Early life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_ColbertStephen Colbert was born in Washington, D.C.[5] and grew up in Charleston, South Carolina on James Island, the youngest of eleven children in an Irish Catholic family.[3][6][7] His father, James Colbert, was the vice president for academic affairs at the Medical University of South Carolina. His mother, Lorna Colbert, was a homemaker. In interviews, Colbert has described his parents as devout people who also strongly valued intellectualism and taught their children that it was possible to question the Church and still be Catholic.[8] The emphasis his family placed on intelligence led Colbert to train himself to suppress his Southern accent while he was still quite young. As a child, he observed that Southerners were often depicted as being less intelligent than other characters on scripted television; to avoid that stereotype, he taught himself to imitate the speech of American news anchors from an early age.[9][10]Colbert sometimes comedically refers to his surname as French, but his family is actually of Irish descent.[3] Originally, the name was pronounced "KHOL-bert"; Colbert's father wanted to pronounce the name "Khol-BARE," maintaining the "KHOL-bert" pronunciation only out of respect for his own father. As a result, James Colbert offered his children the option to pronounce the name whichever way they preferred.[6] Stephen started using "Khol-BARE" later in life when he transferred to Northwestern University, taking advantage of the opportunity to reinvent himself in a new place where no one knew him.[3]On September 11, 1974, when Colbert was ten years old, his father and two of his brothers, Peter and Paul, were killed in the crash of Eastern Air Lines Flight 212 while it was attempting to land in Charlotte, North Carolina. They were en route to enroll the two boys at Canterbury School in New Milford, Connecticut