When I was very young, my parents let me know that they had big ambitions for me. I had difficulty understanding that concept at five or six when their dreams for me were boundless. I was in first grade. My mother dressed me in a white shirt, a clip-on tie, dark short pants and just shined, brown, Thom McAnn lace up shoes. My mother and I walked many blocks to a school where I would take dancing lessons. Only I did not know that was where we were going. We had no car in those days. Taxis were out of the question. Public transportation could not get us to that location. We walked and when we finally arrived, I was very tired and not in the best of spirits. The room, filled with small girls all dressed the same in white blouses and black, pleated skirts, had only a few boys dressed as I. To say I was mortified and humiliated is an understatement. I assume all the boys felt the same. At least I would hope. A woman teacher sat at a highly polished, ebony Baby Grand piano barking instructions to us students for the steps she wanted us to take. I decided quickly I wanted no part of learning how to dance, certainly not in that group. Much to my mother’s embarrassment, I refused to go onto the dance floor. I managed to find a safe haven behind the piano and behind a curtain from where, despite my mother’s pleading, I refused to emerge until the lesson ended and it was time to go.

I don’t know what my mother was thinking. I knew that I would never let that happen to me again. I vowed that my mortification for the sake of someone else’s desire was not what I wanted. I could not articulate this verbally, but by hiding I let me mother know, never again. It produced my first rebellion and it had a permanent effect on my life. The event, though seemingly minor, gave me a deep-seated sense that I would not allow anyone to take advantage of me again. This is not to say it never happened again in my life. It did because there is no escape from people who attempt to control you.

I lived in a mixed neighborhood. We were of various religions and from different ethnic backgrounds. I had many friends on my block, but few close friends in school. We got along well, except for the occasional fight, something that most boys did. I had very high grades in school but I considered it a place between the games we played on the streets where we lived. Busing did not exist. I walked to whatever school I attended. When I lived on Avenue H, I walked each morning to my grade school, P.S 152. I crossed Ocean Avenue and then moved steadily to the right around Brooklyn College until I reached one of the oldest schools in the city. It looked like a castle and was very forbidding for a young child. For a short time when I lived in Brighton Beach, I walked down Ocean View Avenue to P.S. 100. Later, from my house on Argyle Road, I walked to P.S. 217, a brick and concrete pile with no beauty or charm that sat at Coney Island Avenue and Newkirk Avenues like a colorless lump. Inside the school, the classrooms were devoid of anything that would make it a pleasant experience. I did well in school with very little studying. I concentrated in class, and remembered what I needed for tests. School was there, and unavoidable. I went everyday and never complained.

My father wanted me to be a doctor, a typical ambition of many Jewish families that survived the Depression. I accepted his wish without thinking about it. Call it blind compliance, but it is what a dutiful Jewish son did. Because of my father’s desire, I thought, yes, I would be a doctor, or, to be precise, a surgeon. He thought I had the long fingers required of a surgeon. My father said surgeons needed long fingers with which to operate, so I was partly there already. Though I had big hands, thinking of cutting into someone made me ill. I once broke the middle finger on my left hand while playing catcher in a softball game and my father let me know loudly that my career was at its end. I was twelve years old. I never thought much about tomorrow, but as with all kids, what lay ahead of me in life was infinite. Only I didn’t realize it then.

I never played hooky, was a decent athlete, a fair cartoonist, and I could copy maps as if I was making photocopies. I even tried to paint with oils. I failed. Like many kids, I owned boxes of baseball cards and lead toy soldiers. Both collections disappeared when I went to college, a victim of my mother’s penchant for neatness. Along with my monthly supply of books from Max in Chicago, I read everything in sight, not only some of the many newspapers my father brought home each day, but even read the labels on cans and jars of food. Reading consumed me and brought me to places I never knew existed.

