Early Life and World War II Service
Bronson was born Charles Dennis Buchinsky in Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania, in the Allegheny Mountain Coal region north of Johnstown. During the McCarthy hearings, he changed his last name to Bronson, fearing that Buchinsky sounded "too Russian".
He was one of 15 children born to a Polish-Lithuanian immigrant father of Lipka Tatar ancestry, and a Lithuanian-American mother. His father hailed from the town of Druskininkai (or Druskienniki). His mother, Mary Valinsky, whose parents were from Lithuania was born in the coal mining town of Tamaqua, Pennsylvania.
Bronson was the first member of his family to graduate from high school. As a young child, Bronson did not initially know how to speak English and only learned it in his teens. Bronson's father died when he was 10, and he went to work in the coal mines. Initially, Bronson worked in the office of a coal mine, later in the mine itself. He earned $1 per ton of coal mined. He worked there until he entered military service during World War II. His family was so poor that, at one time, he reportedly had to wear his sister's dress to school because he had nothing else to wear.
In 1943, Bronson enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces and served as an aerial gunner in the 760th Flexible Gunnery Training Squadron, and in 1945 as a B-29 Superfortress crewman with the 39th Bombardment Group based on Guam. He was awarded a Purple Heart for wounds received during his service.
Read more about this topic: Charles Bronson
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, world, war and/or service:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“God wills a full life for us all,
Loves us with tender care,
Asks us to take the sacrifice
Of broken life to share.”
—Paul R. Gregory (20th century)
“This might be the end of the world. If Joe lost we were back in slavery and beyond help. It would all be true, the accusations that we were lower types of human beings. Only a little higher than apes. True that we were stupid and ugly and lazy and dirty and, unlucky and worst of all, that God Himself hated us and ordained us to be hewers of wood and drawers of water, forever and ever, world without end.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“In a war everybody always knows all about Switzerland, in peace times it is just Switzerland but in war time it is the only country that everybody has confidence in, everybody.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“The man of large and conspicuous public service in civil life must be content without the Presidency. Still more, the availability of a popular man in a doubtful State will secure him the prize in a close contest against the first statesman of the country whose State is safe.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)