Joseph Walter Jackson (July 26, 1928 – June 27, 2018) was an American talent manager and patriarch of the Jackson family of entertainers. He was inducted into the Rhythm and Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2014. Early life and ancestry Joseph Walter Jackson was born in Fountain Hill, Arkansas to Crystal Lee (née King; May 1907–November 4, 1992) and Samuel Joseph Jackson (April 4, 1893 – October 31, 1993) on July 26, 1928. His father was a teacher. According to the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame and Katherine Jackson's book My Family, The Jacksons, his year of birth was 1929. He was the eldest of five children. His great-grandfather, July "Jack" Gale, was a US Army scout; he was also claimed to be an Indigenous American medicine man. Jackson recalled from his early childhood that his father was domineering and strict, and he described himself in his memoir The Jacksons as a "lonely child that had only few friends". After his parents separated when he was twelve, his mother, two brothers, and sister moved to East Chicago, Indiana, a suburb outside Chicago in Northwest Indiana, while he moved with his father to Oakland, California. When he was 18, his father remarried, and he moved to East Chicago to live with his mother, two brothers, and sister. He soon got a job in East Chicago at Inland Steel Company but did not finish high school. While in East Chicago, he began to pursue his dreams of becoming a boxer and found success with the Golden Gloves program. While he was preparing for a professional boxing career, he met 17-year-old Katherine Scruse, who also lived in East Chicago and attended Washington High School. Joe was married to another woman, but was divorced in less than a year before he started dating Katherine. Joseph and Katherine were married on November 5, 1949; in January 1950, they purchased a small two-bedroom home on 2300 Jackson Street near East Chicago in Gary, Indiana. Their first child, Maureen Reillette "Rebbie" Jackson, was born four months later on May 29, 1950, in the Jackson house. Still employed at Inland Steel, Jackson left his hopes of becoming a professional boxer in order to support his family, and began working there as a full-time crane operator. He later took a second part-time job at American Foundries in East Chicago. In the meantime, his wife Katherine tended to their