In 1939, Compton graduated from high school and was offered a football scholarship to UCLA. I couldn’t shake that booming voice if I tried.” ROTC at UCLA His voice ingrained its way into my head. Whatever mud or snow we were in, if our ammunition ran low or we didn’t eat for some time, Coach Bert was there. “Coach Bert’s voice helped push me through a lot of hard times, including the war years,” he said.
It was a lesson Buck Compton never forgot. He also went out for the football team where the coach, a brusque, demanding man, never settled for less than 100 percent effort. After he entered high school, he continued to pursue his interest in the game, becoming the all-league catcher his senior year. To take up part of the slack, he earned a few dollars a week as a caddy at a local golf course as well as a newspaper delivery boy.īesides being an avid baseball fan, Compton developed into a standout player.
Buck compton hand signals movie#
The Compton family lived a lower-middle-class existence during the Great Depression, and the loss of the meager movie extra income brought home by Buck was keenly felt. Unhappy with Compton’s efforts in the silent classic, Modern Times, star and director Charlie Chaplin fired him from the set.
Growing up in Los Angeles, he also became a movie fan and a young extra in several films, even appearing in a few scenes with up-and-coming child actor Mickey Rooney. That was OK by them––nobody wanted a friend who had a sissy’s name.” This portrait of the young Buck Compton was taken in the village of Aldbourne, England, just before Christmas 1943. I informed all my friends that Buck was the only name I’d answer to. It was settled––Buck Compton was my new name. How about Buck? That was close enough for jazz. Sounded tough, but I also sounded like a copycat. Compton, at an early age, thought: “If he could have a nickname, why couldn’t I? One day in grammar school, I rolled around in my head the name-Truck Compton. The team had a player named Truck Hannah, whose real name was James Harrison Hannah. Angels, a minor-league team in south Los Angeles. Always a baseball fan, his favorite team was the L.A. But to me, Lynn was a girl’s name and always will be.” “My mother’s father was from Lynn, Massachusetts,” he said, “and named Lyndley in honor of the town, so that’s where my name came from. As might be expected, the young man hated his first name. To begin at the beginning, Compton was born in Los Angeles, California, on New Year’s Eve 1921.
It has made for a great recently released book, Call of Duty: My Life Before, During, and After the Band of Brothers, written with Marcus Brotherton and including a foreword by John McCain.
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His life story would make a great film or TV series in its own right. Thanks to the late historian Stephen Ambrose, his book Band of Brothers, and the HBO series of the same title, the legendary, extraordinary exploits of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment (PIR), 101st Airborne Division, have become well known to a whole new generation.Īnd one of the most extraordinary men who served with that outfit is Lynn “Buck” Compton.
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