Michael Jordan_ The Life ( PDFDrive.com )_compressed (1)_compressed

The near suffocation, which happened after the family returned to North
Carolina, only served to raise his mother’s anxiety levels over her special gift.
“He was such a jolly baby,” she remembered. “He never cried. Just feed him and
give him something to play with, and he was fine.”
By the time Michael was five months old, the family had retreated from
Brooklyn back to their home on Calico Bay Road in Teachey. They made the
move with Deloris pregnant one final time (daughter Roslyn was on the way),
and back home, James put his education to use as a maintenance employee for
the General Electric plant in Castle Hayne, near Wilmington.
Soon the young mother found herself in the small house with five children,
four of them under the age of five. Her husband called her Lois, as did the rest of
the family. And her term of endearment for him was Ray. He cut an impressive
figure in the small farming community with his Air Force experience and his job
at GE. Although generally warm and friendly, he began to show a harsher side as
well. He proved to be a stern taskmaster with children, whether they were his
own or somebody else’s. Word soon enough got out among the neighborhood
children: Ray didn’t play. He’d whip your butt in a minute.
Young Michael would spend his formative years on sleepy little Calico Bay
Road. By all accounts, he was easy to laugh, eager to please, and hungry to
entertain, which also earned him his share of spankings.
“You had to discipline him,” Deloris Jordan once remembered. “He would
test you to the limit. Michael was always getting into things.”
As a two-year-old he wandered outside one late afternoon while his father
worked on an auto in the family’s backyard and used a lamp powered by two
extension cords stretched across the damp ground from the kitchen. Before his
father could stop him, the toddler grabbed the two cords at their juncture. The
ensuing shock knocked young Michael back three feet, leaving him stunned but
otherwise unhurt.
Already strict with their children, the Jordans were prompted by the incident
to tighten their control. No one was to leave the house under any circumstances
without permission. And each night the children had to be in bed by eight
o’clock, no matter if others in the neighborhood were still outside playing. But it
soon became evident that Michael’s bountiful nature could not be contained as
he grew into childhood.
One time he found trouble under his granddaddy Dawson’s wagon, with a
wasps’ nest that he attempted to douse with gasoline. That was followed by his
adventure with a stack of lawn chairs he piled amazingly high to demonstrate his