Charles Bronson updated Tue Nov 6 2007 8:10 am CST

Charles Bronson, born November 3, 1921. Shuffling this mortal coil on August 30, 2003. Charles Bronson's birth name was Karolis Buchinskis (Charles Dennis Buchinsky), being one of 15 children to a Lithuanian immigrant father of Lipka Tatar ancestry and Lithuanian-American mother. The Buchinkys' lived in the notorious Ehrenfeld, a Pennsylvania coal-mining neighborhood of Scooptown, in the Pittsburgh Tri-State area. His father died when he was only 10, so he worked with his older brothers in the coal mines earning a mere $1 per ton of coal mined in support of his family and a matter of survival. In fact his family was so poor that, he had reportedly been forced to wear his sister's dress to school on one occasion, as he had no other clothes to wear. This story has been repeated in a book by Ed Lucaire, titled, Celebrity Setbacks: 800 Stars who Overcame the Odds and again in an edition of Ripley's Believe It or Not!. Bronson joined the United States Army Air Forces in 1943 serving as a B-29 Superfortress tail-gunner in the Pacific theater. He was Assigned to the 61st Bomb Squadron of the 39th Bomb Group of the Twentieth Air Force and flew bombing missions to Japan from North Field, Guam. Bronson's passing was caused by the onset of pneumonia while suffering Alzheimer's disease at DHMC Leb NH. He had been in poor health since undergoing hip replacement surgery in August 1998, laying to rest in Brownsville, Vermont, near his home of thirty years in West Windsor.