I had a number of very strong personalities in my family. My father was a concert flutist, the solo flute for Toscanini. That was an unusual profession for a kid to have as his father. He would dress up in a tuxedo. A concert musician has to practice a lot, and my earliest memories are of that. He was a great musician, very knowledgeable, and he used to tell us the stories of the operas, and all about the composers. He had a lot of knowledge, and he would make a point of telling us about it. I had an older brother who was five years older than me. He was a very successful student, a very handsome kid. Having an older brother by that many years was really an edge that I had. I had an older brother who would protect me. He was a very sensitive and talented boy, and he became interested in literature. So at the same time that I had all this information from my father, I also had a brother who was giving me books at a young age that I would not normally have run into. Brave New World, of course, which was fun, because it was sort of science fiction. As a kid, he was showing me books by James Joyce, and André Gide. So I was really stimulated at a younger age than I normally would have been exposed to that kind of thing.

My dad certainly, and coaches I had that I was very close to. They took a big part in my developing an interest in sports, actually. One has passed away I was very close to. His name was Bill Slybaum. He was my coach in junior high school for tennis and then he moved up the ladder academically and went to the high school about the time I got there. He was my high school coach in basketball. I became very close to him. Later on, when I came back after the service, I went to Compton Junior College near Los Angeles, and he was the junior college basketball coach. I was very close to him.

My parents inspired me by their example. They both grew up in the Depression, and both of them had to quit school when they were quite young to work, because there actually was no choice. So, though they’re intelligent people — and my father in particular is interested in books and has subsequently, since his retirement, attended classes at the University of Buffalo — nonetheless, they didn’t have any opportunity to be educated. So they’ve always impressed me with their resilience, their good spirits, their courage. It wasn’t an easy life, and I won’t go into details, but there were a lot of problems. And yet they were never defeated. Somebody else might have been defeated. Someone else might have been really depressed, or become an alcoholic or something, because there were personal problems and economic crises. But I just remember them carrying on and just doing their lives. They really made a strong impression on me.

There were definitely teachers who made a huge impact. I think about a woman whose name was Mrs. Fish who was my seventh grade English Language Arts teacher. What I remember about her was just how hard she pushed. I thought I was a perfectly strong student at this point, but she just pushed everyone to their limits. That was very instrumental for me. In fact, all the teachers I remember had that same thing: they just had such high expectations and wouldn’t stop pushing. I think she just conveyed the idea that good wasn’t good enough, and I think the skill development and critical thinking skills that that year developed were also instrumental. But I also think, I don’t know, there’s something about that year that probably instilled within me that ethic that you just have to keep pushing to get better and better, and that if you work hard enough it will pay off.