08/02/06

New York (1939-1940)

We arrived in New York on the 5^th of December 1939, and lived with the Eisler family in Jackson Heights for several weeks, our relatives from Brünn. Manfred was a successful trader in leather and other commodities and had made a fortune on the stock market, which he had wisely transferred to Swiss and American banks long before the war. Marianne was a good mother interested in art. Doris was about my age, and Rudi was about Eric’s age. They lived in half of a duplex house owned by a Mr. Wallance, who flew and once gave me a ride in his Swift. The Eislers came with all of their furniture, books and piano, and had a brand new Buick, worth about $600 as I recall. Manfred started a leather company. I enrolled in Newtown High School and found myself a Sunday paper route. I practiced piano whenever Doris wasn’t. I worked on plans to enroll in one of the many aviation schools which were advertising at the time.

After several weeks we found our own apartment in the neighboring town of Elmhurst, a somewhat more modest suburb on the edge of Flushing Meadows, within sight of the 1939-1940 World’s Fair "Pylon and Perisphere" buildings, and the newly built LaGuardia airport. We had our lift-van of furniture delivered, which included our piano. Father tried to make a living by coating aluminum army canteens with self-sterilizing silver nitrate, and I helped him make dozens of samples for testing. The venture never got off the ground. I befriended an old German locksmith who ran a hardware store and gave me a job sorting his lifetime collection of tools and nuts and bolts. He told tales of having worked on building the Holland Tunnel. I bought tools from him. I made friends with a boy in High School whose name I forget. He was part of a large Italian family and played the violin. He came to our house almost every evening, and we worked on the Schubert violin-piano sonatinas. The level of education at Newtown High School was so much below the level in Vienna and Brussels that I needed to spend very little time getting top grades. I spent much time building rubber-powered model airplanes, which I flew on Flushing Meadows. I saved my money in hopes of buying a gasoline engine. During the summer of 1940 I often walked across Flushing Meadows to the World’s Fair.

I also walked to LaGuardia airport, and watched the Yankee Clipper and American Clipper, Pan-Am’s two trans-Atlantic seaplanes arriving and departing from the marine terminal. Little did I realize that I would be flying a large twin airliner of my own, and a Citation Jet into La Guardia.

The self-styled aviation experts and media prognosticators proclaimed New York’s Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia a fool for building "Fiorello’s Folly", an airport larger than New York would ever need. And they proclaimed trans-Atlantic air service doomed to failure, because the Pan Am clippers were much too small to be viable, with a crew of six flying thirty-six passengers. And obviously nobody would ever build a larger land airplane because it could never support itself on wheels. And seaplanes simply can’t service enough cities. Trans-Atlantic passenger service was pronounced impossible.

During the winter of 39-40 I shoveled snow at Flushing Airport in exchange for rides in their many yellow piper cubs.

In fall of 1940 father got a faculty position at Temple University and we moved to Philadelphia. A new phase of life began.

(Continue to Philadelphia)