Background
Harold was born on May 7, 1891 in Barre, Massachussets, United States. His birth record lists him as Harold Edmund Doyle and his mother as Sarah E. Doyle. He later took the name of Stearns (as did his older brother, Clyde M. Doyle), identifying his parents in Who's Who in America as Frank and Sarah Ella (Doyle) Stearns.
His father had died, he reports in his autobiography, before he was born, and his mother had gone to a Barre sanatorium to recover from the shock. She was a trained nurse with little sense of financial responsibility, who during his childhood led a "polite gypsy life" in a half-dozen towns in the Boston area, thus contributing to her son's sense of rootlessness.