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Teenage runaway Robert Stroud spent his adolescence in Alaska, landing in the capital where he sold peanuts to survive. In 1908, at age 19, he was pimping and living with a dance-hall girl when a fight led him to murder a bartender. Sent to Leavenworth, he then killed a guard and received a commuted sentence of life.
It was in solitary confinement that Stroud found his passion for birding and he raised canaries, studied breeding and diseases, and set up a lab. His research was smuggled out and his book, “Stroud’s Digest on the Diseases of Birds,” was published in 1943.
– Eve Lederman, The 100 Companies