George Burns Is Born on the Lower East Side

Nathan Birnbaum was born on January 20, 1896, in a three-room Lower East Side tenement, the ninth of twelve children of Jewish immigrants from Galicia. His father, a coat presser and part-time cantor, died in a flu outbreak when Nathan was still a boy, and the family scraped by on his mother's washing work and whatever the kids could earn on the street. At seven, working a candy-store syrup job, he and some other neighborhood kids started singing harmony for pennies in a stairwell, and that was it for him. He took the stage name George Burns, spent decades in vaudeville and radio with his wife and partner Gracie Allen, moved into television, and kept working into film long after most performers his age had stopped, eventually winning an Academy Award at 80.