Despite my excellent grades, my conduct in school was poor, a problem for my parents and teachers. I became class president in the 6th grade because I was the most popular and maybe the cleanest kid in class. This made my parents happy. It confused my teachers who had difficulty equating my popularity, my conduct and my intelligence. Many people predicted I would have a great future despite the streak in me that made me stand up against authority. I tried to control myself to please the adults but I was not always successful.

When school was out, and before homework or Hebrew school, I hung out with my friends in the schoolyard and on the streets near where I lived. On weekends at P.S 217, we tore a hole in the heavy, mesh, wire fence that surrounded the schoolyard so we could get inside to play without teacher, that is, adult supervision. Monday morning, the school custodians repaired the fence as best they could knowing we would tear open it again come Friday afternoon.

My parents thought they were middle class, and maybe they were. Their ideas about home and family certainly conformed to those of Middle America. It was an understandable aspiration for a family that survived the Depression. But we were not anywhere near middle income. In the 1920s, my father was on the verge of becoming rich when the stock market crashed and changed his life forever. Sadly, like many of his generation, he never recovered from the Crash. The American dream for him and most people changed forever when the market collapsed. My father carried wounds from that event until the day he died at 96 near the end of the 20th Century.

Though my father struggled for years to make a living, I was not aware of his struggles nor how hard he worked. Growing up, I did not know what I was missing. Thankfully, as a family, we did not want for anything. I missed nothing until I went away to college and started to see the wider world beyond the streets of Brooklyn. My friends and I were in the same situation. Where we grew up, we had the same lives. Some of us, but not all, were grateful for what we had. We learned early not to complain. As long as there was food on the table, a roof over our heads and food on the table, life was not too bad. There was an unwritten fatalism about life. We could not control it or ignore it.

After World War II, we moved from a four-story apartment house on Avenue H and East 19th Street into our first real home on Argyle Road and Avenue H in Brooklyn. It had two stories, a screened-in front porch on the second floor where we lived, a high attic, gray asphalt siding, a one-car garage down a driveway in the back of the house, a huge maple tree on the sidewalk, a small grass plot in front and back and full basement. It was a neighborhood with mostly Dutch style, single-family homes each with a small yard back and front on quiet, tree-lined streets. Many houses had thick hedges instead of fences. These were green in summer and bare in winter. Every house had a porch on each of its two floors with one screened in for outdoor, bug-free living.

Living in an apartment house without air conditioning, we were lucky to live on the ground floor because the building had no elevators. Now my life changed. The new house seemed very grand and for us. Used to small apartment living, it was indeed majestic. My patents were homeowners for the first time in their lives and they reveled in it. Living on the top floor we had use of the attic. We rented the main floor to a couple who had no children. My mother and father had to be careful with money. There was nothing excessive in our lives. We had only what we needed.

My mother was a hard working, stay-at-home wife, proudly called a homemaker. She cared for my younger sister and me. Our home being always neat, my mother’s kitchen always in order, the rest of the house buttoned up tightly as if fixed in amber. Essentially shy, she was usually soft-spoken and sweet. Our clothes were neat and clean. Mother cooked and cleaned the house. She shopped carefully and there was always more than enough food on the table. My mother was a wonderful, creative cook, especially with homey Jewish food. She made great soups, such as pea soup and chicken soup. She cooked enough stuffed cabbage to last for a week. Her stews were legendary, especially lamb stew with potatoes, carrots and a delicious, tomato-based gravy. She made tomato sauce from scratch which we put on spaghetti or fresh egg noodles. She made fresh chocolate pudding and allowed us to scrape the pot clean. After roasting a chicken, she made chicken fat by cooking down the skin, taking the residue and refrigerating it until it was solid. We ate the fried chicken skin, called gribben by the spoonful. We then spread the chicken fat onto fresh rye or corn bread, added a touch a salt, and gobbled up a delicious treat. We had no idea how dangerous that was to our health. We ate as a family at a fixed time every day, usually 6 p.m. My mother rarely sat with us, preferring to serve and then stand, to nibble and nosh, rather than to sit and eat a full meal at the table. My mother made sure the family functioned as a family should in those simpler days. Many nights my father cleaned the kitchen. I helped him wash the dishes by hand, place them in a drying tray and then wipe them before putting them in a cabinet until the next night when they would come out again for another meal.

