Oral History Research Office
Columbia University

Session #1
Interviewee:  Moe Foner
Interviewer:  Robert Master
Place:  Flushing, New York
Date:  August 21, 1984

Q:  To begin with, when and where you were born?  Then perhaps a little bit about who your parents were and so forth.

Foner:  I was born in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, on August 3, 1915.  We lived there until I was about sixteen years of age.  My family moved to East Flatbush for one year and then to Boro Park.  The Williamsburg section was a predominantly working-class area, a tenement.

My parents -- Abe Foner, was a seltzer man; that is, he went around with a horse and wagon and delivered seltzer to the people in the neighborhood.  He had come to the United States as a teenager from Poland, the first of several brothers who came here, and helped bring the others here and then his parents.  They were a closely knit Jewish family, not particularly religious but observed all the holidays and Friday nights and that kind of thing.

My mother, maiden name Mary Smith, Smith obviously given to her when she arrived, came here from Poland, met my father, I'm never sure how, but was a housewife all her life.  I am one of four brothers.  My older brothers, Jack and Phil, twins, are four years older than I am, and my brother Henry is four years younger.  I am the middle Foner.  We went to school at Public School 19, which was across the street in Brooklyn, in Williamsburg, then to PS 50, and then to Eastern District High School.  All of us went to the same PS 19 and Eastern District High School.  I'll deal with college later.  My brothers were--

Q:  Before you go on to your brothers, what part of Poland did your parents come from, and why did they come?  First, when exactly did they come, do you know?

Foner:  I don't have specific dates on that.  My father was born in Bielsk in Russia.  My mother was born in Poland, we don't know which town.  My father came in response to pogroms and the uncertainty at that time, and looking for great opportunities in the new world.  He came with no money.  He would tell us of the difficulty in finding bread to eat.  He knew no one.  Someone helped him find a place to sleep, and gradually through people who lived here from the town in which he was born was helped to find some kind of employment and worked all his life.

Q:  You don't remember what town he was from?

Foner:  I don't remember.  My brother Henry is best, he's the resource on the family background of the parents.

Q:  Were your father and mother political people?

Foner:  No, they were not political people.  They were totally apolitical.  They were primarily interested in seeing to it that their children got an education and could move up in the world, to become learned, and that was a very, very important thing for them.

Q:  When you were growing up, as a small child, did the family have enough resources, or did you suffer through times of great poverty, or what was family life like, do you remember?

Foner:  Yes.  The family was poor, but I do not recall being very deprived.  It may be compared to the people in the neighborhood, we all seemed to be on the fairly same level.  But in the Depression I do not recall that we were very, very badly off.  As a matter of fact, we were always working.  My brothers worked in the post office when they were attending college; we played in the band to add to our income.  I remember working when I was a student in high school.  I had a job at Gimbel's from 4:00 to 8:00 and all day Saturday for the sum of ten dollars a week, which was very, very high, and that would have to be in 1931 and '32.  And everybody put their money into the family household's money, but I honestly don't recall being hungry, poor, or anything.  There was always food to eat and there was a place to sleep, etc.  We never were wealthy, but I cannot say that we were very deprived because of the lack of money.

Q:  What was your relationship like with your brothers?  Were you close to them?  Were you competitive with them?

Foner:  My brothers were very, very brilliant in school and very, very popular.

Q:  Your older brothers?

Foner:  I'm speaking of my older brothers now, Jack and Phil.  It was a sort of a tough act to follow because I would come into the public school as they were leaving the school, and I came into the high school as they had graduated from the high school.  They had achieved already very, very great reputations in scholarship and in all kinds of activities.  They were members of the debating team, and it was a debating team that was one of the best debating teams in this city.  They played on the baseball team, they were in dramatics, they were officers of the G.O., which is the student organization.  They were very actively involved in everything that was happening in the school, and they were very, very popular.  My home was a center for all kinds of people, their friends, who gathered there for all kinds of reasons, including rehearsals for a band in the living room.  But the baseball team, everybody would come to the house, and it was a center.  My mother was feeding them and my father was delighted to see them.  My father came home from work very late.  He worked from very early in the morning and came home very late.  It's hard for me to remember having meals in which the family sat down at a table together, except for the Passover Seder and some Jewish holidays.  The home was like a restaurant.  My mother served meals at all times.  The family never gathered together for a meal because of the crazy hours.  My brothers were always working, and I was, too.  My brothers were intellectuals in the sense that they read, the debating team, the whole atmosphere of their friends and themselves was an intellectual atmosphere.

In my case, I devoted virtually all of my time to sports.  That's all.  I virtually lived in the playground.  I played on the softball team, I played on the baseball team, I played basketball all the time, when I was in high school, I had become the captain of the basketball team.  That was my major interest and major concern.  When I went to college, I remember telling somebody that I was going to Brooklyn College rather than City College because I couldn't play the style of basketball required by Nat Holman, which was fast, I was not very fast of foot.  I thought I would do better at Brooklyn College, and I went to Brooklyn College.  But I don't want to get into college now; I want to stay in this.

Q:  You speak about your brothers as if they sort of sprung forth as intellectuals when they were in junior high school.  There must been some influence from your parents to have created such special people.

Foner:  Well, it's very hard for me to explain it.  My mother, for example, did not read English.  She could not read English and she could not write.  My father only read a Yiddish paper, and he did not write in English.  He could sign his name and sign checks, I guess, but he did not write.  There was an atmosphere of encouraging going to school and college and studying and studying, doing homework and that kind of thing, but there wasn't an intellectual atmosphere in the home in the sense of literature.  There were no books that I can recall that were there because my parents brought them there.  I think a great deal of this came from my brothers and the contacts, the teachers they ran into in school, the friends they had, and they absorbed a lot of this stuff, and they would go to plays.  To go to Broadway, we rarely ever did.  But I would go to movies, I remember, with my mother occasionally, but I don't recall an impact from the family on the children of an intellectual character.  My father respected, greatly respected learning, but he himself was not learned.  He read the paper.  He did not read books.  He read the newspaper, and he did not have a great deal of time.  He read the newspaper and occasionally he would read the Jewish books in preparation for the holidays., but generally speaking, that was it, as I recall it.

Q:  Were your parents in some way charismatic, charming type people, or shy and retiring?

Foner:  My father was rather shy, but he had a very good sense of humor, I remember.  He was always sort of twisting things into a jest, although he was usually so tired and exhausted that it was hard for him to do anything but get up and go to work, etc.  My mother was a good person.  She was a good mother and a good person, but there was nothing charismatic about her.  I used to read to her.  In that sense, I was different than the others.  My mother did not read.  I remember that we had the Book of Knowledge.  That was the sum of the big one.  We had the Book of Knowledge, and all of us read it, and I remember that I would read stories from the Book of Knowledge to my mother while she worked in the kitchen.  I would do that a few times a week, I remember, by the kitchen window while she was working, to read stories, Dick Whittington's Cat and other novels.  Stories were read to her because I liked the stories and my mother enjoyed them.

Q:  How old were you when you did that?

Foner:  I would maybe be nine, ten, eleven, something like that.

Q:  What was the Book of Knowledge?

Foner:  The Book of Knowledge was the Encyclopedia Britannica of that period, but it contained a smorgasbord of information in it.  It was a series of books, and I guess that they probably had them in every home in that area, because the parents who were anxious that their children be learned would buy them from a traveling Book of Knowledge man.  You know, you added a volume every time.

Q:  Did you grow up speaking Yiddish?

Foner:  No, I did not grow up speaking Yiddish.  One other influence, as I recall now, that is the influence of the library, of books and reading books.  But the books that I read were all spots, adventure books.  But we went to the library all the time, the library being the Williamsburg Public Library, which was located virtually across the street from the high school, and I pass it now on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  You can see it and you go right by it.  We spent a lot of time there.  My brothers spent even more time in the library reading books.  I think they read much more.  I was really not a good student.  I was a very average student in high school in comparison to the scores my brothers rang up.  I was an indifferent student in the first two years of college because I was playing basketball on the team and playing in a band, and I dropped that through the influence, I guess, I was becoming more political and college athletics and concentrated on studies, I became a history major as well as my brothers.  Then my grades improved considerably in the last two years, even though I was working.  This family was constantly working.  My brothers, as I said, were working in the post office.  My father by this time had left the business and become a partner in a garage on Pearl and Tillary Streets, where the Brooklyn/Edison trucks were housed, and through his contacts there, he got a job for my brothers to put on and off the last section of Brooklyn that was not on an automatic switch on streetlights.  They would get up early in the morning and turn the lights off with a key and early evening turn them on, and I inherited that job while I was in high school.  We were paid seven dollars a week for it.  It was a very, very good job.  You walked about four or five miles for it, but it was a lot of money at that time.  But in addition to that, my brothers were playing in the band, working in the post office, and in the summertime going to the mountains to play in the band.  I didn't work in the post office but I followed with the band and I inherited that job.  It was like work and school.  I don't want to get to that point because I get into the period past college.

