Early Life, Family and Training Steve Wheeler was born Stephen Brosnatch on April 3, 1912, in Slovakia. His early years were defined by migration, as he moved with his family to New Salem, Pennsylvania, as a young boy. Life in Pennsylvania was far from academic. At sixteen, he left school to enter the coalmines, working alongside his father. This period of manual labor provided a stark contrast to the visual world he would eventually inhabit, yet it grounded his early existence in the physical realities of industrial labor. His transition from the mines to formal study was driven by a vorac…