Elder was born in 1952, the second of Randolph and Viola Conley Elder's three sons.[
citation needed] At the time, the family lived in the largely Latino Pico-Union district of Los Angeles. Elder's father, Randolph, was on his own from the age of 13 and worked a variety of jobs. He enlisted in the military and served as a cook in the Philippines during World War II. Following the end of the war, he was refused employment as a short-order cook many times because he had no references.
Elder's father moved to California and worked several jobs at once to support his family. He also attended night school to earn his GED. By his early forties he had saved enough to open his own café, which he successfully owned and operated near downtown Los Angeles for 30 years. On his radio show, Elder said about his father: "A tougher life I have rarely come across. Yet he never hated, he was never bitter, he never condemned his circumstances, and he always said there are very few problems that cannot be solved through hard work." Elder told a
Reason interviewer in 1996 that his father was his role model: "He was the hardest working man I've ever known.... He had a work ethic that was beyond belief."
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In 2013, Larry Elder and his brother Kirk accepted a
Congressional Gold Medal from U.S. Representative
Dana Rohrabacher on their father's behalf.
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