Q:  What was the Williamsburg community like?

Foner:  The Williamsburg community was overwhelmingly Jewish, mostly working class, garment workers, even some peddlers.  I recall the people I knew, the kids I played with, were all the children of workers.  I don’t know anybody who had this, but at that time I know there were women working, but the family was a male-dominated family.  I don't recall anybody who was in business of any kind.  If they were in business, it was like peddling, it was a very, very small time kind of operation.  In the same house where I was born, 310 South Third Street, among my friends were the Herbst family, Moses Herbst was my age, but his younger brother also was a friend of my brother Henry, Frank.  Frank Herbst, we were friends from that point on, and our lives seemed to parallel -- they moved to Boro Park, we moved to Boro Park.  We were both active politically together.  He went to City College 23rd Street, with Henry, and he later went into the labor movement.  He was with Elliot Godoff and Jack Bigel in the public workers.  We were very close friends, we were close friends after he was kicked out when the purge took place, and we were friends until his death a few years ago.  But I’ve moved away from your question.

Q:  I was just curious about the community and the sense of consciousness or identity that it engendered in you, for you as a Jewish identity, a working-class identity, or was there no sense of identity?

Foner:  It's hard to say that there was a sense.  We weren't among the most religious people, although we went to shule on the holidays.  Everybody did.  It was very, very rare, although I remember that on the floor we lived, there were six families on the floor three on one side, there was the next-door neighbor and the one in the center.  The person in the center, named Cooper, Bernie Cooper was the son, his father was an anarchist.  I remember there were pictures of Lenin in their home, and they were known as anarchists.  His mother also was an active anarchist and maybe a communist, it's hard for me to remember, but I do know there were pictures of Lenin in their room.  I knew that they were talking about Sacco and Vanzetti.  I remember hearing about it.  It make no great impression.  My brother Henry was very close to Bernie, to their son, and spent more time with them, but I don't think he absorbed any political influence.  They seemed to be sort of queer people to us in the sense that they seemed very intellectual, as distinct from all the other people.

Q:  Even more intellectual than everybody around them?

Foner:  The parents.

Q:  The parents were intellectual.

Foner:  Oh, yes, yes, very distinctly.  The books, they had a lot of books in their home.  But nobody singled them out.  People may have made remarks about them but they were not considered outsiders, you know, or boycott them.  The atmosphere, I remember, intellectual only in the sense that I can recall that we would, in the hot weather, we were always out in the street at night and the smarter ones were always -- I was younger than the people I associated with, so that when they were in high school I was still in public school.  I remember the feeling of unease and embarrassment because once they got into high school, they studied algebra.  There they were on the streets doing algebra problems with chalk on the pavement.  To me it meant nothing, you know, and I felt rather left out on the thing.  But that was about all you could do.  In addition to the library, you went to a bookstore because there were western novels that you could get that weren't in the library, that you could trade in every week, or you went to the candy store where you bought Nick Carters or paperbacks of Frank and Dick Meriwell that you read.  Obviously we did a lot of reading because all of these books seemed to float in and out of our lives and handed down and moved around, but they were not great literature, they were just all kinds of crazy series that were real popular at that time.

Q:  It sounds as though the influences were more American than Jewish and immigrant.

Foner:  Let me try to remember the Jewish influence.  We went to haida.

Q:  What's that?

Foner:  A Jewish school.  Mr. Greenhouse had a school, like a brownstone on the block that was set up with benches, and we went after school there.  But we went there because our parents said we should go.  I, at any rate, was never serious about it.  It was a fun kind of thing that you went to and wanted to get out of so you could go do your own thing.  We never did anything that I really absorbed out of it.  Bar mitzvah, for example, my brothers' bar mitzvah was a very big deal, and it was done in conjunction with the people next door because it was a double-header.  We had relatives in and the people next door turned over their place, and I remember Jack made his speech in one, then they crossed over.  They were regarded as very smart, and it may be that that gave me a sense of inadequacy in comparison.  Particularly I remember going to school, I’d come in for the first time and they said, "Are you -- "

And you said, "Yes.,"  And they sort of expected great things for you, which you couldn't deliver.

Henry, who came four years later, had physical problems.  At that time it was defined as one leg was shorter than the other, and he used to go to doctors and, I remember, to Eneslow for special shoes.  I went there two years ago.

Q:  What's Eneslow?

Foner:  It's a store that provides special shoes with arches.  They still have them around.  I went two years ago to have some things.  I remember telling the sales guy, "Hey, you know, this is like a sense of deja vu, coming back here fifty years later."  So Henry had to be taken care of specially because of this physical weakness.  He could not participate in sports, he couldn't do a lot of the things we did.  He also became a musician, too, but Henry was a very, very able student, very bright and a good student and very clever.  When I was the captain of the basketball team, we arranged for Henry to become the manager, and Henry would go with me to all the games we played.  I had a closer relationship with him than with my brothers because my brothers were already off and running and were very busy all the time.  They had girlfriends and everything, in a fraternity, a real "lebedike" time.

Q:  You mentioned these anarchists that lived in the same building.  Were there any other politics in the Williamsburg community that you were aware of? Of course, you were very young.  I'm just wondering if there was anything percolating that influenced you.

Foner:  No, the politics were the politics of Democrats.  Election meant electing a Democrat.  That was a district in which Joseph Lentol was the district leader, and I remember his picture on posters.  And to this day, Lentol descendants are in the legislature, Eddie Lentol.  It just went right down the line.  But that was the politics.  You never heard of a Republican.  I recall the mayoralty thing because I remember following very, very carefully the Seabury investigation.

Q:  What was that?  When was it?

Foner:  Seabury must have been in the late Twenties.  That's the Judge Crater thing.  You must have heard, "Where is Judge Crater?"  That's a judge who was being investigated and disappeared and was never heard from again.  But the investigation of the Jimmy Walker regime, then he was challenged, I remember, by McKee.  John McKee was the mayor, and other people were mayors, and then La Guardia came.  But that's already coming into the Thirties.  But that was the extent of it.  Following politics was following the exciting things in politics, investigations.  But other than that, politics meant very little to us.  Let me try to think about some things about that.  Political things might be hard to figure out.

Q:  You said that you wanted to comment about Jewish and Gentile relations.

Foner:  Yes.  Our friends were Jews and everybody else was a Christian, and we knew no others.  I remember that my brothers brought to the house a fellow who was on the baseball team, a pitcher.  His name was Serge Grinkovich.  He was Russian but he was not Jewish.  The idea of bringing into the house a non-Jew was a precedent-shattering kind of thing.  My parents didn't know what to do.  You know, it was like someone with horns would come in, and it turned out he was a very nice guy.  He later became a pitcher at Lafayette College and later became a doctor, a surgeon, and that was the first thing.  But what I do remember is that at various times -- Williamsburg is near Greenpoint, and Greenpoint was predominantly Christian, Italians, Irish, just all of them, and from time to time, particularly on election night, there would be invasions.  On Halloween there would be invasions of the Christians and you'd get off the street and you'd get caught.  They came in with stockings with stones in them, and they really let you have it.

Q:  What occasioned that?

Foner:  Tradition.  There was never a reason for it, but it was like suddenly they decided that they’d go in against the Jews.

Q:  And the Jews ran away and didn't fight back?

Foner:  I don't recall.  Your parents said, "Don't be outside in the street."  Otherwise, in the wintertime, we were out in the street with mickeys, potatoes roasting, that kind of thing, but that was off limits, get into hiding, because the marauders are here.

Q:  How big a group was it, do you remember?

Foner:  They'd come in groups of four or five or six.  They were just in groups, but people would take off.

Q:  And find an individual Jew and beat him up.

Foner:  Find an individual kid and beat him up, yeah.

