I was born in 1933, at the height of the Depression. I was born in the very same month that FDR became president, and remained president for the next 12 years. And my father was not a big wage-earner; he was working, luckily, for the Metropolitan Life Insurance company as an insurance agent, as a salesman, and he probably made about $80 a week, which… even at that time it wasn't much. But I didn't know it; I didn't know that we were poor. My mother was a tremendous organiser of... of our household, of our finances, of our clothing and our health, and she was... she was remarkable, really. And so the orderliness of the household made a big impression on me as a kid, and helped to convince me that we weren't poor.

We lived in a nice flat — in those days apartments were called flats — and in a two-and-a-half-family house. A two-and-a-half-family house was a house that had a three-room apartment at the top and two five-room apartments below, on the first and second floor. So there was room enough for all of us; it wasn't huge, but it was comfortable. I was happy; I... I think I… my moods ranged from general contentment to extreme happiness, and particularly happy when I discovered school.