The hero of his comic book
About a red bicycle, hot Spanish women and painting the ceiling.
Stan Lee was born Stanley Martin Lieber to a family of Romanian Jews who immigrated to the US in the early 20th century. At first they lived in a nice apartment on New York's Seventh Avenue, but after their father Jack lost his job as a worker in the textile industry, money problems caught up with them. He and his nine-year-younger brother, Larry, watched their parents struggle to make ends meet during the Great Depression. The family began to move frequently in poor New York apartments, and Stan almost always slept in the living room with a view of the brick wall of the neighboring building. In later years, he recalled how his father was not resourceful and how he could never find a job. Perhaps because of this, out of defiance of his father, but also out of financial need, Stan did all kinds of jobs from early childhood. He sold subscriptions to the New York Herald Tribune. he delivered gablecs to the pharmacy in the neighborhood and many other things. He was an average student. He didn't like school and couldn't wait to get rid of it.
One of his fondest childhood memories was when his parents (with the help of his grandmother's loan) bought him a red bicycle. Then he felt truly free. He enjoyed day and night drives along the long streets of New York. One of his favorite activities was reading. His favorite reading was then popular works for children: Hardy Boys, The Boy Allies, Terry and The Pirates and Tom Swift, and he especially liked the Jerry Todd and Poppy Otto series because they were extremely humorous. He also liked the fact that letters from readers and responses from the author appeared at the end of Jerry Todd. Because of this, he felt like he could be a part of the series. Lee was very well read. He also liked to read Mark Twain, H. G. Wells, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, E. A. Poe, Charles Dickens, and he considered Shakespeare the greatest writer.
As a boy, he also tried his hand at acting in a Jewish theater group. But the main motivation for this feat was not that he wanted to become an actor. The occasion was one Martha. For the rest of his life, he remembered the blonde Spanish girl who entertained him at rehearsals. Acting was not the only activity he did as a child. He was a member of the school's prestigious Club of Future Lawyers and the "publisher" of the school magazine The Magpie. The title of publisher made him very proud, and his self-confidence, which made him one of the most important people in American pop culture, is best reflected in a crime he committed as a child.
Namely, the classroom where The Magpie magazine was written and published was called The Tower. She had an extremely high ceiling that even the highest professors could not reach. One day the school hired painters to paint some classrooms, including the "editorial" among others. Stan hid nearby and waited for the worker in charge of painting to leave for lunch. Then he stole his ladder, climbed it and wrote in large letters on the high ceiling of the "editorial office": - STANLEY LIEBER IS GOD! - Of course, the inscription was discovered only after the painter left school. It stayed there for a long time, and then when Stan really became the "God of Comics", there was no longer any reason to hide the inscription.