Q:  Did it ever happen to you?

Foner:  I don't recall it ever happening to me.

Q:  Or to your brothers?

Foner:  No.  By the way, you know this area is described in very great detail by Daniel Fuchs in his trilogy on Williamsburg, Summer in Williamsburg, a novel.  He came out of this area.  He came a little earlier than us.  There were a number of people who became famous, who became famous gangsters and were killed.  I remember Boggy Foyer was a basketball player who I knew that became a gangster and then was killed in a gang fight.  But that's the way it was.  What areas do you want to cover?

Q:  Jews aren't known for being athletes.

Foner:  Well, basketball.

Q:  At that time.

Foner:  Basketball was Jewish, heavily Jewish.  Nat Holman, City College.  Even in the pros, the Celtics, and then the Jewels came out of St. John's had mostly Jews on it.  And when we played basketball, we played against some teams that did not have Jews, obviously, but most of the teams that were good had Jews.  The best team was usually at Thomas Jefferson, with "Rip" Kaplinsky, Java Gotkin, and others who later went on to college to star were playing there, mostly Jews.  We would spend Saturday night going around.  The Williamsburg Y was near us, too, and the Williamsburg Y had a lot of cultural activities.  Occasionally we saw a play there, but that did not stand out.  We went there because it had a gym and we could play there, we could watch games there.  We would even go the church right beyond it on Saturday night because there were basketball games, just to watch them play, the kids.

Q:  You would watch the Christians play.

Foner:  We’d watch the Christians play.  But at that time we were already in high school.  We were older.  The period of the beatings was a young time.

Q:  Like how much younger?  Five, six, seven?

Foner:  No.  Seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, before going to high school.

Q:  That period lasted for as long as you could remember until you got into high school?

Foner:  Yes, it was always playing basketball.

Q:  No, I meant the period of the anti-Semitism.

Foner:  Yes, the anti-Semitism was with you all the time in the sense that we lived in a Jewish milieu, even when we went to a band.  We went to the Jewish resorts.  It wasn't a religious resort; it was Jewish.  We pretty much stayed within that framework.  I'm trying to think of the people I knew who were not Jewish, and I probably did not get to know non-Jews until I really went to college, or those that I came across while playing basketball.  Incidentally, one of the guys who played basketball with us, he was in my brother Henry's class, but his older brother played with us.  That was Red Auerbach.  Red Auerbach's brother, Davie, was on the high school team with me, and Red was then a freshman, but we knew Red Auerbach at that time, but he was just a basketball player.

Q:  He wasn't the general manager of the Celtics then.

Foner:  Not really, no.  No.  But he was not a great basketball player at that time.

Q:  Was he a shrewd guy?

Foner:  No.  Compared to what?  Yeah.

Q:  Did you go outside of what really amounted to a ghetto, in a certain sense, very much?  Did you go to downtown Brooklyn?  Did you go to Manhattan?  Did you go to Ebbets Field?

Foner:  Oh, yeah.  We went to Ebbets Field.  We went to Ebbets Field.  First of all, we'd go with the summer school.  There were times where the summer program could take kids to the game, and it was a big event.  We would go to Ebbets Field.  We were avid baseball fans.  We knew averages and everything.  As a matter of fact, I remember, it must have been as a teenager, I got a job -- not a job, it was a sort of an honor, on Williamsburg Extension, Bridge Plaza, there was some kind of store.  I don't even know what was in there, but they had a swinging window around which was a scoreboard, and with a ticker there, you put the scores on in chalk, later on in stencil.  Large crowds stood below, watching the scores, watching the scores.

Q:  Not the game; the score.

Foner:  It was like watching grass grow or ice melt.  And the honor to do it, because you learned the score before they did, see.  Or you could fool them.  You’d put up -- like you knew that the inning came in two for one and three for the other team, or three for the top.  You'd put the two on first and then put up the three, that kind of thing.  Also going to Ebbets Field was a very, very big deal, and to be close to players, to stand outside and wait for autographs, or see them.  These were people who were much bigger than life.  I remember we had in the summer school playground, we had a guy -- I used to know his name, I can't remember -- he was like the summer school teacher.  He was going to high school, and he played on a baseball team on Sundays at Park Circle.  He was terrific.

Q:  Where is Park Circle?

Foner:  Park Circle is on the outskirts of Prospect Park.  There were baseball diamonds there.  I'm sure it exists there.  It's on the Flatbush Avenue side.  We would go on Sunday to watch him play.  We were his supporters.  We would cheer him and he would talk to us, and it was a great event.  I'm trying to think of where we went outside of the circle.  It was not until I was in high school that I can remember going into New York City, and I remember going into New York City for a specific reason.  I became interested, I don't know why, we had a radio.  We were one of the few people with a radio.  I remember KDKA.  This would be in the Twenties, the early period.  We had a radio with a speaker shaped like a cone, and the kids would come up to listen to Graham McNamee describe the World Series.  I just thought of a great story.  The kids -- the kids, that's us -- would have a club.  We had a team, the Crimsons, and we had a club that met in the Y, and we had what you would call faculty advisors, someone from the Y who was assigned to meet with us.

Q:  How old were you at this point?

Foner:  I would have to be -- this may be early high school.  No, no, because my brothers are in high school at the time.  They’re on the debating team in high school, so I’d be in public school.

Q:  So you were twelve, thirteen?

Foner:  Yes.  We went to the Y once a week and we would meet there and discuss what we should meet and talk about.  So we should talk about baseball.  And then I remember suggesting that we should have a debate, because I used to follow my brothers and watch them debate capital punishment and League of Nations and World Court.  Those were the typical discussions.  As a matter of fact, they debated their arch-rival, Boys' High,  and the key debater at Boys' High was what's-his-name from the ILG, Gus Tyler.  Gus and I would talk from time to time.  "How are your brothers?"
 

"You remember?"

"Of course I remember."

I remember I met him in Fresh Meadows Theater, we were seeing "Reds" and there he was.  He lives in Great Neck.

But anyway, we had a debate, and the debate was resolved that the Washington Senators will beat the Pittsburgh Pirates in the World Series.  This is the 1924 World Series because that's when they played.  Because I knew the strategy of debates, of how it went, I remember when I got up for my thing.  I remember all those things.  Anyway, I started by saying -- you won't believe this -- I said, "Mr. Chairman, worthy opponents and ladies and gentlemen of the jury."  And everybody said it’s not fair.  Everybody.  This is unfair because nobody started their debate like that.  They hadn't been at a debate.

Q:  I see.  You had an unfair advantage.

Foner:  Yes.  This is unfair, it’s not fair.  But I remembered that.  That was intellectual for us, keeping together, that kind of thing.  But now it comes to going to New York.  Let me try to figure this out because it was a very important thing for me.

Q:  You've got two stories running here.  You've got New York and you've got Graham McNamee on the radio and the kids coming to listen.

Foner:  Okay.  I think I know.  My brothers were playing in a band in the Catskills, and y parents had a place in Mountaindale, and I would go there.  Once my parents let me go for a day or two to the hotel, the Royalton Hotel, it was in Monticello.  You didn't only play in the band, you did the show.  I remember they had a very witty piano player who was very funny.  And so I would watch them and I would admire them.  That was the greatest thing to be able to be in a band and do the show and have fun and punch lines and skits and sketches.  You had the Dr. Cronkites, the Smith and Dale stuff, and I was very interested in that kind of thing.  I remember that I used to go with a friend of mine.  This was high school because he was on the basketball team with me, Harry Krugman, and he was also interested in comedians.  We used to go to the Palace.  Every Saturday afternoon we would go to the Palace Theater where all of the big acts, Burns and Allen, or J.C. Flippin, all of the top comedians, Jack Benny, Gracie Allen, were there, the Marx Brothers.  I would go and I would take notes on what they said, and then I would send letters to my brothers of what was the gags for them that they could use in their sketches.

Q:  Where is the Palace?

Foner:  It's the Palace now, the Palace Theater, 46th Street and Broadway.  That was the mecca for a comedian.  If an act could make it at the Palace, that was the highest rank you could go, to be at the Palace.  I remember Milton Berle when he was a kid performing there, and I used to go to the Brooklyn Paramount to catch them, and the Fox.  Then when I became interested in playing an instrument, I was playing the saxophone, then I used to follow every band that came into New York, particularly Paul Whiteman.  You may not have heard of him.

