“Both my parents were third-grade dropouts,” he said. “My father never read a book in his life and I was the only one in my family to complete high school.”

Sheldon won a scholarship to Northwestern University. Although he was forced to drop out halfway through his freshman year because of the financial pressures of the Depression, he recalled having an epiphany of sorts as he walked on campus one day.

“I saw all these well-dressed students, and I thought that years from now, no one will ever know they existed,” he wrote years later. “I wanted to leave a mark, I wanted people to know I was here.”

He made up the last name of Sheldon in the mid-1930s when he entered an amateur radio contest as an announcer.