In memory yet green : the autobiography of Isaac Asimov, 1920-1954

by Asimov, Isaac, 1920-1992

  I don't remember how many columns I did, but I do remember that on one occasion there was a ministir brought about by the fact that I had naively reported that we had been let out early one day, when that was against regulations. The head of the Annex found he had to do some explaining, and from then on he read my column before I was allowed to pass it on to the newspaper office.

  It was during this third term that the presidential campaign of 1932 was carried on, and I was much more alive to events this time. I had never forgiven Mr. Hoover for defeating Al Smith, and since everyone I knew blamed Hoover entirely for the Depression, there was no question but that I was supporting Franklin Delano Roosevelt (who, like Al Smith, was from New York) with all my heart.

  This time my side won, and I was delighted. I never deserted Roosevelt either. His election made me a "New Deal Democrat," and I've never wavered thereafter. I have considered myself a "liberal" ever since.

  In February 1933, a month before Roosevelt became President, 2 I finally transferred to the main building of Boys High and entered the fourth term.

  Boys High was (and still is) located at Marcy and Putnam avenues in Brooklyn, about 3V2 miles west of the Essex Street candy store, and I reached it by streetcar, I believe. In 1933, Boys High, like all the schools I had attended up to that point, was a ghetto school in that its student body was very largely Jewish. 3

  My coming to Boys High meant a distinct change for me. Things weren't as they used to be. For one thing, I discovered that in high school, school wasn't confined to school hours, and that meant a new disadvantage that I had never before had.

  I had assumed, for instance, when I was in the Annex, that once I went to the main building, I would join the staff Qf the school paper. It

  2 And just a few days after that, Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, though that fact didn't register with me at the time.

  3 It is located deep in Bedford-Stuyvesant, so it is still a ghetto school, though of a different kind. The student body is almost entirely black and, since it has recently become coeducational, it is now Boys and Girls High School.

  seemed natural to me to do so, since I had no doubt of my writing ability at all. That, however, was never to come to pass.

  For one thing, I found that working on the paper meant all kinds of after-school activity, and I couldn't work after school. I had to get back to the candy store. For another thing, the students on the staff of the paper were all considerably older than I was and infinitely more sophisticated. They seemed, to my abashed self, to be very cynical and worldly wise, and they knew much more about politics than I did. I was overawed and backed away.

  The result was that I never worked on a school paper, either in high school or in college. 4 But as always, all was for the best. I would have made a rotten reporter. Newspaper work would have been the wrong turning for me.

  3

  The main building supplied me with a worse shock by far. Through all my seven years of school so far, right up to Waverly Annex, I had been the "smartest kid in class" and very probably the "smartest kid in the school." I had accepted that as a basic law of the universe, and it came as a disconcerting boot in the rear end to find this wasn't so any longer.

  Boys High's reputation for scholastic excellence was deserved, and there were easily a dozen students there who consistently got higher marks than I did. One student averaged 98 per cent each term, and I was sufficiently overawed by this to remember his name even though I don't recall ever having spoken to him during our stay together at the school. It was Karl Hill. In comparison, I was only too pleased to get a 93 average. I generally got less than that.

  After the initial shock and embarrassment, however, I shrugged it off. All the rest were much older than I was, and besides, young as I was, I had grown old enough to realize that "smartness" is not exactly, or entirely, equivalent to high marks. It was quite clear to me that some of the youngsters who did very well did so only at the cost of a great deal of sweating over their books. I, of course, continued to depend on what I could get by understanding-at-once-and-remembering-forever. I

  4 When it was Stanley's turn to enter high school, he was much more self-possessed than I. In his day, it became less fashionable to have students skip grades, so he entered high school at the normal age. What's more, he managed to find the extra time, even though he had duties at the candy store (which shows that my own failure to manage must have been at least as much through cowardice as through duty). He therefore worked on school papers, rose to an editorial position, and made newspaper work his profession.

  had to, as long as so much of my out-of-school time had to be spent in the candy store.

  My father was far more annoyed than I was at my failure to be at the tiptop of the class. He was particularly irritated at my failure to be elected to Arista, which was the school's honor society. My school marks qualified me, but—very rightly—this was not enough. You had also to engage in extracurricular activity in order to show yourself a well-rounded person. This I could not do, because extracurricular activity was out of the question.

  I never explained this to the school authorities, because I didn't want to seem to be begging to get in. I also never explained it to my father, since it would have saddened him without helping the situation in the least.

  A subshock, by the way, came when I discovered I was not a mathematician. What I had studied in the field had all seemed so easy to me that I assumed I was a mathematician. I took it for granted that I would get on the Boys High Math Team and knock them all dead with my lightning long division. Then I saw the kind of problems the Math Team solved as a matter of course. They might as well have been in South Martian.

  The members of the Math Team were no brighter than I was, if as bright, but they had a feel for mathematics that I didn't have and would never have—so that went by the board just as newspaper work did.

  And that, too, was good. It is important in life to recognize at the earliest possible moment what your field is not. It would be dreadful to waste a sizable portion of an at-best limited life assailing impregnable barriers when, in another direction, the door is open.

