Stephen Sacklarian was born in 1899 in Varna, Bulgaria and emigrated to the United States in 1911. His parents were Turkish Armenians who escaped persecution in Turkey from the Armenian Holocaust. Not much is known about Sacklarian’s early youth, other than he grew up in poverty in Philadelphia. He was a Golden Gloves boxer during a brief period in his late youth. Sacklarian was also missing a small part of his dominant (right) painting hand ring finger from a childhood accident, though he never claimed it a hindrance on his artistic career.