Q:  Paul Whiteman I've heard of, but I don't know anything about.

Foner:  Paul Whiteman was a big band.  It was a jazz band but concert almost, because he introduced "Rhapsody in Blue."  Ferde Grofé was the pianist in his band.  And because it was a big band and it was popular and famous, he hired the best musicians, Frankie Trombaur, Jack Teagarden played trombone, and Chester Hazlett played sax and clarinet.  My sax teacher, Sidney Feldman, used to tell me about them because these were like mythical greats, so I would follow them wherever they went and played.  Like, If they were at the Brooklyn Paramount, I caught them at the Brooklyn Paramount.  If they went to the Palace, I went.  The same act, but just sit close and listen to them.  You didn't learn anything from that.  That's Mildred Bailey singing, you know.  That's the beginning.  And then when I began to play the saxophone, wisely but not well, I played in a band and eventually I was going up to the mountains and playing in a band.  We'd better stop.

Q:  I don't want to get too far ahead because there are other things.

Foner:  Let's back up.

Q:  I can see the music period is going to be a big discussion.

Foner:  I need some musical background.  Okay.

Q:  I just wanted to finish up on the Dodgers.  Who were your heroes?

Foner:  The Dodgers at that time, they had Dazzy Vance, great pitcher.  Dazzy Vance was outstanding.  Zach Wheat, the left fielder, was a big hero.  They had for a while Rabbit Maranville, he wasn’t very good but he was very popular.  He had the basket catch.  They had a lousy team, always sixth or seventh place.  Jake Fournier was the first baseman, then replaced by Del Bissonette.  They had for a while a left handed third baseman, used to throw to first on a bounce, Johnny Barrett.  They were a pretty lousy team, but the games with the Giants were big.  I remember even once going to a Giant game at the Polo Grounds, which was very rare for me to go.  That was a game in which Al Tyson, of the Giants, collided with somebody else and broke his leg.  And then another guy who was very popular for us was Johnny Fredericks, who was a center fielder on the Dodgers.  Then I think I once told you that we used to go to Ebbets occasionally to sneak in for morning practice, because they were always being called for morning practice because they were in seventh or last place.  The manager was Wilbert Robinson, Uncle Robbie, he was known as.  We used to buy the -- I remember there was a Brooklyn Times before the Eagle, that emphasized all this and had score cards and everything and also big basketball coverage.  So we would go and sneak in and watch from the corners, and then I remember when he left, we would walk through the dugout and it was like being on hallowed ground.  I may have told you, I remember the time I was at the dugout and found a telegram that had been torn into strips and I put it together and it was a telegram from a scout saying he was sending up --

[SIDE TWO]

Foner:  As I said, to walk in the dugout was like Gettysburg, you know.  I remember once picking up the strands of a telegram and putting it together.  It was to Robinson from a scout describing a pitcher who was coming up, 6'6", very good fast ball, Van Lingle Mungo from Hartford.  He died recently and there was a big obit in the Times.

Q:  How often could you afford to go?

Foner:  We most of the time we went with the school.  We went with the school.  I remember once going with my brothers.  You went to the bleachers for fifty cents, although fifty cents was a lot of money, and you went on the streetcar to go there.  But I remember it rained suddenly and there was a rush to the exit, and I got pinned against a wall someplace and I thought I was going to get killed, and I was screaming and they got me out some way, because I'm still here.

Football.  Pro football.  There was a professional football team the Dodgers had, the Brooklyn Dodgers, for a while.  They were terrible, too.  Benny Friedman played.

Q:  Who was Benny Friedman?

Foner:  Benny Friedman was Jewish, a football player.  He was a great quarterback at Michigan, one of the great all time quarterbacks.  Then he moved to the Brooklyn Dodgers.  This was a period when to find a Jewish baseball player was very, very big.  The Giants had Andy Cohen, and then there were occasionally big disputes whether that guy was Jewish, how can that guy with that name be Jewish.  The idea that a Jew becoming a professional athlete was an incredible thing because most of the baseball players were farm and country boys because there were not diamonds to play on in urban areas.

Q:  Did you aspire to become a professional athlete?

Foner:  I was never good enough to be a professional athlete.  As a matter of fact, I was a substitute on the college basketball team.  It was clear I was not going to go anyplace.  There was no point anymore.  I was playing in the band and that, but I'm running ahead in my story.

Q:  Okay.  One other thing, just of a point of curiosity I've always had, my father describes downtown Brooklyn as being an incredibly alive and thriving kind of place.  It was like Broadway.

Foner:  But what year is he talking about?

Q:  He's about five or six years younger than you.

Foner:  The only time I went to downtown Brooklyn was when I went to Brooklyn College, because Brooklyn College was located in an office building.

Q:  Really?

Foner:  Yes.

Q:  Before the campus?

Foner:  I still refer to that as the new building because when I was graduated in 1936 it was the last class before the opening of the new building in Brooklyn.  So we were located in that area, a lot of people who went to school there with me.  But later I became more familiar after the war because my first job in a union was in a department store and we represented the workers at Namn's and Loeser's and Oppenheim-Collins in Brooklyn, so I was around there all the time.  But we never really went downtown Brooklyn for entertainment, except if I would go to the Brooklyn Paramount, was a key thing where people went to the movies.  They had a stage show, and the Brooklyn Fox.  But we didn't go there that often.  We went there from time to time but I don't recall it.

Q:  You mentioned a story about going to Manhattan.  You were how old then when you went to hear the comedians?

Foner:  My brothers were in high school, so I had to be in elementary school when I was doing it, and I would memorize acts.  I knew all the gags.  I'm jumping ahead.  I was very interested in that thing because when Sammy became very friendly with us, Sammy Levenson, and started to tell stories, I remember I used to keep a paper with his punch lines, and I once had over 400 punch lines to stories.

Q:  This is much later you're talking about?

Foner:  This is not too much -- this is later, but it's not -- yes, it's later.  But I was always interested in that kind of thing because later on, I'll tell you, when I went in the mountains, I suddenly found myself replacing the social director one summer and then was doing that a number of times with the band.  I'm jumping.

Q:  What was your first job, the very first one you can remember?

Foner:  The first job was at Gimbel's.

Q:  How old were you?

Foner:  It would have to be that I was maybe -- let's see, I was in my junior year at high school.  I may have been around fifteen or fourteen.  I remember I went Benny Glick, who lived in the same building, and we went to the Gimbel's employment office.  We never really thought we'd get a job.  I don't think we half wanted a job, you know, but we had to show our parents that we were looking for work to help.  They said yes, 4:00 to 8:00, all day Saturday, ten dollars a week.  We were shocked.  And we had to go, and this was a new thing for me to take the Broadway-Brooklyn line, the BMT, that went into Williamsburg over the bridge, over the Williamsburg Bridge, it still exists now, and to take that in to 34th Street and to come back.  But the parameters were very tight.  You just went and came back.  You didn't wander off.

Q:  You didn't wonder off because you --

Foner:  Because we worked from four to eight, also  my mother would hold food for me.  See, also, on food and school, that's probably why I eat the way I do.  I eat very, very fast and I never stop to really enjoy the food.  When I went to elementary school, I lived across the street.  I used to run home for lunch.  When I went to high school, I lived about six, seven, eight blocks, so we had like a twenty-five minute lunch hour.  Benny Glick and I had a time, we would walk fast, get home, get a hard-boiled egg and something on the table, eat it and come right back.  So I did that all the time.  In college, I sort of took along food, and then after the second year in college, I was working at City College from the afternoons on, from 2:00 o'clock on, so I was always rushing, with a piece of food or something so that you never stopped to eat.

Q:  What was your job at Gimbel's, exactly?

Foner:  Stock, hanging up things, I don't know, putting price tags on.  I then got another job later on.  That was my first job.

Q:  How long did that last?

Foner:  About two years.  About two years.  It was a very good job.  Ten bucks a week was fantastic.  Then I inherited the job with the lights.

Q:  I meant to ask you, what neighborhood was it that was the last one that had the lamps?

Foner:  The area that includes Park Avenue, Flushing Avenue, outside Williamsburg, it's toward Kent Avenue.  You don't know the neighborhood.

Q:  I don't know it that well.

