Maynard Shipley was born on 1 December 1872 in Baltimore, Maryland. He was the fourth of six sons. Elmon Shipley, the family’s patriarch, could trace his American ancestors back to seventeenth-century Maryland. His mother, Sarah Armitage Jerome, came from a prominent Baltimore family. In Miriam Allen de Ford’s biography of Shipley, she wrote Elmon was “about as bad a husband and father as can be imagined—a domestic tyrant, a philanderer, and a paragon of refined selfishness.” Elmon made a good living and was religious for a time, but eventually moved into the wholesale liquor business, which had him out of church and becoming a free-thinker. This last influenced Maynard greatly. In 1887, Elmon deserted the family.
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