“He’d go in his back woods and drink himself insensible with some of his sharecropper friends.”

Harold Burson was born in Memphis, Tennessee, on February 15, 1921. His parents had moved to the city one year earlier from Leeds, in Yorkshire, England. Burson’s father taught him to read by the age of three using the local newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, as his text. Burson recalls how his father began with “first the big type in the advertisements, then the headlines, finally the news stories.”