Foner:  We started on Broadway about, I'd say, twenty blocks from where I lived, on Broadway right up towards P.S. 147.  There were three lights with four lamps on each, and it was near a bank.  That was the signal.  You started there and you turned off the light.  The person in charge, the supervisor, knew that you had started.  Or if you turned them on, they knew you had started.  We had this problem.  My brothers had gotten post office jobs, so they couldn't do it anymore, so they wanted to turn it over to me.  I was too young and they were sure that the guy in charge was a jerk and they hated him.  He was sort of a mean guy.  Why, I don't know.  They said he was mean.  But they knew that if they said that they couldn't do it and they were going to give it to me, that he would object and give it to somebody else, so they never told him.  So I was taught the route, and I was to get there before he got there, see, because he would be there at a certain time, to start before him at both times, so that he wouldn't know who was doing it.  You had a key, and you stuck it into the lamp post, and you would turn it on.

Q:  Gas or electricity?

Foner:  Electricity.  It was the last section of Brooklyn that wasn't on the central switch.

Q:  This was when?

Foner:  This was '31.  I'm in high school.  No, wait a minute.  Gimbel's is before '31.  Gimbel's has to be like '29.

Q:  Fourteen, fifteen.

Foner:  Yes.  I'm on the basketball team when I'm turning out lights, so I'm playing, and I was on the basketball team for at least two years.

Q:  In high school.

Foner:  In high school.

Q:  This was Eastern District High School.

Foner:  I graduated Eastern District in 1932, and I graduated junior h.s. in '29.  I graduated Brooklyn College in '36.

Q:  There are a couple of quick questions that I didn't ask earlier about the very early time.  Were you born in a hospital or at home?

Foner:  I think I was born at home.  I was born at home.  I remember Henry being born at home.  I remember it because I heard crying and screams, and I remember to this day, I was in the kitchen near the sink, and it upset me, and I turned on the water, the faucet, and I threw a pencil in the sink.  That's what I remember.  I remember also -- I don't remember this, but this is the story that was handed down in my family about my brothers when they were born, they were born at home, too.  They were born, and the first children were twins.  My mother never knew she was going to have twins, and hen my father came home from work, she was beside herself.  She was weeping.  He said, "What's the matter?"

She said, "How am I going to take care of twins?  One is enough.  How can I take care of two?"

My father looked, looked at one and said, "Don't worry.  He doesn't look so good."  That's the story that was handed down in my family.  He never would say who he pointed to.  I think that one of them was born fifteen minutes earlier than the other.

Q:  In general, aside from Henry's problem with his leg, the family was always in good health?

Foner:  Yeah, we had no serious things.  You know, you'd break an arm or something like that, but nothing.

Q:  I don't know how to handle this exactly, but maybe you could say a little bit more about what becomes of your parents.  Do they live long, happy, healthy, productive, lives together, or something else?

Foner:  My father -- it was not a loving -- my father did all the things a father had to do, and my mother did all the things a mother had to do.  But I don't recall it as a loving relationship because I don't recall the family together very much.  My father would come home at 7:30, and I remember I would be playing in the playground, I would see my father coming from South First Street.  You know, he was still dirty and grimy, and he looked like Lee J. Cobb, you know, he was bowed down, because in those days a seltzer box was a heavy box.  You carried it up four or five floors.  You really were busting your back.  My father was always bowed over from that.  Later when he got the job at the garage, he was busting his back there fixing everything.  Of course, his partner was a goof-off.  But anyway, so I don't recall a loving relationship.  I don't recall a close, warm relationship, but I recall my mother was very close to the children.  My mother was very close to me, I think.  I don't know why, but either I'm imagining it.  I remember, for example, on Thursday nights, the big event was that at the end of the evening my mother would prepare My-T-Fine, which was a big event in itself.  My mother was a terrible cook.  Anyway, d I used to spend Thursday night ironing the handkerchiefs for everybody.  I remember the ironing board, and I would iron the handkerchiefs and I would talk to my mother then.  It was rare that you talked to your parents.  I don't think we had the kind of relationship where you discussed things with your parents very much.  You were always on the move, kind of thing, but my mother was a warm -- my wife says my mother gave people the sense of appearing helpless in getting things done that way, but it was like a defensive mechanism.  I don't how else to describe it.  I don’t recall.  Later on, see, my mother always wanted to learn to read and write, and we would always try to get somebody to teach her.  I remember, this is past this period a little bit, Jack is already teaching downtown, and I remember getting Al Friedman to come, Al Friedman now a vice president of Kuhn Loeb and a member of the board of directors of IT&T. Al Friedman used to come and teach my mother, and my mother would laboriously try to do it and she wouldn't get it.  She just wouldn't get it.

Q:  Did she speak English?

Foner:  She spoke English well, but she wanted to be able to read.  She even went to school sometimes at night, but it just did not work out.

Q:  One thing I confused, when you said they didn't read or write English.  But they spoke?

Foner:  Oh, yes, they spoke English.

Q:  From when you were a small child?

Foner:  At home they spoke Yiddish.  They spoke Yiddish, but later on they spoke English.  We conversed with them in English.

Q:  What became of them?

Foner:  Well, my father retired from the garage business.  He was very ill with emphysema, a heavy smoker, and for many years he suffered enormously.  There's a whole history in my family in the relationships not between my mother and my father, but between my mother and TR, Tante Rosie, as Sammy Levenson used to call her, TR.  The mother of the Jeffers, the Jeffer Funeral Home in Brooklyn and in Jamaica, their mother, a real matriarch.  My mother grew up in her household in Flushing.  As a child, we used to come to Flushing for the summer just to have a vacation in the country.  My aunt, Tante Rosie, and Uncle Hersh owned a general store five minutes from here.  I know exactly where it was.  We used to come here.

Q:  What would that current intersection be?

Foner:  It's at Fresh Meadow, it's the Booth Memorial Drive and where -- what is the lane that intersects?  I know where it is, but we used to come here by taking the elevated train to Jamaica and then take a trolley that went on 164th Street and then walk over there, and we’d come from time to time to visit, and in the summertime we'd come and stay a month in the country.  Sometimes my brothers came, and sometimes they were not there.

Q:  This is in the Twenties and early Thirties.

Foner:  We have pictures of Henry and me in cowboy and Indian suits, and I couldn't be any older than six years old or seven years old, plus Henry looks like he's three or four, something like that.  But we were in the country.

Q:  What was it like?

Foner:  It was real country.  There was just fields there, fields and farms, big farms, and there was nothing there, goats and cows and everything.  It was country.  Where am I?

Q:  Your father was very sick from emphysema, and you were talking about your mother and Aunt Rosie.

Foner:  See, Aunt Rosie, my parents were always concerned about money, saving money.  As I am, I guess.  I remember, see.  You left the light on, my mother would say, "What's the matter?  Edison doesn't make enough money?"  That kind of thing.

Q:  This is very familiar sounding.

Foner:  So they were concerned about money, so when we left the house gradually, Phil was the first one to leave, then Jack left, and then I left.  Henry remained, and it became a question of, "Why do you have this big house in Boro Park?"  Upstairs it's a two-family house, downstairs was Tante Rosie.  Tante Rosie was always saying, "Why don't you come down and talk?"  Over my father's objections, my mother and father moved down to share the house and rent out the upstairs.  Tante Rosie used to have chickens in the basement who laid eggs.  So the relationship, my father hated her.  It was a terrible thing for him.  It was also a sign of -- to share a house with someone you didn't like was a terrible thing.  He was unhappy and miserable, and he was suffering from emphysema.

One Sunday the whole family got together in Long Beach, where Jack and :Lisa lived, and on the way home my father, who drove, lost his way and he drove -- and Tante Rosie and my mother were in the car -- into the channel.  They fished the car out.  My mother and Tante Rosie were okay, and my father was badly hurt, a leg was broken and his chest badly mauled.  I remember going out to St. Joseph's Hospital in Rockaway every night to see him, and he virtually had lost the will to live.  He died.  He was about seventy-four when he died.

Q:  When was that?

Foner:  It was about the early Sixties.  We had gone through a lot of stuff by that time.  Then my mother lived with Tante Rosie for a while, then we convinced her to go into a home in Long Beach, and she was there about two years.  She was not very happy there.  I don't why she should be.  We would see her from time to time, we'd talk on the phone regularly.  And then she had a stroke and died.  Everything has a grim gallows humor about it.  At her death, both of the sons, the Jeffers, had competing funeral parlors, and I remember outside the street where she died, they came, and there was this big debate of who's going to get the funeral.  They were saying it was not for the job, but for the honor.  So I remember we decided that one would have the funeral, the other one would have the service.  We were all married by that time, and that's the end.

