Early life

Ford was born on Monday, July 13, 1942, at 11:41 a.m. in Chicago, Cook County, Illinois, at the Swedish Covenant Hospital. His mother, Dorothy (née Dora Nidelman; October 17, 1917–February 10, 2004), was a homemaker and former radio actress, and his father, Christopher Ford (né John William Ford; November 20, 1906–February 10, 1999), was an advertising executive and former actor. Harrison Ford's maternal grandparents, Anna Lifschutz and Harry Nidelman, were Jewish immigrants from Minsk. His paternal grandparents, Florence Veronica Niehaus and John Fitzgerald Ford, were of German and Irish Catholic descent, respectively. When asked in which religion he was raised, Ford jokingly responded, "Democrat";[6] he has also said that he feels "Irish as a person but I feel Jewish as an actor".

Ford was active in the Boy Scouts of America, and achieved its second-highest rank, Life Scout, and worked at a Scout camp as a counselor for the Reptile Study merit badge. Because of this, he and director Steven Spielberg later decided that the character of young Indiana Jones would be depicted as a Life Scout in the film Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. They also jokingly reversed Ford's knowledge of reptiles into Jones's fear of snakes.

In 1960, Ford graduated from Maine East High School in Park Ridge, Illinois. His was the first student voice broadcast on his high school's new radio station, WMTH-FM, and was its first sportscaster during his senior year, 1959–1960. The radio room still bears his graffiti. He attended Ripon College in Wisconsin, where he was a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity. He took a drama class in his junior year, chiefly as a way to meet women. Ford, a self-described "late bloomer", became fascinated with acting. Towards the end of his college freshman year, he was a member of a folk band called The Brothers Gross, in which he played gutbucket. He did not graduate from Ripon. It was around this time that he suffered from a period of intense clinical depression; he would sleep much longer and eventually lost respect for his appearance.