I was born in Philadelphia on August 17, 1921. For the first three years of my life I lived in my grandfather's house, in the Kensington section of Philadelphia, then we moved to Poplar Street, which was the inner city. It was the worst slum in Philadelphia, but there was a veneer of Jewish merchants along the street. I went to Central High School.
When I lost my virginity, I must have been sixteen years old. It was two dollars. You got a towel and a condom. I knew the condom, I could figure out what you did with that. She was lying on the bed on her back and I got on top of her and she was saying to me, "Don't just lie there, you have to go up and down." I said, "I am going up and down. Your hips have to go up and down." She taught me how to get into sex. I had a very good professor, a two-dollar high yellow in Atlantic City in a back alley, somewhere with really red lights. The whole street lit with red lights. I was sixteen. I was very impressed. Now I know I was a little shit, but in those days I thought I was a big shot.
Before the war I was going to the University of Pennsylvania. I was in the second year and they were getting pretty close to my draft number. I wasn't too eager to be in the army, but I knew I had to be. There was a war on. I left school and I went down to Washington, D.C. to work in the Pentagon building, where I worked for two years. I enlisted in the army, into a training school for fixing radios and airplanes. We moved around. One part of it was a semester at Johns Hopkins University, and then I finally went into the army at Fort Mead, Maryland. From there I was sent to the army airbase in Columbia, South Carolina, where I did my basic training.
Then I was shipped overseas. It took us five weeks to cross the Atlantic, because we were zigzagging to avoid submarines. We always had airplanes flying over us, looking for them. Luckily, none got near us.
I was stationed in Norfolk, England for two years during the war. I was attached to the 8th Air Force B-24 Bombers. With other guys in my unit, I took care of the radios. The planes had to speak to each other. They had to speak to the tower. And they each had a magnetic radio, so they could find their way home.
We must have had thirty or forty bombers out on the field all the time. Every morning at 0500, they would start making a formation and by 0800 they would start on their way to Germany. The Americans bombed in the daytime. The English bombed at night.
There was no oxygen in the cabin. They all wore oxygen masks and there was no heat. They wore sheep lined jackets. Each guy on the flight wore a parachute in case there was a problem, they could jump out and parachute down.
I stayed on the ground. I admired those guys, but I wasn't one of them.
I never flew in combat, but I flew every chance I had. Sometimes the pilots would fly up to Scotland to buy Scotch and I would go up with them. When I flew it wasn't dangerous.
They had to do twenty-five missions and then they could go home, back to America. I would say 70% went back.
One time, our planes were coming back and there were some Messerschmitts that had followed them back and were shooting at them. One plane must have been hit, because the guys in the plane all jumped. I saw these six or seven fellas coming down in parachutes. I always used to think that the parachute would billow down side to side, but they were coming straight down. I knew they had to break their legs when they hit the ground. That's the only time I saw our men parachuting.
If a plane was damaged there was a large runway where planes that had been hit could come down because they didn't have all of their equipment. Often, when our planes came back, there were ambulances waiting for them. They had radioed ahead they had people in them who were injured.
On several occasions, the Germans came over at night with flares and they lit the base up so they could see what was going on. We felt kind of helpless. They were at a high altitude and we couldn't reach them, and they dropped flares and took pictures.
Finally, I was discharged and went back to Washington, where I had been working before the war. I matriculated at the American University School of Law and was there for one year, before transferring up to Philadelphia, where my family was. I graduated from Temple Law School.
I met my wife when we were working on a political campaign. We knew each other, but not all that well. One day I took the train up to New York. I'm walking down the aisle and I see a young lady sitting there. From the back I didn't know it was Frieda, but I slipped in beside her and it turned out to be Frieda, and we were talking and she told me she was going up to northern New Jersey to dump some guy who had been a date. I figured any girl that would go that far to dump a guy must be pretty nice. Any time a girl dumped me, she called me up and said, "Listen, we're through." We had two-hours to talk to each other. When we came back to Philadelphia, we started dating.
We were married for sixty years and we had three children and seven grandchildren. I had a general law practice. I did everything from adoptions to tax matters. After two or three years, I started to make some money. We were able to move out of a little house we were in, into a bigger house in Elkins Park, which is a nice neighborhood. I practiced law in Philadelphia for thirty-five or forty years, running from courtroom to courtroom, trying to scrape out a few bucks for my young family.
Anyhow, I did alright. I came up from nowhere.
