I was born in Summit, New Jersey and I was a second child. I have an older brother, and what I remember of my childhood is a couple things. One is that we had a lot of fun. I mean we horseback rode in the neighborhood and we could go sleigh riding and I could take a sled from my house down to the school.

It was suburbs but it was very urban; lots of trees and lots of outdoor life. I also; that had a pretty big impact on me; we had a lot of help. I mean my father would say, “Oh, in the Depression we were so poor.” We only had three in help. We had a maid, and a new chauffer, and a cook.

You know, and this is, “Whoa, we’re poor! Yeah, times are tough, and I didn’t know this was unusual until I got into college. I just thought this was how everybody grew up.

There were a couple things that I think impacted me and one was my dad was away for three plus years in the Navy when I was a kid, and that was very big. It was very big because I didn’t have a dad.
There was a lot of pride, back then, that if your dad didn’t go away in the service he was kind of a shirking bad guy. You had to go if you were patriotic. Very different from now. So, he would come home and our whole family dynamic would change.

So, his being away was one thing and the other thing is I had a retarded sister who was never really named. Her name was Carolee, after my mom, and they didn’t know she was retarded for a while…

So, then my retarded sister was very interesting because that was just a very shameful thing to have. She had her own nurse off in a wing of the house. You’ve heard of big secrets in the family. I mean, she certainly wasn’t a secret but the family dynamic was very different because of it. She didn’t come down to meals. She had her own life over here and I think it had a few impacts on me, one being that when my dad was home she was not in sight.

Well, when he wasn’t around during the war she was around all the time, and they in their great wisdom, and I think they were very tender about this, took her away when I was about 10 maybe…11? She went off to a school.

I had always been told that she would get better. That she was slow but she would get better. So, off she went to school and I came home from school and she wasn’t there. I had no idea where she had gone or what had happened, but she was gone.

Her whole wing which had been a baby nursery with a room for the nurse and all that kind of stuff had been turned back into an office/library, so it was whoa! They just said she was going away and she’d be back when she got better. Well, that got very confusing and that’s all…we didn’t talk about it.

So, those two things were big as a kid.