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Session:         Page of 617

LBH
Interview # 1
Interviewee: Congressman Edward R. Koch
Interviewer: Ed Edwin
New York City
Sat., Nov. 6, 1975

Q:

First of all, Congressman, when and where were you born and could you just rather briefly sketch your early life and your education and how you became a lawyer.

Koch:

I was born September 4, 1924 in the Bronx, Gotona Park East, and we lived there for about seven years and then we moved to Newark, New Jersey because of the Depression. My father had been a fur manufacturer and business had gone broke, and my uncle had opened up a place called Kruger's Auditorium, which was a catering place and a dance palace. This is about 1931 that we're talking about now. And my mother and father were given the hat check concession in this Kruger's Auditorium. We lived on Spruce Street, as I recall it, in Newark, which is now the heart of the black ghetto. At that time it was a marginal area -- poor whites on one side of Quitman Street, blacks on the other.

We then moved to Millford Avenue, which was closer to the Weequahaic Section, which was the posh Jewish area, but we were not yet in that. I had gone to Monmouth Street School for elementary purposes, and that school was overwhelmingly black. I got beaten up occasionally. Then we went to Millford Avenue and I went to Miller Street School, which was sort of half and half. And then I went to South Side High School, which was












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