3. Clint Eastwood - Firefighter/Lumberjack/Steelworker
Reading about the early life of Clinton Eastwood, better known as just Clint, feels like being pitched a script about the toughest American to ever walk the face of Earth. The gritty attitude and hard, don't-even-try-it lines in his face are not there just for show and the camera, Eastwood really means it. He's as tough in real life as he is in cowboy movies, maybe even tougher. Off camera, Clint Eastwood's six-shooter is his personality. After he graduated from high school he held several jobs, all of them physically demanding beyond what 80% of the rest of the country could handle. In Oregon he first worked as a firefighter before taking up being a lumberjack. Sometime later he moved to Seattle, Washington to work in a steel mill. This was before he was drafted in the early fifties during the conflict in Korea. Even though he didn't see combat, Eastwood still got his baptism by fire when one night he was returning home on a Navy plane. An engine went out and the pilot was forced to crash land in the ocean where he and Eastwood swam over a mile in the pounding Pacific surf to get to land. It begs the question is Clint Eastwood even human? Learning about his life off camera makes him seem more like some Norse god who fell off the Bifrost into our midst.