page_title: Tom Kelly (basketball)
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Tom Kelly (basketball) / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Lt Thomas E Kelly, USAAF
context_page_description: Thomas Edward Kelly was an American professional basketball player. After playing one season with the Boston Celtics of the Basketball Association of America, Kelly retired and became an engineer.
context_section_description: Thomas Edward Kelly was born at the New York Medical College, New York City, on March 5, 1924, to Edward Thomas Kelly, a New York City Alderman,  and Anastasia Cecilia Kane. In 1929, the family moved to St. Francis Xavier Parish in the Bronx.
  Kelly earned an academic scholarship to Regis High School, where he played basketball and graduated in 1941.
  In 1942, at age 18, Kelly joined the United States Army Air Forces as an Aviation Cadet. He was trained in the United States Army Air Corps as a B-17 flying officer and commissioned a Second Lieutenant Pilot in 1944, assigned to the 486th Bombardment Group (Heavy), 833rd Bomber Squadron of the 3rd Division of the U.S. Eighth Air Force, stationed in Sudbury, Suffolk, England. Kelly flew twenty-nine combat missions over Germany, winning five battle stars and the air medal with oak leaf clusters.
  After leaving the military, Kelly attended New York University's Bronx campus on the G.I. Bill, graduating after three years in 1948 with an engineering degree. He was a member of Tau Beta Pi, the engineering school equivalent of Phi Beta Kappa.
  While at NYU, he won a spot on the basketball team as a walk-on, joining such nationally recognized athletes as Dolph Schayes, Ray Lumpp, Sid Tannenbaum, and Frank Mangiapane. At NYU, Kelly was All-Metropolitan basketball forward on the team that reached the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) final game in 1948. In 1991, Kelly was inducted into the Athletics Hall of Fame at NYU.
caption: Kelly while stationed in England during World War II.
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