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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.
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 --
But everybody did that. I don't think that was very unusual. Maybe the music was.
I don't mean unusual for you. I mean the whole milieu was like that, people did everything.
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.
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 --
They're poorer.
They're poorer and politics seem inescapable in the Lower East Side.
There had to have been socialist around during this period, on the street corners.
In Williamsburg.
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
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