10
I participated in the naming of the new baby. It was the first time in my life such a thing had happened, and I had very strong feelings about names.
For instance, for as long as I could remember I have been extraordinarily fond of the name Isaac. I don't know why; perhaps it is one aspect of being pleased at being me, generally. In any case, I have never willingly allowed nicknames. Ike, Ikey, and Izzy are all abominations, and I correct all who call me that, except for very old friends of whom I am very fond. If a correction in their case doesn't take, then I correct no more but endure it. These represent no more than a handful of people, I assure you. Sometimes I am called "I," which may even be written "Eye." That I won't fight over, but it is still not the name of choice.
While we were still on Van Siclen Avenue, old-timers were instructing my mother on How Not to Be a Greenhorn. The suggestion
was made that she ought to do something about my name. Isaac, they explained, would be a terrible stigma. It would be entirely too Jewish and it would keep me from advancing in the new land. What would be an appropriate name, they said, would be Irving. It would keep the initial "I," so that my mother could still console herself with the pious thought that I was named for her dead father, while it would give me a name that would enable me to hold my head up among the Gentiles.
I didn't know at the time that it was all folly. Irving is an old aristocratic English name. Once, however, enough Jewish youths were named Irving, it became a Jewish name, with all the disadvantages thereto appertaining.
I didn't have to know. When my mother tried to call me Irving, I set up a howl of objection. My name was Isaac, I would answer to nothing else, and that was the way it was going to stay. And so it has stayed. As far as I know, it has never in any way proven a stigma or kept me from advancing, since my Jewishness did not need the name to be self-evident.
In fact, simply because it is an uncommon name, it has made it possible for those of my readers who, for one reason or another, feel close to me to use it as a way of signifying familiarity and affection without much fear of ambiguity.
I wanted my brother to be called Solomon. I still remembered Solly Frisch, and I wanted him to have the honor. My father, unaware of the origin of the suggestion, was attracted to it. It was a classic Jewish name and no living member of the family bore it. It was thus understood, when my mother went in the hospital, that if a boy were born, his name was to be Solomon.
What we didn't count on was that the woman in the bed next to my mother was planning to call her child, if it were a boy, Stanley. My mother liked that name, which was (if she but knew) another fine old aristocratic English name. What's more, she must have taken the strictures of the old-timers more seriously than my father or I did, and she did not wish to add another stigma to the family. Stanley it was, therefore, to my profound indignation.
What made it worse was that my mother, for years, called him "Standely" with an extraneous d, and no amount of coaching on my part could get her to omit it. (There were other parental idiosyncrasies of pronunciation I couldn't eradicate. My mother spoke of "birthsdays" and wouldn't drop the s despite anything I could offer in the way of logic, reasoning, and ridicule. My father, who never used coarse language, was reduced to saying "Nots" when driven past endurance, and nothing I could say would induce him to say "Nuts.")
As to my father, he customarily referred to the new baby as Shlaymele, which is the Hebrew version of "Solly" in our dialect of the language. Still, Stanley it was, and there was no fighting it.
When Stanley grew to mature years, he tended more and more to drop the second syllable, and now he consistently uses the first syllable only. He is Stan Asimov.
11
Once Stanley was born and my mother had recovered somewhat, she returned to the store full time. Fortunately for her, while Marcia and I had been breast-fed (what else, indeed, was possible in Pe-trovichi?), Stanley, in this new land beyond the sea, could be bottle-fed and was. Moreover, he was bottle-fed, for the most part, by me.
There were only two alternatives possible. Either my mother helped run the store and I helped care for little Stanley, or my mother devoted herself full-time to the kid and I to the store.
For myself, I preferred to take care of Stanley. For one thing, I liked the baby, and for another he was no particular trouble. Except when he needed changing (which my mother took care of), he either drank his milk or slept. Unlike his older siblings, he was over seven pounds at birth and was well developed, so he did very well indeed. He stayed in the carriage and I propped myself in a chair leaning back against the brick wall of the house, reading—and set to go into the store if I were called.
Or else I could wheel him around the block a dozen times or so with a book propped against the handle of the carriage. No problem. No trouble.
One embarrassment I can recall in connection with this was once, when he had grown big enough to want to stand up in the carriage, I amused him by starting and stopping the carriage so that he would sway back and forth and laugh. A woman scolded me for doing so, feeling I was endangering the child. When I got home, I complained to my mother that some strange woman had scolded me "for just doing this." I demonstrated it, and Stanley immediately tumbled out of the carriage—and don't think I didn't get a hiding promptly.
On another occasion I stopped at a plant nursery that existed on one of the other sides of the block. A bud of some sort hung over the fence, and I plucked it and examined it as I continued walking. I thought nothing of it, but when I reached the store, the owner of the nursery was there ahead of me.
"Did you take a flower?" my father asked.
"Yes," I said, frightened, "but it was just a bud."
"Why?"
"I wanted to see what was inside."
My father paid up and said not another word. He knew he didn't have to. I had just never known that flowers weren't free. Now that I had learned that wasn't so, he knew I wouldn't do it again.
