My father came to America in the first decade of the 20th century. He was a little over 20 at the time. He had spent a year at the University of Vienna and a year at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. He would have returned to Vienna for the third and final year of his undergraduate work, but his parents had immigrated to the U.S. and were not doing well, so they asked him to come over and help. At the time he knew very little English, but he came to Philadelphia, where he worked in an orphanage and learned English and baseball from the orphans. It's a good thing he came, since if he hadn't he would probably have been killed in the First World War.

My mother lived most of her life in New York and believed for a very long time that she was native-born. She voted in four or five presidential elections before she found out that she'd actually come over from Austria-Hungary as a baby. She had to be naturalized in a big hurry in 1940. If she hadn't become a citizen then she would have turned into an enemy alien when the United States joined the war.

My mother was very kind and nurturing, but she had somehow lost her ability to deal with anything intellectual. I don't know how that happened. When she was a high school student she had extremely good grades. Her report cards showed that she had done well in algebra and Spanish, but I don't think she could recall a single formula or a single word of Spanish when I knew her. She would have liked to go to college, but her stepfather ruled it out and said she had to work. She went to secretarial school instead and became a secretary. She was a good typist and her spelling and grammar were always excellent.

She did a very good job of taking care of the family, and was very loving. She also had the idea that I was a little bit special, and she tried very hard to get me into a private school, although my father had no interest in that whatsoever. I didn't know what was happening, but I kept having to pile blocks on top of one another in various tests at different places in New York City. I realize now, of course, that these were all attempts to get me into a private school with a full scholarship. They all failed, unfortunately, until finally a very nice music teacher named Florence Freint succeeded in getting me into Columbia Grammar School.

My brother Ben was a wonderful influence in my life. He taught me almost everything I knew when I was little. Ben and I would do all sorts of things together. He loved bird-watching and we were also interested in flowering plants, trees, butterflies, and many other things. After we moved back to Manhattan we still went up to the Bronx for some of our bird-watching because just north of the Bronx Zoo is the only remaining stretch of the hemlock forest that once covered the whole of New York. We regarded the city as a hemlock forest that had been over-logged, and so we spent some of our time in the small portion of the forest that was still preserved.

I learned a number of things relatively early. My brother taught me to read from a cracker box when I was three. We were visiting our cousins, the Walkers, and while we were sitting in the kitchen he showed me how to read the text on the cracker box. I picked up reading rather quickly after that, so I was somewhat ahead of other kids in learning.

My father and brother were both interested in how to pronounce the sounds in various languages and we all practiced. Except for German and English we didn't have them exactly right, of course, but we were close. My interest in etymologies and the relationships among languages was stimulated by one of my father's books. When I was a little child and we moved to a tiny apartment, he had to give away his library, which beforehand was very extensive. He kept a few books, though, and one of them was on Greek and Latin roots in English.