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Moe FonerMoe Foner
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Session:         Page of 592

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





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