 He later amended his birth certificate, removing his middle name, which he claimed originated from a maternal uncle (whose actual name was Daniel Venzor), who had been killed in World War I.His father was a soldier, sheriff, and photographer from New York, while his mother, May Venzor, a Mexican-American from El Paso, Texas, was an evangelist and lifelong soldier in the Salvation Army.Williams resented his mother's long hours working in the Salvation Army, and Williams and his brother cringed when she took them to the Army's street-corner revivals.