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No, in those days we read a couple of magazines that have gone out of existence. First of all, the Saturday Evening Post was popular already, and all of us used to sell the Saturday Evening Post. You got prizes for selling the Post, and you put a white bag over your shoulders with copies of the Saturday Evening Post in it. It cost five cents in those days. You parked yourself at some subway station or somewhere else, and then you'd get prizes according to the number you sold.

But the magazines that I remember with particular affection were called Popular magazine and Top-notch magazine. They had baseball stories and the football stories and adventure stories--very tame by present-day standards, but we liked them. The books I remember starting with were the Rover Boys and the Motor Boys and the Putnam Hall Cadets. And then I remember one day there was a branch of the public library at 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue that we all belonged to, and we all discovered together an author named Ralph Henry Barbour. My, was he popular. I still remember the names of some of the books--The Crimson Sweater, The Honor of the School and Four in Camp and Four Afloat. This was a step up from Top-notch magazine. This was a first step up.

Did your parents ever encourage you to read?

Yes, my mother always liked to read. I read the children's books of the day, like Black Beauty and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. But as to the really good books, they didn't really know about them.