Q:  So he worked in the garage.

Foner:  He owned the St. Clair garage, a partner in the garage, but he worked there.

Q:  For many years?

Foner:  Many years, yes.  Many years, many years.  When he retired, even, he used to have a route selling eggs.  He used to get eggs from someplace and used to sell to Sammy Levenson, everybody, all of our friends, he would have a route.  It would keep him busy.  He used to come here on Sunday mornings, but to get from the car to the house, he was exhausted.  We were usually sleeping, and the kids, he would talk to the kids.  Just to get out and talk to somebody was a great event.  Then he would leave eggs and he would go.

Q:  Basically I wanted to wrap the pre-high school period.  There was one thing that we didn't talk about at all, was moving to Boro Park.  You lived in Williamsburg.

Foner:  We lived in Williamsburg and then we moved for a year to 1014 Winthrop Street, in East Flatbush.  It was an apartment in like a three- or four-family kind of complex.  I don't know what you call it now, attached kind of things.  While my brothers were in the country playing in the band, my parents would usually rent a place in Brighton Beach for the summer with the Pines, another family.  We would share an apartment.  I remember Saturday nights walking with Abie Pine, who died of a heart attack, he was a great softball pitcher whose doctor told him he should never do it, he shouldn't play, and he wouldn't tell his parents and he would play, and he died very young of a heart attack.  So we would walk around Coney Island, you know, go to Nathan's, like a ritual kind of thing, and sing all the latest songs from the song sheets and remember the lyrics.  And we swam.  We used to swim.  At that time I used to swim "rocks".  You know, from rock to rock, long distance.  Each "rock" was two blocks.  It used to be like eight, ten, twenty rocks without stopping, because we were there all summer long.  We had a whole summer to kill.  What else do you want to know?

Q:  Boro Park.

Foner:  I've got to tell you, because it reminded me of Coney Island and the beach.  From Williamsburg, one of the big things in the summertime was to go to Coney Island, and my mother would be the schlepper.  Frankie Herbst, Henry, and I would go, and like a day before, my mother would spend preparing the food, and my mother would schlep two big bags along the boardwalk to the George Washington Junior Baths, which was around 21st Street, and we would come.  My mother wouldn't put on a bathing suit.  She would sit in the hot sun on the beach while we were running around in the baths, and always at the last minute when we were supposed to be out, we weren't.  My mother was always sending a cop in to look for us like we were lost.  Which reminds me of a story about my brothers.  My brothers, when they were very young, they’re twins -- what's the day when you throw your sins away?

Q:  Yom Kippur.

Foner:  Yom Kippur.  On Yom Kippur, my parents went the whole family on the Williamsburg Bridge, and suddenly they looked around and the twins were gone.  There were a thing -- by gosh, they fell in the river, and verybody was looking at the thing.  They called the cops, and they were talking about dredging the river.  Finally they found them in the station house someplace eating ice cream.  I remember that as being a rather interesting experience.

Q:  How old were you then?

Foner:  I couldn't have been more than three or four years old.

Q:  What were you doing going on the Williamsburg Bridge on Yom Kippur?

Foner:  Throw your things -- what's the thing where you throw things in the water?

Q:  I was never that religious.

Foner:  There was something where you empty your pockets and throw them in the water and stuff.

Q:  So that all the Jews from Williamsburg went up on the Williamsburg Bridge and threw off their sins?

Foner:  They didn't have a lot of money in there.

Q:  But is that what really happened?

Foner:  Yes.  I remember that happened then.  I don't think I did it traditionally.  We were there for a year.  My parents didn't like it.

Q:  There in East Flatbush.

Foner:  In East Flatbush.  Then we moved to Boro Park in the same house that Tante Rosie had.  We took the upstairs.

Q:  How old were you when you moved to Boro Park?

Foner:  Fifteen.

Q:  So that was 1930.

Foner:  '30?  Couldn't be.

Q:  If you were born in 1915 and you were fifteen, you moved in 1930.

Foner:  Wait a minute.  Couldn't be.  I was already -- it has to be, I had to be older, because it had to be when I was going to college, because I was not going to high school from there.  So it had to be when I graduated.  Maybe they waited until I graduated from high school.  It must have been in 1936, however old I was in 1936.  Twenty-one.

Q:  Twenty-one already.

Foner:  Twenty-one?  Couldn't be.  It couldn't be.  I started to go to college earlier than twenty-one.

Q:  When you started college.

Foner:  Started college.

Q:  You said graduated.

Foner:  No.  Started college.

Q:  Started college.  So you would have been seventeen or so.

Foner:  Seventeen.  Yes.

Q:  One more question.  You were fourteen in 1929.  Do you have any recollection of the Depression happening, or did it have an impact on your family?

Foner:  Strangely enough, I don't recall.  See, I don’t recall bread lines.  I remember hearing and reading about things.  I don't recall experiencing it.  As a matter of fact, I came closer to experiencing it much later when I began to work on preparing things on the Depression, and I became very interested in every little thing about it, but I personally don't recall it as a horrible period.  It wasn't.

Q:  To summarizeit , what strikes me most are two things.  One, that you had such a diverse range of interests, and it seemed like all of you did.  I mean, this is not getting into when you got involved in music, but music, and reading, you know, cheap novels, and sports, and all these kinds of things, and that you --

Foner:  But everybody did that.  I don't think that was very unusual.  Maybe the music was.

Q:  I don't mean unusual for you.  I mean the whole milieu was like that, people did everything.

Foner:  Yes, people did everything.  They sort of tasted everything at that time.  It was a small town in a big city.  It was very tight, the people were all close together.  I remember the backyards.  In the backyards there was always somebody, always singing in the yards, and people were throwing down pennies.  A lot of crazy things happened there that I gather is fairly typical of what was happening all over the place.  Like, for example, we were up in the Adirondacks, we’d run into somebody, a couple there, he lived in Williamsburg, much older thanI, in a different section of Williamsburg.  His experiences are fairly similar to mine, even though he's considerably older, he's about eighty.

Q:  One thing that also has struck me is that it seems to me, based on what I've heard from my grandfather, who was twenty-five years older than you, you know, that the Lower East Side experience was somehow different from the Williamsburg experience, that in the Lower East Side --

Foner:  They’re poorer.

Q:  They’re poorer and politics seem inescapable in the Lower East Side.

Foner:  There had to have been socialist around during this period, on the street corners.

Q:  In Williamsburg.

Foner:  In Williamsburg.  And they don't stand out in my mind.  They may in other people who were there.  For example, my brothers, I'll bet you, would remember them.  I don't really, because my interests were not in that direction.  There had to have been, but the East Side is very different.  First of all, it's much poorer.  Even though Williamsburg is not a mecca, it probably is considered much nicer than the East Side at that time.  It's much poorer and more of the basic workers in the garment industry are there, crowded up and huddled up, and the Irving Howe stuff is all there; the socialist movement culture and everything is there.  That's the fight that’s going on already.

Q:  Because my grandfather, in his experiences, you know, was carrying a box for Meyer London to stand on.

Foner:  I remember the name Meyer London.  I remember them from that period, but I remember my parents mentioning Meyer London, but I didn’t know -- he was a socialist, he was a good man, a good man, because those people were good men.  That’s all, they weren’t because they were socialists; they were good men.

Q:  That was the view that your parents had?

Foner:  I’m sure I must have heard it somewhere.

Q:  He was Jewish and he was for the workers, and therefore, he was a good person.

Foner:  He was a good man, that’s right.  He was for people, for poor people.

Q:  Did you have any, from your family, sense of unions?

Foner:  Not really, no.  No, no.  No, I don't.  I'm trying to think, because first of all, I had uncles who lived all fairly close.  I forgot to tell you my father, at night, after coming home later, would wash up, sit down and eat by himself, and then go off to visit his father, who lived a block and a half away and where all the sons would sit down and while my grandmother would bring tea, and my grandfather -- I remember because I used to go to him for lessons also -- sat and smoked a Murad and was writing letters to Bintele Brief and nobody talked.  Occasionally he'd say something.  He was like the patriarch, would sit there, and they all sat there.  They would exchange views with each other a little bit.  Then they picked up, and they came home and they went to sleep.