Sunday nights we sat around the kitchen table and ate grilled American cheese sandwiches on white bread. We coated the thick slices with butter and pressed the sandwich to melted perfection using a heavy clothes iron on top of a dish in a frying pan. We ate them with cold milk and listened to radio serials, and fifteen minute newscasts, staple of radio back then. We were a typical family together at mid-century.

During the week and on weekends, my mother saw her friends. They played Canasta, Ma Jong, and gossiped. Sometimes we saw relatives and had a meal together. Once a week my parent’s friends met in someone else’s home where they ate, played cards and talked.

I have thought about it for years. It is a moment that is never out of my mind. Perhaps it defines who I am, the man I have become. Perhaps not. It took place June 18, 1941 about a month before my seventh birthday. That was the night of the Joe Louis-Billy Conn heavyweight title fight broadcast live across the county on radio at 10 p.m. Joe Louis, The Brown Bomber, the icon of the day, a hero to everyone in then racially-divided America, was to fight Billy Conn, the light heavyweight champion for the heavyweight championship of the world. During his championship reign, he transcended race, but as a kid in those days, I knew nothing of race or class nor what it meant to many in America. He was Joe Louis and along with Joe DiMaggio, a figure my friends and I could look up to. I cannot speak for the adults, or my father, but everyone my age wanted Joe Louis to win. My father rarely, if ever, divulged his prejudices. Over the years, we never discussed what happened to me that night nor did we ever discuss the fight. Ever.

We were living in an apartment on Avenue H and East 19th Street in Brooklyn. I did not want to sleep. I wanted to hear the fight despite it being on well after my bedtime. Already in my pajamas, I went to my father and asked him if I could stay up. He said no. I insisted. He said no again. I persisted. He said I was too young. Boxing was something I did not need to know about. He was also sure it would be in the newsreels and when I went to the Saturday movie matinee, I would see the fight then, which was better than hearing it on the radio. In my small boy voice, I told him that was not good enough. I told him my friends would be listening. He said no again. Then, unlike me, I had something of a tantrum. I stamped my feet. I cried. I made a scene. Normally when I went into that rare mode, my father would slam me on the top of my head, and pound me once or twice on by backside with his fist or his open hand. Standing in front of him, I prepared myself for that eventuality. It did not happen. He did not hit me. What he did was in some ways worse.

He finally relented and said that if I wanted to listen to the fight I could. But there was one condition. I would have to stand in the middle of the living room without moving or saying a word. Stand absolutely still, he said. Without hesitating, I said I could do it, not thinking of the consequences. I nodded my head several times in affirmation. He told me to move into the center of the room. I did. My memory of the room is that it was very dark. There was no ceiling light. We had only one floor lamp by my father’s easy chair. There were lamps and ashtrays on the end tables at either side of the couch. A coffee table sat in front of the couch. As a child, I thought the room very dark. Standing in the middle of the room, I realized how dark it really was.

Ten o’clock came. The fight started. Usually in bed at that time, I was very tired. The living room took on the appearance of a dungeon. But nothing would deter me from my mission. Not that I thought of it that way. I was, after all, a nearly seven-year-old boy with a stubborn streak. I thought I had won some sort of victory. I would listen to the fight through the massive floor model, the centerpiece for entertainment in our living room. The next day I would tell my friends what I did. That is all that mattered. I stood in that spot without moving through the whole fight. I did not whimper. I did not cry. I did not shift my position. My legs hurt. My head hurt. I wanted to sleep. I refused to fold. When the fight ended, my father said nothing and waved me to my room. I did with great difficulty. My legs were numb. I managed to move anyway. My kidney’s about to burst, I went to the bathroom and then dragged myself to bed where I fell into a deep sleep.

