Born in 1938 at the tail end of the great depression in a small coal mining village in West Virginia, he tells how his parents struggled to provide for the family. His father, was a coal miner for forty years and his mother a house maid for the local doctor. How he and his seven siblings only had one pair of shoes each, during spring and summer they had to put them away so that they would not wear them out for the next school term. So during this time they went around playing in their bare feet. At the age of seven he disliked going to school. There were many school days he did not show up for class, because of his profound fantasy for being in the woods alone, contented with the sounds of mother nature, he would sit and dream. At fourteen, in 1953, the family with their meager possessions, moved north to a city in Ohio and within five years was the beginning trends of him becoming an alcoholic.