I was born in 1925 in New York City in Brooklyn and actually born in our own house. In those days it was fashionable to be born at home, so my older sister and I were born at home. My younger brother... the fashion had passed by that time, so he was born in a hospital. I think I can actually remember when he was brought home, although he's only three years younger than I am and I... I went to school there. It was… Brooklyn in those days was quite a, I don't know how to put it, sort of village-like place. It was very residential, you know, tree-lined streets and walked to all the shops and sort of knew the shopkeepers, it... it was quite a you know comfortable, safe-appearing environment. Then I went to elementary school at a Jewish parochial school, where we learned Hebrew and studied the Bible and the other parts of the canon of the... and I was there for elementary school. And it had very high academic standards; essentially all the kids that went on to high school of course, and I’d say that 100% of them went on for university training. I and it was quite a small school; there couldn't have been more than two or three hundred students when I was there, but I know of at least two Nobel laureates who went to that small elementary school.

[Q] That's amazing.

So we, then I went to high school in Brooklyn initially, at James Madison High School is the name of it, and again that was an extremely high academic standard. It was during the Depression and many of our teachers would have, in other times, taught at university, so quite a few of them had PhDs in math and science. My chemistry teacher in high school had a doctoral degree and had done research and was really a wonderful teacher as well.

And so the second high school I went to when our family moved was at Far Rockaway High School. These were both New York City high schools and it also  was a very high academic standard and there are three Nobel laureates who graduated from that relatively small New York City high school, including Richard Feynman who... there’s a very good book about him called Genius, and there is a chapter about Far Rockaway. And actually I met Richard Feynman, only once, and that was in Far Rockaway and the reason I met him is I had taken his sister to the movies and when I came, when he played a kind of practical joke and he... when I came to take her to the movies, I had been talking about my interest in math and science, she was carrying a textbook on quantum mechanics that he'd given her. So we met briefly then, and I think he was teaching at Cornell at that time. She went on by the way, to be a NASA scientist and up until recently was working at the jet propulsion lab.