[This coming weekend, the great Martin Sheen celebrates his 84th birthday. Sheen’s life has been as impressive and inspiring as his iconic career, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of threads to both. Leading up to a special tribute to a pair of even more inspiring Americans!]
On three
foundational moments that helped make the man.
1)
Health Challenges: Sheen (whose birth and
legal name is Ramón
Estévez, as I’ll write more about on Wednesday) was born in 1940, and in his
childhood dealt with the devastating effects of one of the period’s most persistent
health crises: polio. I haven’t been able to find the exact age at which Sheen
was stricken with the potentially fatal illness, but apparently he was bedridden
for a year before the experimental Sister
Kenny treatment helped him regain use of his legs. Combined with a
different physical ailment caused by his difficult birth (his left arm was
partially crushed by forceps, leaving him with chronic
Erb’s palsy), these childhood afflictions no doubt affected young Sheen,
and to my mind must have played a role in creating an individual with such
empathy and commitment to helping others.
2)
Family Crisis: Unfortunately, health issues
were not the only such crises—when Sheen was 11 his mother (Irish
immigrant Mary-Ann Phelan) died, and his factory worker father (Spanish immigrant Francisco Estévez)
did not have either the income nor the time to take care of Sheen and his nine
siblings. They were faced with the very real possibility of being raised in orphanages
or the foster care system, but fortunately Holy Trinity Catholic
Church in Sheen’s hometown of Dayton offered sufficient support to keep the
family together. As I’ll discuss in tomorrow’s post, Catholic activism would become
a lifelong and defining element of Sheen’s identity, and I imagine this foundational
experience with the best of Catholic community contributed greatly to that
emphasis.
3)
Labor Activism: That activism began long
before Sheen became an adult, in a surprising place: on the Oakwood
golf course at Dayton Country Club, where he and his older brothers worked
as caddies. Sheen had joined them when he was just 9, and by the age of 14 was
fed up with the combination of low pay, grueling responsibilities, and abusive
treatment from the club’s wealthy clientele. So Sheen led
the caddies on a walk-out, risking the wrath of not just those elite members
but also his boss, who Sheen
remembers coming out and telling them, “Well your [butts] are in trouble
now. You better change your mind.” Although the strike apparently did not
succeed, and Sheen was fired, clearly this final foundational moment only lit a
fire in a young man who would go on to live his life by
this mantra: “Acting is what I do for a living but activism is what I do to
stay alive.”
Next
SheenStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think?
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