Session: 123456789101112131415161718192021222324         Page 1234567891011121314151617181920212223242526272829303132333435363738 of 592

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.

This is much later you're talking about?

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.

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

The first job was at Gimbel's.

How old were you?

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.

You didn't wonder off because you --

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