12
It was about that time, too, that I became aware of the outside world as reflected in the newspapers, which I began to read.
My first experience with the newspapers—the Sunday News, to be exact—was while we were still living on Miller Avenue. The comic supplement was a powerful attraction, and I loved reading it. My favorites were Moon Mullins and Winnie Winkle. For some reason, I still remember the Rinkeydink Club, of which Perry Winkle was the leading member. The other three members were Spike, Spud, and Chink.
I even have dim memories of my mother reading the comics to me before I could read. In a way, this was impossible, since my mother couldn't possibly read English at that time. I can only presume that, going by the action, she made up her own conversation.
But matters besides the comics were beginning to penetrate. In 1928 I was aware that there was a presidential election on, in part through the four-page newspaper that was distributed in grade school.
It was Al Smith of New York vs. Herbert Hoover of Somewhere Else. Naturally, I was for Al Smith because he was from New York. So were all the other kids at school, so it seemed clear to me that Hoover didn't have a chance. I was devastated when Hoover won. In fact, I couldn't believe it, and was convinced that there had been some crooked work somewhere. I wondered if perhaps Al Smith could be president of New York, at least.
My clearest memory of that election is of a radio set up over the front door of some store on Sutter Avenue with a crowd of people standing about in front of it listening to the election returns.
Then in October of 1929, came the stock market crash that put an end to the prosperity of the 1920s and introduced the Great Depression. The economic situation slid steadily downhill and, as my father's customers found themselves with less and less money, things turned bad for the store as well. Our second candy store, after half a year of moderate promise, showed clearly that it was to be no more a highway to riches than the first had been.
Just the same, the Depression taught us the value of
the candy
store. There were bread lines and soup kitchens and people selling apples on corners, but none of that was for us. Even people with jobs had to dread the possibility of a layoff, and once laid off, there was the near impossibility of finding another job. None of that was for us, either.
We could not be fired. We had a job and a place to live. The job might be sixteen hours a day and seven days a week, and the profits might be small, but it represented security. All through the Hoover administration we never missed a meal, and there was always money for necessities.
Junior High School
I passed through the sixth grade smoothly. In 6B1, I had as my teacher a Miss Growney (I believe that was her name), who was at the opposite pole from Miss Martin. Miss Growney was considered "strict," and she regularly scolded us in unmeasured terms.
I had entered her class with the greatest misgivings, fearing that with my well-known proclivities for antisocial whispering, I would be in constant trouble—and so I was. Miss Growney, however, seemed to have a perverse affection for me, possibly because she was pleased at having such a bright little boy in her class, so she was never as hard on me as I thought she would be.
And as for her short temper—well, that was old-home week for me. She was very much like my mother in that respect.
Then, in June of 1930, my stay at PS 202 came to an end after not quite two years. I was 10V2 years old now, and once the summer vacation was over, I would enter junior high school.
Summer vacations were never easy times for me. Theoretically, they were vacations, but not for me. It just meant I worked in the candy store all day instead of only from 3:00 p.m. on. During the school year I got away from the store, and the school itself offered me no problems in exchange (except for my periodically being punished for my many terrible transgressions).
So I loved school and found the summer tedious. This was at no time more pronounced than the summer of 1930, when I was looking forward to the excitement of junior high school and feeling very adult about it. It seems to me I spent that entire summer doing only two things:
First, I wheeled Stanley around the block endlessly while reading the Iliad endlessly. 1 Second, I carefully computed the number of hours until school began.
I think that was the first time I ever computed hours to some zero time, but I've been doing it ever since. I would routinely compute the
I I even told myself stories designed to continue the Iliad after Homer had left off. I was Achilles, and although Homer clearly indicated that Achilles was slated for an early death, he never died in my daydreams.
number of hours until the next issue of some desired science-fiction magazine would appear on the stand and watch the number diminish as I grew more excited. Even today, you can ask me at any time, when I am out of town for any reason, how many hours it will be till I'm back at my typewriter and I'll tell you.
And though I thought, at some times during the summer, that vacation would never be over, it was. On the last day of vacation I remember sitting on my father's newsstand (which I could do when the papers were mostly gone) drumming my heels against it, with myself in a delirium of joy because the next day would be Monday, September 9, 1930, and I would start junior high school.
The junior high school I went to was East New York Junior High School 149, on Sutter Avenue between Wyona and Vermont streets (I think), quite close to where I used to live on Van Siclen and Miller avenues. Had I still lived there I would have been able to walk to school.
As it was, there was the far more exciting necessity of having to go to school by bus. It meant that every weekday I would have to take the bus twice, once going and once coming. It meant my mother would have to entrust me with two nickels, one for the bus going and one for the bus coming.
For the first time since I started school five years before I would not be coming home for lunch. That meant I would have to buy something to eat or take lunch with me. Since my mother didn't have time to make lunch for me early in the morning, she gave me a quarter with which to buy hot dogs, french fries, corned beef club sandwiches, and other foods guaranteed to pickle the stomach. I loved it.
