Have a Seat ". He is regarded among his colleagues as the best to ever pitch copy. His true name is Richard "Dick" Whitman. He stole the identity of a dead officer during the Korean War. Draper is a brilliant but lonely and mysterious advertising man, denying his past and looking only forward. His character is considered one of the most brilliant in television history. Born in , Richard "Dick" Whitman was born to a posthumous mother. Little was known about Dick's true mother except that she was a prostitute whom had been impregnated by his father, then died from complications during childbirth.
Dick lived with his father, Archie Whitman, and his father's wife, Abigail Whitman, until he was 10, at which time his father, a drunk, was kicked in the face by a horse and died.
His stepmother, pregnant at the time, then "took up" with a new man, "Uncle Mack," and had another son, Dick's half-brother, whom she named Adam Whitman. Dick's childhood was unhappy, and his stepmother never allowed him to forget that he was a "whore's child" " The Hobo Code ".
After moving into Uncle Mack's brothel, Dick spent his adolescence pick-pocketing the clients of the establishment. His motivation for stealing was money to buy Hershey's Chocolate bars. During this time, Dick Whitman heard about Milton S. Hershey and his school for orphans and imagined what it would be like to grow up in a happy place such as that. It is unknown whether he attended school in his teenage years, but sometime between his childhood and early adulthood he moved away from the brothel and got a job.
He enlisted in the US Army, and was eventually deployed to Korea. During military service in the Korean War Dick assumed the identity of Lieutenant Don Draper after Draper was killed while the 2 were posted alone at an isolated base.
