The eldest of seven children of Catholic immigrants from Belfast, Northern Ireland, Hamill was born in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn.[2] His father, Billy Hamill, lost a leg as the result of an injury during a semi-professional soccer game in Brooklyn.[3] Hamill's mother, Anne Devlin Hamill, a high school graduate, arrived in New York on the day the stock market crashed in 1929.[4] Billy Hamill was introduced to Anne Devlin in 1933 and they married the following year.[2] Billy Hamill had jobs as a grocery clerk, in a war plant, and later in a factory producing lighting fixtures. Anne Hamill was employed in Wanamaker's department store, and she also worked as a domestic, a nurses' aide, and a cashier in the RKO movie chain.[2] Hamill's younger brother, Denis, also became a columnist for the Daily News.[5]
Hamill attended Holy Name of Jesus grammar school[6] and delivered the Brooklyn Daily Eagle when he was 11.[2] In 1949, Hamill attended the prestigious Regis High School in Manhattan, but he left school when he was 15 to work as an apprentice sheet metal worker in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; 59 years later, in June 2010, Regis awarded him an honorary diploma.[7] Inspired especially by the work of Milton Caniff, he was set on becoming a comic book artist.[8] Hamill attended night classes at the School of Visual Arts (then called the Cartoonists and Illustrators School),[9] with the goal of becoming a painter.[10] He also took courses at Pratt Institute, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1980.[11][12] In the fall of 1952, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy. Following his discharge, in 1956–57, he was a student at Mexico City College on the G.I. Bill.[13]
