Early Years
He was born George Leslie Goebel in Chicago, Illinois, His father, Hermann Goebel, was a butcher and grocer who had emigrated to the United States with his parents in the 1890s from the Austrian Empire. His mother, Lillian (MacDonald) Goebel, was born in Illinois to immigrant parents from Scotland. He was an only child.
Gobel graduated from Theodore Roosevelt High School in Chicago in 1937.
Gobel initially pursued an entertainment career as a country music singer, appearing on the National Barn Dance on WLS radio. Gobel enlisted in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and served as a flight instructor in AT-9 aircraft at Altus, Oklahoma and later in B-26 Marauder bombers at Frederick, Oklahoma. In a 1969 appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, Gobel joked about his stateside service, "There was not one Japanese aircraft got past Tulsa." After his discharge at the end of the war, he switched from singing to comedy.
Read more about this topic: George Gobel
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Pray be always in motion. Early in the morning go and see things; and the rest of the day go and see people. If you stay but a week at a place, and that an insignificant one, see, however, all that is to be seen there; know as many people, and get into as many houses as ever you can.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“The years like great black oxen tread the world,
And God the herdsman treads them on behind,
And I am broken by their passing feet.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)