08/02/06

Philadelphia (1940-1941)

We arrived in Philadelphia in fall of 1940, and moved into an apartment at 1722 Spruce Street, near Rittenhouse Square, the first time I had lived in a city. All of our furniture, including our piano, arrived.

I enrolled in South Philadelphia High School, an awful school in an awful neighborhood, but transferred to Simon Gratz High School in Germantown at the end of the fall semester. I joined a boy scout troop consisting entirely of boys from the local parochial school. Father enrolled us in the youth group of the Ethical Society which often exchanged visits with the young Quakers, where I made a new set of friends. Father got a faculty position at the Fels Foundation at Temple University doing endocrinology research, and immediately started studying for the medical board licensing exams in internal medicine, pathology, pharmacology, and eventually neurology and psychiatry. He passed all exams and got all licenses to practice without having to do internships. He also published several papers on endocrinology. Somehow he found the time and energy.

I found a job in a gas station on Broad Street, half-way between City Hall and the Navy Yard, a rather unwholesome neighborhood. The owner Bob Cooper entrusted me with running the station from 5 pm to midnight, and my duties included greasing and gassing tractor-trailers from a trucking company down the street. I had to fetch and return them, and back them over the greasing pit. I don’t remember having a driver’s license at the time, but Cooper was on good terms with the local police and the local Mafia as well. He preferred to pay the Mob for protection, because they delivered whereas the police didn’t.

In spring 1941 I got a job assisting a German mechanic named Franz Schultz in the downtown Sleigh garage on Walnut Street, and Franz gave me permission to use the shop weekends. I bought a thoroughly worn-out 1933 Dodge roadster with a rumble seat and wood-spoked wheels. I bored out the six cylinders and replaced the pistons and crankshaft bearings and the valves. and had a new canvas top installed..

Eric started a photo-finishing business, and I helped him build concrete developing tanks in the basement of our apartment house. He had a route of 30 or 40 drugstores in the western suburbs, and provided one-day pickup and delivery service. We drove the route together in my dodge, until Eric got his driver license and bought a 1938 Buick sedan.

I graduated from Gratz High School in June 1942 and waited to be drafted. I actually wanted to enlist, anxious for a chance to even my scores with the Nazis, and with hopes of getting into the Air Force and becoming a fighter pilot. But my parents objected very emotionally, and mother even cried. So I waited to be drafted. First I got a job in a furniture factory building office furniture for government offices; then I got an office job in the Grabowsky cigar company, followed by a job as testing technician at the E. L. Conwell Engineering Company. I drove all over Pennsylvania getting cement specimens at cement companies and concrete specimens at construction sites,and I made, cured and compression-tested concrete cylinders. In fall of 1942 I was admitted to a government-sponsored course at Drexel Institute for training inspectors in the basic principles of mechanical engineering. I learned a surprising amount in just one semester. In March 1943 I was drafted into the Army.

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