Born on Yancy Street in New York City's Lower East Side, to a Jewish[4] family, Benjamin Jacob Grimm has an early life that was one of poverty and hardship, shaping young Grimm into a tough, streetwise scrapper. His older brother Daniel, whom Ben idolizes, is killed in a street gang fight when Ben is eight years old. This portion of his own life is modeled on that of Jack Kirby, who grew up on tough Delancey Street, whose brother died when he was young, whose father was named Benjamin, and who was named Jacob at birth. Following the death of his parents, Ben is raised by his Uncle Jake (who at some point married a much younger wife, Petunia).[5] Excelling in football as a high school student, Ben receives a full scholarship to Empire State University, where he first meets his eventual life-long friend in a teenaged genius named Reed Richards. Despite their being nearly a decade apart in age, science student Richards described his dream to one day build a space rocket to explore the regions of space around Mars, and Grimm jokingly agrees to fly that rocket when the day comes. Following college, Grimm joins the United States Army Air Forces, where he is trained as a test pilot (his exploits as a military aviator are chronicled to a limited extent in issue #7 of the "Captain Savage and his Leatherneck Raiders" comic, in a story entitled "Objective: Ben Grimm!") Following this, he becomes an astronaut for NASA.
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