Lear flew 52 combat missions, which earned him the Air Medal with four Oak Leaf Clusters. He also talked about dropping bombs on Germany in the European theater. He was a radio operator and gunner on Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers with the 772nd Bomb Squadron, 463rd Bomb Group, and Fifteenth Air Force in the Mediterranean theater. In September 1942, Lear joined the United States Army. He then went to Emerson College in Boston, but dropped out in 1942 to join the United States Army Air Forces. Lear graduated from Weaver High School in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1940. Lear has also said that he heard more of Coughlin’s radio sermons over time and learned that Coughlin would sometimes promote anti-semitism in different ways, such as by attacking people who Jews thought of as “great heroes,” like US President Franklin Roosevelt. This was the event that led him to become an activist for the rest of his life. But Lear has said that when he was nine years old and tinkering with his crystal radio set, he first heard the infamous anti-Semitic Catholic radio priest Father Charles Coughlin. Edith Bunker, on the other hand, was partly based on his mother. Lear called his father a “rascal,” and he said that Archie Bunker, who was a white Protestant on the show, was partly based on his father. Lear’s father went to prison for selling fake bonds when Lear was nine years old and living with his family in Chelsea, Massachusetts. His mother was born in Ukraine, and his father was born in Russia. Lear grew up in Connecticut in a Jewish family and had a Bar Mitzvah. His parents were a traveling salesman named Hyman “Herman” Lear and Jeanette “Seicol” Lear.Ĭlaire Lear Brown was his younger sister (1925–2015).
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