Junior high schools cover the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades, and you could traverse them in one of two ways: You could take a full three-year course: 7A, 7B, 8A, 8B, 9A, 9B. You could also go through in two years by taking a "rapid advance" course, if you were considered bright enough. You could go through RA, RB, RC, and RD, where the "R" stood for "rapid advance," of course. RA was the equivalent of 7A plus 7B, and RB was the equivalent of 8A plus 8B. RC and RD were 9A and 9B, respectively, allowing for some extra brightness. Naturally, I was placed in the rapid advance course.
That meant that at the end of my first year of junior high school, having completed RA and RB successfully, I had also completed both seventh and eighth grades. When I received my promotion in June
1931, which meant I was officially in RC, which was the ninth grade, I was the equivalent of a high-school freshman. 2
I had expected this promotion, of course, and I arranged with my mother that I would not go directly home. I ran to the library instead and came up against the librarian's desk with a thud.
"I want an adult library card, please," I panted, handing her my children's card.
I was still a week short of being 111/2, and was very skinny and looked younger still. The librarian said to me gently, "You can't have an adult card till you're in high school, little boy."
"I am in high school," I said, and presented her with my report card. She consulted another official and for a while both looked at me as though it must surely be against the law for anyone looking like me to be in high school, but in the end I got my card.
This meant I could roam at will among the mysterious stacks containing adult books. The card was stamped "H.S.," however, which still restricted me to two books at a time, only one of which could be fiction.
3
Fortunately, I had my science-fiction magazines, too, and they were wonderful. To be sure, I couldn't keep them. They had to be sold, or, if not sold, returned to the publisher. Consequently, it was my habit to grab them as soon as they came in and to read them with a very light hand, so that when I was through they would close neatly, as though they had never been read. 3
I felt a little put upon that this was necessary, and even more put upon that I could not keep the magazines permanently. It meant I could not save the serials, for instance, and then read the parts all together. On the whole, though, I was fortunate beyond belief.
If my father had not owned a candy store, and if he had made an equivalent living in any other line of endeavor, it simply passes the bounds of belief that I could possibly have bought science-fiction magazines. They cost a quarter each (one of them, an at-that-time inferior magazine called Astounding Stories, cost twenty cents), and my father simply would not have given me seventy cents a month in order that I
2 Grade schools are usually Grades 1 through 8, and high schools Grades 9 through 12. Junior high schools, when they exist, combine the last two grades of grade school with the first year of high school.
3 I also learned to read newspapers that way. To this day, I can read the Sunday New York Times and, when I am through, you will not be able to tell that it has been in any way disturbed.
might buy science-fiction magazines. Nor would my mother, at that time, have let them accumulate in the tiny apartment.
As a matter of fact, I was never allowed any money to spend as I wished. About the only luxury I could legitimately need money for was an occasional movie, and then I would say, "Mamma, can I have fifteen cents for a movie?" (The price had gone up since the Sutter Avenue Theater days, but on the other hand, the pictures now talked.) She would give it to me and off I would go, or she wouldn't give it to me and off I wouldn't go.
Once, when we were still living on Miller Avenue, my mother had the idea of giving me ten cents a week allowance. I was to be allowed to spend that dime on any unbelieva
ble luxury I wished. I think that started because I was going to Hebrew school at the time and some of the other kids had allowances and I called this to my mother's attention. Perhaps she didn't want me to make a poor appearance before the other kids, so I got my dime.
I specifically asked what the limits on the spending were and I was told there were none. It was my dime and I could do as I pleased with it. So I decided to start a stamp collection, and saved up several dimes and then used them to buy a thousand "mixed foreign stamps" (which meant that most of them were duplicated examples of the most common French and German varieties) and a little stamp book to put them in.
As soon as my parents saw me carefully arranging my stamps and discovered that I had lavished immense sums on them (actually, I think it was a quarter), they rescinded the allowance. When I was told that I could spend the dimes as I pleased, I think they meant by that that I was to save up and buy myself underwear.
In later years, my father gave me an allowance of a dollar a week, but ostentatiously put it in a little mechanical savings bank, unwilling to have me spend the money on incredible foolishness like stamps. When enough had accumulated, he bought me an insurance policy that was to mature twenty years later.
Of course, everything has its bright side. If I couldn't afford to buy science-fiction magazines, neither could my friends at the junior high school. I could, at least, read the stories even if I couldn't keep them, and I discovered that I owned a valuable commodity—the ability to tell the stories.
I took over the role of my story-telling friend of Miller Avenue days, and now it was others who listened to me. Of course, the stories weren't my own, and I made no pretense that they were. I carefully explained that I had read them in science-fiction magazines.
During lunch hour, we would sit on the curb in front of the school, each with our sandwiches, and, to anywhere from two to ten eager listeners, I would repeat the stories I had read, together with such personal embellishments as I could manage. It increased my pleasure in science fiction and I discovered, for the first time in my life, that I loved to have an audience. I found that I could speak before a group, even when some of them were strangers to me, without embarrassment.
In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954 Page 13