Wood's father, Edward Sr, worked for the Postal Service and his family was relocated numerous times around the United States. Eventually, they settled in Poughkeepsie, New York where Ed Wood, Jr. was born.
During his childhood, Wood was interested in the performing arts and pulp fiction. He collected comics and pulp magazines, and adored movies, most notably Westerns and anything involving the occult. He would often skip school in favor of watching pictures at the local movie theater, at which stills from the day's movie would often be thrown in the trash by theatre staff, allowing Wood to salvage them to add to his extensive collection.
It is believed that Wood's mother Lillian always wanted a girl and sometimes dressed her son up in skirts and dresses until he was about 12 years old.[citation needed] For the rest of his life, Wood was a non-sexually oriented transvestite.
One of his first paid jobs was as a cinema usher, although he also sang and played drums in a band. He later fronted a singing quartet called Eddie Wood's Little Splinters, having learned to play a variety of string instruments. Wood was given his first movie camera on his 17th birthday: a Kodak "City Special." One of his first pieces of footage was a plane crashing to the ground, which imbued him with pride.
Wood enlisted in the Marines at age 17, just months after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. He claimed that he had participated in the Battle of Guadalcanal while secretly wearing a brassiere and panties beneath his uniform.
Fascinated by the exotic and bizarre, Wood joined a carnival after discharge from the Marines. His several missing teeth and disfigured leg (souvenirs from his time in combat) combined with personal fetishes and acting skills made him a perfect candidate for the freak show. Wood played, among others, the geek and the bearded lady. As the bearded lady, he donned women's clothing and created his own prosthetic breasts. Carnivals would be frequently depicted in Wood's works, most notably (and semi-autobiographically) in the novel Killer in Drag.
Wood's other vices included soft drugs, alcohol and sex. While he respected women and was completely faithful to his girlfriends (most notably Dolores Fuller) and wife Kathy O'Hara, he was a notorious womanizer in his younger days.
