📍Shaker Heights, OH 44120, USA
1925 – 1943“I was born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, in January 1925, and when I was two we moved to Shaker Heights, a prosperous, carefully planned suburb east of Cleveland, with tree-lined streets, lakes and big brick and Tudor houses. My father, Arthur, co-owned the Newman-Stern sporting goods store downtown, a successful business that kept us comfortable even through the Depression, and my mother, Theresa, was a Hungarian-born Catholic who became a Christian Scientist. I had an older brother, Arthur. My father was a decent, intelligent man, but distant, and I always felt I never quite earned his respect. My mother loved the theatre and pushed me towards it; at seven I played the court jester in a school production of Robin Hood, and at ten I acted at the Cleveland Play House in its children's company, the Curtain Pullers. I was a small, wiry kid who wanted more than anything to be an athlete, and at Shaker Heights High School I played football, without much distinction. I graduated in 1943 and joined the Navy, serving as a radioman in the Pacific. After the war I studied at Kenyon College, ran the family store for a short while after my father died, and then went to Yale Drama School and on to New York. Films like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid made me a star, and I later founded Newman's Own and gave its profits to charity. In my memoir, The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Man, I wrote candidly about my Shaker Heights childhood and the father I wished I had known better.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
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