Q:  They wrote letters to the Bintele Brief?

Foner:  My grandfather did.  He pictured himself as a great intellectual.  He was not.  He was not.  He used to always be writing.

Q:  The Bintele Brief was in the Forward?

Foner:  In the Forward.

Q:  And your father read the Forward?

Foner:  My father read the Forward.  I remember him reading the morning Journal, not the Tag, which was more conservative, but he read the Forward, I remember, on weekends because they had the roto-gravure section, I remember.  We all looked at that because when my brothers graduated from high school and I carried it around in my wallet for many, many years, their pictures were in there.

Q:  From graduation.  But never the             ?

Foner:  No.  Not during this period.  Later on my father became very political in his interests, later on, not in reacting to what we were doing, but not during this period.  My father went through various periods of being completely agnostic to very religious, that kind of thing.  My father was also a very cynical person.  "Ah, politicians.  Ah, you know."

Q:  Okay.  You went to high school.  It's confusing to me.

Foner:  I went to high school.  I graduated from high school at the age of sixteen.

Q:  Graduated high school at sixteen?

Foner:  Yes.

Q:  So you went to high school when you were twelve.

Foner:  Maybe I was between sixteen, seventeen.  I graduated in June of 1932.

Q:  So you were almost seventeen.  You were seventeen.

Foner:  Right.

Q:  So you went when you were almost thirteen.

Foner:  Right.  I went to junior high one year and then I went to high school.

Q:  All the things that we've been talking about are sort of merged a little bit.

Foner:  Yes, it’s hard.  They slip around.

Q:  But what I'm interested in, was high school somehow a different experience or a new experience?

Foner:  High school was basketball to me.  I did very little homework.  I think I learned very little there because I was not interested in studying.  I can't tell to this day whether it was, I'm reacting to my brothers by blocking out things or what, but I was not a very good student.

Q:  Do you remember any particular academic experiences that were in some way humiliating?  Teachers making fun?

Foner:  No, no.  What I do remember is this: I invariably would sit in the back of the room, and I could not see the black board.  My eyes were terrible.  I was nearsighted, and I had to copy off what the homework was when they’d write what the homework assignment was.  But the idea that I should wear glasses, you know, sissies wear glasses.  So I went for many years without seeing what was happening until I went -- this probably is true of a lot of people.  It’s not because they didn't want to get glasses, but the idea of glasses was a sort of a humiliating sissy kind of experience.

Q:  And so your main interest was basketball.  And you played what position?

Foner:  In high school I was a center.  I was 5'10".  I was very tall.  I was very tall for my age.  No, because we didn't have a very good team.

Q:  But did you play all around the city with different teams?

Foner:  Yes, we played all high schools.  In the second year I was the captain.  I wasn't a great basketball player, but I was a good, steady -- you know, those were the days when the scores were like 14-12, you know.  You scored six points a game, you were a high scorer.  Ten points, you were really ready to go anyplace.

Q:  Did you play schools from black neighborhoods?

Foner:  Well, I don't recall neighborhoods being that black at that time.  The only neighborhood that was black that we played was Boys' High.

Q:  It even then was black?

Foner:  It had whites on the team, but it had blacks on the team, too.  But that's the only neighborhood I know.  Hamilton had some blacks on the team, it was also in that area, in a black neighborhood, but we played against blacks, not many, not many.

Q:  Do you remember your racial attitudes?

Foner:  They probably were very bad, but I don't remember.  I'm sure they were very bad, and I don’t think -- it was politics that changed my racial attitude and opened me up to all kinds of things.

Q:  Your brothers at this time, Jack and Phil, were already becoming politically interested.  When you listed those topics that they debated in high school --

Foner:  But those were the things that everybody would debate.

Q:  League of Nations.

Foner:  Yes, but that's what you debate.  It isn't selected by the students; it's a standard kind of thing.  Every year you had the same.  You could be on different sides.  One time you take this side, one time you take this side.

Q:  Were they developing political interests at this time, and did it have an impact on you?

Foner:  Their political interests did not have an impact on me at this time.  A little later it did.  I came into politics through their political interests, through identification with certain magazines that they got and told me about, or going to the house, and then I became interested in it.  They were becoming politically interested.  I then moved closer, because certain things happened that brought me closer to them.

Q:  Before we get to that, I'm just trying to see if there is anything else.  Did you take up the instruments in high school?  You used to play the saxophone.  When did you start doing that?  How did you get into that?

Foner:  My brothers were playing instruments.  Jack played the drums, and Phil played the saxophone.  We got into instruments because it was an economic thing.  You got into instruments because if you played an instrument, you could have a band and you’d go away for the summer and earn some money.  My brothers played instruments in high school.  They were in the high school band.  They did it as part of their interests, and then they found that they formed a band, and the next thing you know, they're playing in a band and playing in the country, and then playing at dances.  So why shouldn't I do it?  Great thing to do.

Q:  So you picked it up just because they had done it.

Foner:  That's all.

Q:  And you were like in the middle of high school?

Foner:  I probably was about a junior at that time when I started taking lessons.  As a kid, I played the violin for about two months.

Q:  So the main things that you did in high school were play basketball and the saxophone.  Were you any good at the saxophone?

Foner:  No, not really good.

Q:  But good enough to be in a band.  You make it sound like everybody played a saxophone and was in a band.

Foner:  Everybody wasn't, but --

Q:  There were a lot of kids in Williamsburg, but only one band or two bands in the Catskills.

Foner:  Yeah, but we weren't very good, but then again, many bands weren't very good.  But then to be a band in the Catskills, you didn't have to be very good.  You played the standard kind of things.  But then to become a band later that played dances, you were in competition with good bands, and we had certain advantages that they didn't have.  We had contacts.  At the beginning it was not political.  We played at dances and clubs and that kind of thing, so you knew somebody.  Later on it became, of course, our political contacts, I would promote and develop and get jobs.

Q:  That we’ll come to as a different story.

Foner:  Okay.

Q:  What else in high school?  What were the teachers like?  Do you have any recollection of them?

Foner:  I remember some of the teachers who were good, but really, to come down to it, I was not a student.  That's one of the reasons why I write poorly, is because I never applied myself in school, in high school or college to do that kind of work.  You know, bumping through.  Like anything else, tools get sharpened by using them.  You don't have to be a great writer, but if you write a lot, you're going to learn.  So I ended up, and I'll tell you when I came in for the union, to be writing.

Q:  Socially it was just hanging out with the guys, playing sports?

Foner:  Hanging out with the girls, the guys, very few girls, very few, not going out with girls really, because  sissies went out with girls.  Girls were separate.  You looked at themand  talked with them, but mostly not.

Q:  I'm groping for anything else.  It's the height of the Depression, and you're bouncing along happily.

Foner:  The Depression was passing us by, I think.  It's there.  And I bet you if you talk to three other people on the same block, you'll probably get three different other stories.

Q:  But this was your experience.

Foner:  Yes.

Q:  So in 1932 you graduated from high school, and this, I assume, is going to be a turning point in some way.  You go to college.

Foner:  I go to college.  I go to Brooklyn College.

Q:  Why did you go to college?

Foner:  Your parents, you grew up to go to college so you could get a good job.  What job?  Nobody knew at that time in '32 what you would do if you graduated from high school.  Where would you work?  I had no skills to do anything.  There were no jobs around.  It was not merely that, but only bums didn't go to college.  You know, it was ordained that you were going to go to college, that your parents were going to help you go to college if you couldn't do it yourself.  So we went to a public college that didn't cost money, and we really earned our keep, whether it was an NYA job the first year or --

Q:  What's NYA?

Foner:  National Youth Administration.  Maybe I had, I can't even remember, but I’m college and it's basketball, and I'm struggling in the classroom because I can’t, it's not easy for me, and I can't devote a lot of time to homework either.

Q:  Because you're also working, right?

Foner:  I'm working, I'm playing in a band for some time, and I'm playing basketball, which is my main -- and the garage is located right near Brooklyn College, right there, so my father would wait until practice ends at 7:00, 7:30, he'll wait for me to come over there with Harry Feingold, who was on the team with me, who we would drop off on the way, and he would drive us home.  By the way, that's something that I inherited and it probably is endemic to the kind of Jewish family -- everything for the kids.

Q:  "Alles fur die Kinder."

