strong and why my passion is strong.
My mother and father were farmers from very humble means, and when I was three years old they moved from the roca to the city to try to give us a better life. My father took a job at a winery and my mother worked as a seamstress.
I was brought up in a very ordinary family, in fact, a worker's family. Both my father and mother were ordinary citizens.
When my father died, the money he left us would have dried up within a year were it not for my mother... We might very well have ended up on welfare.
I think I was well brought up, for my father and mother were of one mind regarding the care of the family.
In my earliest of years, my mother was a huge force in my life. She was for all intents and purposes, a single parent. My father had abandoned us. He was an alcoholic and a physical abuser. My mother lived through that tyranny and made her living as a domestic worker. She was uneducated but she brought high principles and decent values into our existence, and she set lofty goals for herself and for her children. We were forever inspired by her strength and by her resistance to racism and to fascism.
I was born in Akron, Ohio, on June 6, 1943, one year to the day before D-Day, the allied invasion at Normandy. The youngest of four children, I was brought up in a wonderfully stable, loving family of strong Midwestern values.