 He was raised as a Christian Scientist and spent his early childhood in Leland, Mississippi, before moving with his family to University Park, Maryland, near Washington, DC, in the late 1940s.He remembered the arrival of the family's first television as "the biggest event of his adolescence", being heavily influenced by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom on "Kukla, Fran and Ollie" and Bil and Cora Baird.He remained a Christian Scientist at least into his twenties when he taught Sunday School, but he wrote to a Christian Science church in 1975 to inform them that he was no longer a practicing member.