Until I looked it up I had no idea who won the fight or how long it lasted. For the record, after nearly losing Joe Louis knocked out an overly confident Billy Conn in the 13th round to retain his title. Now that does not matter. I think without realizing it, I vowed that my father would not defeat me. I think he did not but who really knows. Did the incident affect my life? I am sure it did. I cannot say how. In retrospect I would rather, he had hit me. I could have handled that. The moment, though painful, would have passed. The torture he put me through that night was worse. I am sure he knew what he was doing. For that I can never forgive him.

I did not cry that night. Since that incident, it is hard for me to cry at all, ever, unless the moment is so overpowering that it eclipses my early defenses. Understand, I have cried over the years, but never if I could help it. For me to cry, it would have meant defeat. I had little understanding of what was happening, but something inside me recognized that crying in front of my father would undermine my life forever. It was a test of his will against mine. When the battle ended in the middle of the living room, I still cannot say who won. What took place that night was only the first of many skirmishes between my father and me over who would dominate my life. I only regret we never discussed what took place while he was alive. I wonder what he would have said in his defense.

My father was a man of great pride. A white-collar worker who never wanted to get his hands dirty, he wanted the life he believed a pressed suit would bring. Every day he went to work dressed as a banker, his shirt freshly starched and pressed by my mother, his dark tie knotted just so, his shoes shined, his hands washed, his fingernails cut close and clean. He was fastidious. He was of average height and slim. His size allowed his clothes to fit him well. He wore a pencil thin mustache; his hair neatly clipped, with the back and sides, as they used to say, short. Nothing about him seemed out of place. When he arrived home, he immediately untied his shoes, slipped them off his feet and wandered through the house in his stocking feet. I don’t remember if he owned a pair of bedroom slippers. He showed me photos of the way he looked in the 1920s before the Crash. In them, he had about him the touch of dandy. He wore two-toned brown and white Oxford shoes. He wore custom-fitted suits, buttoned vests, and neatly knotted ties. In summer he wore a straw boater and in winter a dark fedora with a snap-brim. It took me years to understand that dressing as he did, even in the worst of times after the Depression and during the years of recovery, gave him the dignity I think he never associated with the work he was doing.

My father owned a small, one-person insurance agency. He had a desk and filing cabinets in a large open room on John Street that he shared with other brokers who were in the same business. I remember going with him to his office by subway and feeling overwhelmed by the tall, imposing buildings in the Wall Street area. I got bored waiting for lunch or the trip home. I sat in his office and drew on the backs of old insurance contracts. I tried to type on old table model Remington typewriters, but I screwed up the keys while getting black ink from the ribbon on my fingers.

My father had a friend named Max who worked for Bantam Books in Chicago. Every month for years, he sent us the paperback books Bantam published. These were mostly novels, Westerns, mysteries, some science fiction, but there were also biographies and history books. I started carrying a book everywhere I went, even in grade and high school. My only escape, it seemed, was reading those books. Some months I read as many as fifteen books. I also read the funny pages in his newspapers, some sports, and almost nothing else.

I grew up in Brooklyn in the late 1940s and into the early 1950s. In 1952, I went off to college and my life changed forever.

I had what I can only call a normal life, at least on the surface. Yet, I always felt no one understood me. Of course, I did not understand myself either. My friends felt the same. First, there was World War II. After the war, we were part of America resettling itself with the threat of what we called “the bomb” hanging over our heads. It was not easy being a child and having bomb drills in class where we hid under our desks until the principal called off the mock attack. Mushroom clouds were deep in our consciousness. Next came the Korean War and more upheaval. We lived in a rapidly changing world that we did not comprehend. Our elders decided that we did not have to understand anything as long as we obeyed their wishes. Only years later did I realize how confused they were and how they found it impossible to explain the world to us. Blind obedience was far better than clarity and understanding.