  Decatur Street

  In early 1933, my father gave up his second candy store at Essex Street It had seen us through the Hoover administration, but the lure of El Dorado was on him again.

  This time, it seems to me, the lure was a disastrous one. We had a candy store on Church Avenue for a month, but apparently it was not as represented, or my parents found they had overestimated their own ability to handle it. In any case, they had to give it up and move twice —once into an apartment in that area, and once out of it again.

  It was all a very traumatic period and I find it interesting that almost all trace of it has vanished from my mind. Through a wise provision of nature, we tend to forget the unpleasant—at least to a greater extent than the pleasant.

  About the only thing I remember was that my mother, faced with a store larger and more complicated than she could handle, and an apartment in which everything was jumbled in the middle of the rooms, simply gave up, went into her bedroom, and closed the door.

  My sister and I, scared witless, proceeded to straighten up, pulling furniture here and there as quietly as we could, putting the dishes in place, storing things in drawers and cabinets as nearly as we remembered they should go, and then dragged the boxes and paper out in the street.

  When my mother came out of the bedroom, looking haggard and beaten, she stared in amazement at the neatness of it all and burst into tears of joy. That was one of the few times I remember us being good children.

  I don't count the Church Avenue store as one of our candy stores. It was just an experiment that failed at once and that cost my father perhaps half of his painfully stored accumulation of capital. He had to retreat from his attempt at moving toward a big-and-busy store and find himself a candy store at the same level as the first two.

  This candy store, which I count as the third, was at 1312 Decat
ur Street, on the corner of Knickerbocker Avenue. It was about i l A miles northwest of Essex Street and was one third closer to Boys High than the old location was, which was an advantage for me.

  Another advantage was that it was just on the northeastern border of Brooklyn. One block farther north was Irving Street, along which ran the local boundary with Queens. This meant I was able to wangle a library card out of the Ridgewood branch of the Queens Public Library, and for several years I could go to it as well as to the local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, thus getting twice as many books as I would have otherwise.

  What's more, by the time we were in the new store, my father gave up the fight. Either he decided I was incorrigible or he felt that my mind had been formed and could resist, so that junk reading would not turn me into a bum. I therefore read all the pulp magazines that interested me; not only the science-fiction magazines and The Shadow, but also Doc Savage, Operator 5, The Spider, G-8 and His Battle Aces, and so on.

  The move also meant that, for the first time in the ten years since we had come to the United States, we moved out of the East New York section of Brooklyn. We had moved to Ridgewood.

  Leaving East New York was inconvenient in one way. It meant that for the first time since coming to the United States, we did not live in a Jewish neighborhood. Ridgewood was heavily Catholic at the time, I believe, and had a strong admixture of Germans. And now I was old enough to begin to understand and experience anti-Semitism, both in terms of the names I was called in the street and the subtler ways in which I was made to feel an outsider; and in terms of the infinitely more dangerous form epitomized by Hitler's Nazis in Germany.

  I did not feel particularly Jewish, however. I did not observe any of the rituals. Since my father's brief flirtation with the synagogue in Miller Avenue, I had not gone into one.

  On January 2, 1933, nearly at the end of our stay at Essex Street, I had turned thirteen. Even unbelieving Jews often saw to it that their sons went through a bar mitzvah—the occasion on which a young man accepts Judaism independently, rather than having it thrust on him by his parents. I did not undergo the rite.

  Nor have I ever felt any guilt over this, nor any urge to make up the lack. I have never felt anything but comfortable over my lack of religion.

  However, Hitler's anti-Semitism was not a religious persecution, but one against anyone who could be defined as a Jew by those who were professional Jew-haters. Under those conditions, I qualified per-

  fectly and the world grew a distinctly more dangerous place each year for me and for all Jews.

  It made me more than ever a liberal and a New Dealer, for liberals were openly anti-Hitler and conservatives seemed to me to be rather complacent about the Hitler phenomenon and to be interested in other things.

  3

  In the Decatur Street store, as in the previous one, the apartment was upstairs, but it could not be reached from the store. We had to go outside to go upstairs, which was a pain in the neck. Furthermore, there were two other tenants, one downstairs and one across the hall from us upstairs. Another pain in the neck.

  It was, however, a roomier apartment than any we had yet had. What's more, we were now in the full American technological swim. We had an electric refrigerator, and not an icebox, and in the store, the icecream was kept in an electric freezer. (I remember worrying about this iceless cooling. I didn't see how it was possible.)

  What's more, we had a radio in the apartment, and we could play it ourselves.

  Of course, we could not play it when my father was napping. Not that it would disturb his sleep, but we found, as we grew larger, that my father preferred no one to be in the house when he was napping. He valued his privacy.

  Nor could we play it when my mother napped. She didn't mind our being in the house, but there was no way we could play the radio, for it could not be made loud enough for us to hear it with our ear against the loudspeaker without its being loud enough for her to hear it two rooms away.

