The influence of my mother was important, too, because she was very interested in promoting my... my future career. And she was... unlike my father, she was a very positive person. She had been bright when she was a girl and passed her high school courses with very good grades, but when I knew her she seemed to know very little. I don't quite understand how that happened, it may have been the result of some mental aberration, because she did show some, later on, some symptoms of mental illness, and this ignorance or even occasional stupidity may have been... connected with that, because... from every indication she was quite bright when she was a girl. But what was very positive about her was that she liked me and believed in me, and... wanted me to have a great career some day. And so she pursued various things, but particularly trying to get me into a private school with a full scholarship, because my father's language school started to fail just when I was born. The... stock market crash came a few weeks after I was born. The very drastic immigration law went into effect at the same... about the same time, and... both of those ended up seriously threatening the school that my father ran, the school of languages, so that within a few years the income had fallen virtually to zero. And it wasn't until 1933 that he got his job in a bank, which he kept until he retired. Very... it was a job at a very low salary. So we had very little money and I could go to a private school only if I had a full scholarship. Well she didn't succeed somehow, she dragged me to one school after another and I took lots of tests – I never knew what was going on, but... but finally a music teacher... had some... connection with somebody who had a connection with the Columbia Grammar School... or Columbia Grammar and Preparatory School if you want to use the longer name. And... in 1937 I got in there with a full scholarship, and they put me in the sixth grade so that I was... three years younger than most of the other students. And I stayed there until I graduated from high school. I stayed for seven years: 1937 to 1944. And... it was when I was admitted there that we moved back to Manhattan, in fact just across the street from the school.