A few words about my parents are necessary and important to better appreciate, if possible where I come from. My mother and father were not overtly abusive. They were not drinkers. They were not drug or sex addicts. Not the most patient of people, at times they could be rough with me. I was a difficult child for them. Before my mother’s recent death, she admitted to me that I was a hard child to handle. She thought, though I turned out all right. My mind ran in many directions at once. Usually I concentrated on what I wanted, not what they wanted. I wanted to have fun, or at least what I understood to be fun, meaning enjoying doing what I wanted rather than what they wanted. I can define it now as having a free and open imagination, an anathema to my father. My father would not allow me the opportunity to have a mind that was open and free flowing. He made sure I understood his philosophy that fun was for people with no ambition. I had to be ambitious because, he said, that was the only way to be. Growing up Jewish in New York and his being first generation American had everything to do with his ambition for me. Their was constant skirmishing between us and I usually lost. At least then, I lost. After all, I was a kid, and he, my father who ran the family. I depended on him for food, clothing, a roof over my head, shoes, a bed to sleep in.

My father was stern and practical, so stern at times that his face rarely gave anything back to the world around him. His eyes were hazel mixed with gray, soft, not dense, a surprise in a face usually set to take on the world. His moustache was thin, just enough to cover his upper lip. Usually I recognized it was there when he bent to kiss me good night before I went to sleep. He was an insurance broker who insisted I excel in school and, mainly, that I not follow him in his work. He did not want to attach “and Son” to his letterhead. Nor did I. I could not articulate it, but I knew that trudging all over the city 12 hours each day was not the life for me. To his credit, he had other ideas for me, a profession such as medicine, and if not that, at least dentistry or law. He thought teaching, though honorable, paid little, and thus a waste for a bright youngster, me. My father sold what he called general insurance, but hardly any life insurance because, in his later years, he told me, it was hard for him to tell someone they might die someday. Instead, he concentrated on home, theft, fire and auto insurance. He spent long hours traveling by bus, trolley and subway everywhere across New York City to see his many clients. He collected his premiums and, when possible, but not often, he sold them more insurance. It was not an easy life, but, as he said many times, it beat shoveling coal.

At mid 20th Century there were as many as a dozen newspapers published in New York City. My father bought most of them and read every word as he journeyed around the five boroughs. By the time he arrived home at night, there was not much of the day left for him. That, and trips he made to clients after dinner limited his reading time and his leisure. He rarely read a book. He left that pleasure to my mother who never tired of reading best sellers and romance novels that she tried to hide from me in a bottom drawer of her dresser. I spied her secreting her books, and, being curious, when she was not home, I went to the drawer, would open the book, and read a few pages, usually enough to know I did not want to read more. Two books in particular that I recall were “Forever Amber” and “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Even then, neither held much interest for me.

Television was in its infancy and had little affect on our lives other than when, in groups, we sat around living rooms watching wrestling or boxing on small TV sets. We listened to radio for news, music, soap operas and serials like “The Green Hornet” and “Jack Armstrong.”

My mother was petite and very pretty with a ready smile, very smart, a quick wit and a sudden temper. She was tireless and worked around the house at breakneck speed, cleaning cooking, doing laundry. I know now that my father refused to allow her to work outside the home. They did not allow it in his family growing up and he would not allow it in his family as an adult. As an outlet for her energy, she painted rooms, stained doors, moved furniture, sewed buttons, turned the collars of our worn shirts, cuffed trousers, hemmed skirts, ironed our shirts and hers and my sisters clothing. We changed our outfits every day in our family. It was a great source of pride for my mother to have us all look just so when we went out to face the world.

Both parents had a temper for reasons I did not understand then and to this day, I do not fully grasp. They were quick to anger and I was usually on the short end. Sometimes I suffered a ready and sudden slap with their hands or in my father’s case, a few lashes from his belt, and the threat of the buckle, rather than just the leather, against my flesh. Beating were infrequent. The threat of a slap or punch, however, hovered over me like a sword ready to strike. Mostly I avoided that kind of suffering by limiting what they considered my bad conduct away from his and my mother’s eyes. I believe their quick tempers had to do with their frustration of not realizing their potential because of the Crash, the Depression that followed, and World War II.