Foner:  Yes.  Well, he would wait to take us to the station, the car was always there, he was always to be called on to do that.  Later on when we had the band, all kinds of things would happen.  But when I grew up, for the kids, it still -- I'm offering, you drive them eighty miles if they need it, that kind of thing.  It's like that's the kind of thing that you do.  It's crazy, really, it's silly.

Q:  What kind of band were you playing in?  Who was your teacher?

Foner:  In what time?  Incollege?

Q:  In high school and college.

Foner:  In high school I played in a band, I'm not good enough, so I get a job in the summertime, that's the only time I can play, in a four-piece band that plays in a small hotel.

[SIDE THREE]

Master:  So anyway, we're talking about you playing in a band.

Foner:  I'm playing in the band in the summertime.

Master:  In high school.

Foner:  In high school.  I will occasionally sit in.  I learned to play the tenor sax, too, and since Phil plays the alto, I can sit in and not be paid at some dances that they played, small bands, a four-piece band.  So I get the experience of playing with a band.  The band, we don't begin to concentrate on a band until later on.  We're still playing summertime, this time beginning to go to air, live, and becoming part of, by the third year, a more political-type band, because we were becoming more political and beginning to move in that direction.  It was later on that the band becomes the only way I have of earning money for a while, just for a short while, because other things happened.

Master:  Do you develop a real interest in music in high school?

Foner:  Not really.

Master:  It's just something you did for the fun of it?

Foner:  Yes.  I never studied music, per se.  I learned to play the saxophone in the band, and that's why I was not a very good musician.  As a matter of fact, I became more interested in music later on, but now, you know, I like music.  I followed music when I was playing the saxophone.  I followed Frankie Trumbauer.  I'd listen to records.  It was like a period.

Master:  The first two years of college sound like an extension of high school.

Foner:  Extension of high school.  They're a little bit more interesting because you run into professors, teachers, who are a little bit more interesting and have more to say, but it's, generally, you get through it so you can do basketball and other things and get by with as little work as you can.

Master:  You're all still living at home?

Foner:  But one thing happened at that time.  I begin to become interested in political things.  The first year in college the English professor is Maurice Valency, later became a well-known playwright, and the first composition -- so I must have had something already to percolate, I write an essay, "Don't Throw Away Your Vote: Vote for Norman Thomas."

Master:  In 1932.

Foner:  In 1932.  So something must have happened through the influence of my brothers on the Nation magazine, hanging around the house and I began I look at it and to read it and to hear them talk.  So they are already interested in politics.

Master:  What makes them interested in politics?

Foner:  I don't know.

Master:  And what makes you interested in politics is that they are interested in politics.

Foner:  I hear about it, I read about it, and then I’ll become more interested in it, and I begin to meet people, who, like them, are interested in politics.

Master:  Tell me a little bit about, if you can remember, the first people you met who influenced you, who made you interested in politics.

Foner:  I don't remember, and I have to try to logically reconstruct it in the process and maybe make up things.  It must be that I must have begun to hear my brothers talking to other people about socialists and other political things, and it may have been intriguing to me.  It must have been that the magazine the Nation and the New Republic began to move into the house, and I must have begun to read it because I had heard them speak about it.  That was what it was.  That is a period -- what year are we talking about?

Q:  We’re talking ’33.

Foner:  1933.  1932.

Master:  You just started.  So you said you weren’t very political.

Foner: But I write something in '32.  Now, this is already -- it's got to be that in Boro Park, it’s got to be that Frankie Herbst is there, and Frankie is involved in YCL in Boro Park.

Master:  Okay.  Stop for a second.  Frankie Herbst was the guy who lived in the same house from Williamsburg.

Foner:  He had moved to Boro Park early.

Master:  And he's the same age as you?

Foner:  A little younger.

Master:  Younger, but he's already into the YCL.

Foner:  I think he may have been already into the YCL because that's a period that I'm beginning now to recall -- no, that's the Lincoln, that's '36.  That's Spain.  It must be that it's percolated from my brothers because remember, I'm still playing basketball, so I hear it as a side kind of thing.  It must be that I hear them talking to people and their friends, what they've read and what they've heard and what they've said.  Now they're already past college.

Master:  They've graduated.

Foner:  So they went to City College.

Master:  City College.

Foner:  Uptown.

Master:  145th Street.

Foner:  Right.  And even though they're working, they have to be in touch with all kinds of things that are new, radical kinds of things.  They’ve got to be, and that must be the way it bounces over to me.

Master:  Can you recall the first issue or the first time you picked up a newspaper and felt angry or concerned?

Foner:  No, but, you see, I don't recall reading The New York Times at that period.  I may have looked at it.  I must have as a college student, I must have looked at it, but I don't remember reading.  Now you're talking '32, '33, and you're getting to Hitler and what was happening at the time.

Master:  Hitler is 1933.

Foner:  You see, by the time I'm in college, I associate mostly with basketball players, to finish work and rush to practice.  I don't recall a lot of that thing happening to me, and t's got to be around '33 that it was beginning to percolate.

Master:  Hitler gets elected.  You don't remember.  This was March of 1933, I think, or something like that.  I can't remember.

Foner:  March of '33 he comes into power.  This is sort of a blank to me, and I have to reconstruct it myself because I can't believe that Hitler would come to power and I would not -- because I remember my parents were always listening to the news on the radio, H.B. Kaltenborn and that kind of thing.  What I used to listen to on the radio, I remember, was at 7:00 o'clock we would listen to the Easy Aces.  They came at 7:15, but Bing Crosby was coming in, a big deal.  Of course, I remember I had seen Bing Crosby when he was with Whiteman, with the Rhythm Boys.  I knew about it because this new phenomena they built on to come on, and then they canceled, they kept saying there was something wrong with his throat, and they kept building the thing.  But we listened to the radio news.

Master:  So you had to have heard it.

Foner:  I knew it.  If I didn't, someone told me.

Master:  One thing, we've been trying to struggle with this question of how you became politicized, but you mentioned to me once in the office about playing basketball in Madison Square Garden.

Foner:  Yes, but that wasn't political.  That was 1934.

Master:  Tell me about that.  What was that like?

Foner:  I think it was Ned Irish or somebody, I forgot who, who decided on doing the Garden.  The first time, the first games, City College was playing Stanford, and Stanford had Hank Luizetti, the first guy to come east with the one-handed shot.  I know people are thinking there may be something peculiar about that, it can't be true.  How do you do that one-handed?  He used to get them in.  And Brooklyn College was booked to play Cathedral because there were a couple of games in the afternoon.  I remember it was the first games at Madison Square Garden.

Master:  Ever?

Foner:  The first college basketball games.  There weren't any pro games at the Garden.  The first basketball games at Madison Square Garden.  I'm sure there were no others.  So I remember that I got into the game towards the end, and I went to the foul line, and I heard the announcer saying, "Shooting for Brooklyn, Foner, number whatever."  I felt like the world ended.  To this day I don't know if I made the shot, because it was kind of a blinding thing, that kind of thing, that's all I remember.

Master:  This is the old Garden on 48th Street.

Foner:  the old Garden, yes.  It's a great story.  I played in the first basketball game at Madison Square Garden.

Q:  It's a great story.

Foner:  In 1934.

Q:  So at what point did you start becoming more political, aware of politics or what was going on with you?

Foner:  I think that by '33, the second year of basketball, I knew I'm not going to finish it because I knew I wasn't good enough and I didn't like it, other things were happening, and I was going to become more of a student.  I think a lot of other things began to happen and I began to know other people.  So I was slowly moving out of that, and then in '34, my brother Jack was then teaching in the evening session at City College and got me a job from 2:00 to 6:00 in the evening session office of City College.  So I could arrange my schedule in the morning and go from there into City College and work there, and then go home at night.  By then I was already beginning to meet people who were progressive, political kinds of things.  Then after that I sort of became involved at home in Boro Park and knowing people at the college, and I began to become part of that thing.  That continued for a number of years.

Q:  Do you want to deal with that another time?

Foner:  Another time, yes.

Q:  Just one other thing.  Social life, college, girls.
 

Foner:  Not very much for me, not very much for me.  My social life was playing in the band and in the summers.  In the summer you met girls when you were in the band.  That's where you met, that's your social life.

Master:  All right.  Let's stop.

[END OF SESSION]
 

Forward to Session #2