Born in East Prairie, Missouri in the Mississippi River basin, he says his first memory was the 1927 flood. The son of a sharecropper, Earl moved with his family to South Texas near Edna in 1937. He joined the U.S. Army on April 10, 1942 and requested paratrooper training. Instead, he was placed in the Fourth Infantry Regiment, a stand-alone unit, at Fort Richardson, Alaska. "I was still mad about missing out on paratrooper training," he says. He stayed on Adak Island in the Aleutians for eight months. After a furlough over Christmas of 1943, he was sent to Fort Benning Infantry School near Columbus, Georgia. Meanwhile, the Fourth was de-activated. Earl finally got to paratrooper school. "Liked to have killed me," he says of the training. He made nine jumps, but the war ended before he saw combat as a paratrooper. He was discharged on October 31, 1945. Earl joined Air Reduction Company in Shreveport in 1952 as a welding supply salesman. In 1963 he bought Red Ball Oxygen. His company also includes Red Ball Medical Supply.