When Charles Bronson was a boy working at the coal mine, people convinced him he was ‘the lowest of all forms of a man.’

Splendor frequently surrounds Hollywood stars, giving the impression that every celebrity is a natural star.

However, this is not always the case, and Charles Bronson, a legendary Hollywood actor, was not among them. Bronson’s birth name, Charles Dennis Buchinsky, had a miserable existence generally, with an especially traumatic childhood growing up in Croyle Township, a coal mining hamlet roughly 60 miles from Pittsburgh.

He grew up with 14 other siblings and ranked ninth out of 15. Despite the widespread recognition of the high cost of raising a single child, the impact on a low-income household is particularly noteworthy. For Bronson, this was exactly the circumstance.

The small, company-built hut where Bronson and his big family lived was just a few yards from the coal car tracks. They had to take turns sleeping because the house was too tiny for such a large family.

“There was no love in my house,” he explained. “The only physical contact I had with my mother was when she took me between her knees to pull the lice out of my hair.”

The town as a whole was a bleak and desolate place, serving only business leaders who wanted to expedite coal mining and maximize earnings. However, their struggles were not unique to the Bronson family.

There wasn’t much natural beauty, poor water quality, and the future was grim. Bronson’s portrayal of his boyhood as lonely and unhappy is not unexpected.

Around the time Bronson was a teenager and his father died, things grew increasingly difficult. He was accustomed to bargaining for small amounts of money but unexpectedly had to discontinue his education to provide for his family. The only logical conclusion is to work as a coal miner.

The memories of this time in his life haunted Bronson even as an adult. He’d never forget the exhausting work or the pungent coal stench that filled his nose. Bronson sensed that he was breathing in black dust while crawling on his hands and knees.

He regularly recalled the countless headaches and how rough and filthy his hands were when working as a miner. Bronson claims he was born with a shovel in his mouth, not a spoon.

Above and beyond the physical impacts, his stint as a coal miner left him with a serious inferiority problem.

“During my years as a miner, I was just a kid, but I was convinced that I was the lowliest of all forms of man,” he told me.

In reality, Bronson said, all coal miners in his region thought steelworkers and railroad workers were the ‘elite’ and the lowest class.

“Very few people know what it is like to live down there underneath the surface of the world, in that total blackness.”