Robert Templeton was born into a farming family in Iowa on May 11, 1929. Due to the Wall Street crash that year, his childhood was difficult. The family depended on growing their own vegetables, supplemented by his father's wages as a WPA worker, and government rice handouts. Their quality of life improved when his father was entrusted with the management of a farm in Montgomery County, Iowa as a tenant farmer. Templeton later said that all the deprivations of his childhood toughened him rather than defeated him.