Charles Bronson
Childhood Of Celebrities : Charles Bronson
Bronson was born in the notorious Ehrenfeld, Pennsylvania coal-mining neighborhood of Scooptown in the Pittsburgh Tri-State area. He was one of 15 children born to a Lithuanian immigrant father of Lipka Tatar ancestry, and a Lithuanian-American mother.
Bronson’s father died when he was only 10, and he went down to the coal mines like his older brothers until he was drafted. He earned $1 per ton of coal mined. His family was so poor that, at one time, he had reportedly been forced to wear his sister’s dress to school because he had no other clothes. This story has been repeated in Celebrity Setbacks: 800 Stars who Overcame the Odds by Ed Lucaire (ISBN 0-671-85031-8) and in an edition of Ripley’s Believe It or Not!.
In 1943, Bronson joined the United States Army Air Forces and served in the Pacific theater as a B-29 Superfortress tail-gunner. Assigned to the 61st Bomb Squadron of the 39th Bomb Group of the Twentieth Air Force, he flew bombing missions to Japan from North Field, Guam.
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