  Within those limitations, however, I listened to all the quarter-hour adventure serials, from "Little Orphan Annie" and "Jack Armstrong" to "Buck Rogers in the Twenty-fifth Century" (the last being my favorite, of course).

  The real excitement came in the evening comedy shows, however. Eddie Cantor, my favorite in the Essex Street days, was replaced by Jack Benny in Decatur Street.

  My parents occasionally listened, but I had long since come to realize that their senses of humor didn't jibe with mine. My father would not laugh at a joke on principle, and if I ever caught him smiling at anything on the radio, he would shrug his shoulders and say, "Ah foolishness."

  My mother was willing to laugh, but erratically, and not always at the same things I laughed at. For instance, an impertinent youngster asked Eddie Cantor what he did for a living, and Eddie, in the skit, was supposed to be indignant and say, "Don't talk to me that way. I'm old enough to have five daughters." Whereupon the youngster said, snot-tily, "I asked your job, not your hobby/'

  I laughed wildly, but my mother said indignantly, "What a terrible boy. His mother should be ashamed of herself to have him talk like that."

  No use trying to tell her that it was probably an actor, playing a boy's role, and reading from a prepared script. 1

  4

  The candy store had a kitchen in the back, for it differed from our previous stores in being a luncheonette. We served cake, pie, milk, coffee, and a variety of sandwiches, and my mother would usually cook up something hot for about a dozen people besides the family. It was the only thing on the menu, and people who wanted a hot dish took pot luck.

  My mother made elaborate pot roasts, meat-ball dishes, and a variety of other things, and for a while the family ate unusually well, but it was too much. She just wearied of it and gradually let the luncheonette practice dwindle, serving only the old customers with sufficient lack of interest to make them all drift away except for one never-say-die gentleman who was back every lunchtime for whatever my mother had for the family, quite indifferent to the fact that he was the only one eating there.

  Finally, my mother, with as much tact as she possessed, informed him that she would not serve him anymore. Her full supply of tact was insufficient. He was mortally offended and we never saw him again for any other purchases either.

  The kitchen in back was convenient because it was comfortable and enclosed and one could eat in peace, for if it grew busy in the store one could always hear and emerge, and as long as things were quiet, one could take one's time.

  I liked it because it had no windows. Why it should be, I don't

  1 1, of course, knew enough about sex to be able to get the joke and laugh. I had learned about sex at the junior high school in the usual manner. I overheard the older kids talking about it—this was called "picking it up in the gutter." I also saw the pornographic comic books that were passed around from hand to hand and that completed my education as far as the little-boy level was concerned.

  know, and psychiatrists may make what they like of it (for I will not ask them, and I will not listen if they try to tell me), but I have always liked enclosed places. For instance, the ersatz rooms in department stores fitted out with furniture on sale always looked far better to me than real rooms did. They seemed warmer and cozier, and I never knew why till it dawned on me that they had no windows.

  Again, when I used to take the subway, I would envy the people who ran the newsstands on every station (now mostly gone), for I imagined they could board it up whenever they wanted to, put the light on, lie on a cot at the bottom, and read magazines. I used to fantasize doing so, with the warm rumble of the subway trains intermittently passing.

  Well, the room in the back of the store, with the curtain drawn across the opening, and the smell of food permeating it, and my plate full and a book open beside it, and the electric light on over the table (even if it was broad daylight outside), and nobody else there, and the store quiet—who could possibly want more? Certainly not I.

  Looking bac
k on my childhood now, I know perfectly well it was a deprived one in many ways, but the thing was, you see, that I never knew it at the time. No one is deprived unless and until he thinks he is.

  5

  The Decatur Street store was the first with a newspaper route. It was not a terribly large one, but papers had to be delivered both morning and afternoon, and I was the one who had the job. It meant getting up not only in time to get to school at the required moment, but also in time to deliver the papers first and then go to school, which meant an extra hour.

  It also meant being home from school in time to make the afternoon delivery, which further decreased the possibility of extracurricular work at school.

  I never had an alarm clock, or rather I had the best one in the world, for if I wasn't down at the set time, my father would be on the street, shouting up at the window. If it took me more than five minutes after that, I got lecture 5A on responsibility and punctuality and on the deadly spiritual dangers of being a fulyack (a sluggard). 2

  Those papers went out every day, including Sunday (when, how-

  2 Ever since, to the very present time, I have awakened in time for the morning newspaper delivery, and it is a point of pride with me that though I have an alarm clock, I never set it, but get up at 6:00 a.m. anyway. I am still snowing my father I am not a fulyack.

  ever, there was only a morning delivery) so that there were thirteen deliveries a week. What's more, the papers had to be delivered with a faithfulness the post office would do well to envy. At least, neither rain, nor snow, nor heat, nor dark of night stayed me from the swift completion of my appointed rounds. My father saw to that.

  In fact, I only failed him on one day (barring the rare occasions on which I was sick in bed, and that was not often at all). That one day was February 9, 1934, when the temperature dropped to —14 degrees Fahrenheit, the coldest day the Weather Bureau had ever recorded in New York City, and a record that has not been surpassed to this day.