[1] His father worked at a local gold and silver plating factory for 30 years before taking proprietorship of a laundromat.

In 1892, his brother Willie died of diphtheria at the age of six in Newark, New Jersey while visiting their maternal grandparents.

In 1903, he took a position teaching Latin at the Horace Mann School in Manhattan, New York, where he stayed through 1911.

In the summer of 1905, he became a student of the American School of Classical Studies in Pompeii and Rome, Italy.

He authored three Latin textbooks while a teacher at Horace Mann, two of which the school added to the curriculum.