Wood's father, Edward Sr., worked for the Postal Service and his family was relocated numerous times around the United States. Eventually, they settled in Poughkeepsie, New York where Ed Wood, Jr. was born.

During his childhood, Wood was interested in the performing arts and pulp fiction. He collected comics and pulp magazines, and adored movies, most notably Westerns and anything involving the occult. He would often skip school in favor of watching pictures at the local movie theater, where stills from the day's movie would often be thrown in the trash by theater staff, allowing Wood to salvage them to add to his extensive collection.

It is believed that Wood's mother, Lillian, always wanted a girl and would sometimes, until he was about 12 years old, dress her son in skirts and dresses. For the rest of his life, Wood was a heterosexual transvestite. Several of our club members (Seamus, Brendan, Richie & Rich) enjoy this artistic form of display

One of his first paid jobs was as a cinema usher, although he also sang and played drums in a band. He later fronted a singing quartet called Eddie Wood's Little Splinters, having learned to play a variety of string instruments. Wood was given his first movie camera on his 12th birthday: a Kodak "Cine Special". One of his first pieces of footage was the Hindenburg dirigible passing over the Hudson River at Poughkeepsie, just minutes before its famous fiery demise at Lakehurst, New Jersey, which imbued him with pride.

Wood enlisted in the Marines at age 17, just months after the Attack on Pearl Harbor. He served from 1942-1946 and claimed that he had participated in the Battle of Tarawa while secretly wearing a brassiere and panties beneath his uniform. Yes!! he did later serve with US Marine & Harbormaster Terry Clen, Terry has always admitted he was jealous of the lingerie

Fascinated by the exotic and bizarre, Wood joined a carnival after a discharge from the Marines. His several missing teeth and disfigured leg (wounds while in combat) combined with personal fetishes and acting skills made him a perfect candidate for the freak show. Wood played, among others, the geek and the bearded lady. As the bearded lady, he donned women's clothing and created his own prosthetic breasts. Carnivals would be frequently depicted in Wood's works, most notably (and semi-autobiographically) in the novel Killer in Drag.

Wood's other vices included soft drugs, alcohol, and sex. He was a womanizer in his younger days, but in later life he was faithful to his girlfriends (most notably Dolores Fuller) and wife (Kathy O'Hara). Edward D. Wood Jr. had one child, a daughter named Kathleen Emily Wood.

Wood's first wife, Norma McCarty (a Jamie look-a-like), kicked him out of their house not long after they were married (shades of Mike Schmitt). McCarty had a son, Michael ("Mac"), from a relationship prior to Wood.

Wood's big break came in 1953 when he was hired by producer George Weiss to make an exploitation film, I Changed My Sex, based on the life of a transsexual . After Jorgensen refused to collaborate on the film, Wood wrote a new autobiographical screenplay titled Glen or Glenda, ( Better known on Cape Cod as " The Jack Griffith Story") a sincere and sympathetic study of transvestism. Wood directed and, using the alias Daniel Davis, played the titular character who has a fetish for cross-dressing and angora sweaters.

Angora was regularly featured in his films. His wife Kathy O'Hara (or Cathy maybe) and others recall that Wood's transvestitism was not a sexual inclination, but rather a neomaternal comfort derived mainly from angora fabric (Ann Gora also happened to be one of Wood's pen names). The medical experts in the film go to great lengths to stress that the transvestite is a perfectly normal heterosexual man who simply feels more comfortable and "more himself" when wearing women's apparel. There is even a fantasy vignette showing Glenda rebuffing the advances of a homosexual man. Even in his later years, Wood was not shy about going out in public dressed in drag as Shirley; his alter ego—female characters named Shirley also appear in many of his screenplays and stories.

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