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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, an d 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.

What was the Williamsburg community like?

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