As I said there was some physical abuse. I expected that as surely as I awoke each day. Parents hitting children was normal. It was part of life and expected. We compared notes and it was a source of pride, to show each other the nastiest marks on our bodies. But there was abuse of another kind. It was far worse.

“Notebooks, 1954-1961” is my life in diary form from the journals, and notebooks I kept in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Starting with this synopsis, I will post these journals on the Digital Filmmaker Blog in serial form over the next year. The next entries will be the introduction to the book. Once the introduction is online, I will present my journal in the order I wrote it. First, please take a few minutes to read about my early life. And recognize, that as some things change, how we grow up never seems to change no matter the era.

When I started writing my notebooks The Korean War had all but ended. Vietnam, a blip on the horizon, had not yet invaded our consciousness. It is my personal story, but it is in some ways the story of my generation, or at least those of my generation who lived a similar life in the late 1950s and into the next decade.

Many of us then were confused and searching. Through our parents, we were taking a long breath that had started with the Great Depression, and lingered painfully through World War II, culminating with the dropping of two atomic bombs on Japan. We came of age in the so-called Silent Generation when America sought solace in Levittown, freedom from war, and early, blissfully, innocent television. We did not know we were silent. We lived life as it happened, as others before us had, and these memories and experiences define that time for those who lived it with me.

We were similar to youth in any age. Our lives were our own. Our dreams were our own, but they were also universal. I believe my book speaks for a generation once derided as without a voice. It is for these reasons I believe my “Notebooks” will resonate especially with those of my generation and their children as they seek answers. Recall, the fifties were also the age of Dwight Eisenhower, his lean, comforting shadow still hovering over the memories of World War II, then only over ten years. The Korean War, undeclared, ugly and without end, ever a mystery to many why we were there having our youth killed, a floundering blot on our diplomatic and military history. These years were the preludes to the horror we would face after the promise of the disrupted, brief Kennedy era. By the mid-1960s, my life had changed, as had America’s, unsettled by forces beyond our control and dominated by runaway events we still suffer from today.

The book takes me from the relative safety of middle class Jewish life in Brooklyn, to WASP dominated Lafayette College, in Easton, Pennsylvania, then an all male school of less than 800 students. There, to my disbelief, I had a roommate who had never met a Jew before he met me. In the book, I tell about the difficulties I had in college as I tried to find a direction for my life other than the one laid out by the heavy handed influence and dominance of my father and mother. I eventually break some of their chains and become my own man. You will hurdle along with me through many youthful indiscretions, including heavy drinking, sexual adventure, long nights without sleep, and my many failed romances. I describe the hundreds of books I read that I still revere. I talk of my tastes in jazz and popular music, poetry and collecting words. After graduating Lafayette with a degree in history, I work many jobs before becoming a mail clerk at NBC two years later. That led to my becoming a copy boy at NBC News in an era now long gone once dominated by paper and film. It ends with me going to Washington in 1961 as David Brinkley’s assistant. Five years later, I am in Vietnam as bureau chief for NBC News.

The “Notebooks” is the story of how I came of age, but I was no Holden Caulfield. We may have been from the same time, but we lived in different neighborhoods, stood on different corners, and had different ethnic and religious backgrounds. My attack on life was frontal, direct, all encompassing. I often struggled in my quest. However, I survived to have a long and productive life.

I thought my original notebooks, scraps of paper with times and places and the many pages I typed and scribbled had disappeared. I thought those sleepless nights, and the many bottles of ale and shots of vodka had gone to waste. To my surprise, delight, and even some shock for the memories they jogged, I found more than 50 of the notebooks a few years ago, faded but still intact. With those, I wrote the “Notebooks, 1954-1961.”

Now, please watch the DVN Blog for the introduction to the “Notebooks” due here soon.