Early Life, Military Service and College Career
His parents emigrated in 1920 from Široké, a village in eastern Slovakia, for work, settling in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and working for Bethlehem Steel. Their son Charles was born in 1925. He attended school at SS. Cyril & Methodius in Bethlehem, which was a Slovak parochial school with Slovak the language of instruction.
Bednarik began playing football in Bethlehem. He played for Bethlehem's Liberty High School.
Following his graduation from high school, he entered the United States Army Air Forces and served as a B-24 waist-gunner with the Eighth Air Force. Bednarik flew on 30 combat missions over Germany, for which he was awarded the Air Medal and four Oak Leaf Clusters, the European Theater Operations Medal and four Battle Stars.
Bednarik subsequently attended the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he was a 60-minute man, excelling as both center and linebacker, as well as occasional punter. He was a three-time All-American, and was elected a member of the College Football Hall of Fame, as were two of his teammates on the 1947 squad—tackle George Savitsky and tailback Tony Minisi—and his coach, George Munger. At Penn, he also was third in Heisman Trophy voting in 1948 and won the Maxwell Award that year.
Read more about this topic: Chuck Bednarik
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