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, early, life, world, war and/or service:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Parents ... are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.”
—Anthony Powell (b. 1905)
“The forest waves, the morning breaks,
The pastures sleep, ripple the lakes,
Leaves twinkle, flowers like persons be
And life pulsates in rock or tree.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To think the world therefore a general Bedlam, or place of madmen, and oneself a physician, is the most necessary point of present wisdom: an important imagination, and the way to happiness.”
—Thomas Traherne (1636–1674)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it NOW deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)