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In 1934, the rubber workers.

The rubber workers were later, I believe.

Toledo.

Toledo Autolite was '34.

Okay. So there are groupings coming together and a training school took place in Yellow Springs, and Phil came to lecture there, and he came back and told us about it. That probably was his first contact with the labor movement. He then many, many times would go to CIO training schools, to teach American labor history. We knew about that.

So when we broke off, you were trying to pinpoint the point which you became politically active, and so you just mentioned that really the first activity was the American League Against War and Fascism, and that you were involved primarily in the community. You're still playing basketball, you're still playing music and so forth. How did you get drawn into the American League?

I guess friends, through friends in the neighborhood. See, there was one very close friend, who's dead now, Frank Herbst. We grew up in the same house in Williamsburg, we were friends as kids. His family moved to Boro Park before we did, and we came later. He had already become active politically. He later went to City College 23rd Street, was an activist, and so I was involved in Boro Park.

The American League was a group primarily organized by the YCL?

No, no, no. It was an adult group, but it had youth sections. It was largely a left group. I imagine the Communist Party had a great influence on it. I remember Harry F. Ward of Union Theological Seminary was the chairman, the national chairman. It was influential to a degree in that period.

Boro Park was, relatively speaking, a more prosperous community?

Yes. Boro Park was middle class, largely Jewish, private homes for the most part, two-family homes.

And yet things like the American League and the YCL were prominent there.

Oh, yes. They were prominent all over. It's New York City. It's New York, and New York has always had a strong radical movement, much stronger than in any other city in the country.