Childhood

After the Navaho field work, my parents moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where my father had a research fellowship and later taught statistics at Simmons College. I was born in Boston at Massachusetts General Hospital on February 14, 1937. My parents were pleased. They wanted a boy first. I was independent; as my mother said, “not a cuddly child.” My mother was 35 and my father 37. This was still the Depression, and although my parents were well off by the standards of the day (both parents being employed and my mother having a small inheritance), money was still a concern. Years later when I was filling out security clearance forms for the government, I learned from my parents that, in Cambridge, we moved repeatedly, taking advantage of the incentive provided by landlords of a month's free rent. Yet at the same time (not uncommon in those days for a middle-class family), my parents employed a nanny for me and for a time a butler as well. It was clear to me at an early age that my mother preferred working to housekeeping. We spent summers in Truro on Cape Cod at or near Longnook Beach, where my wife Sally and I now have a house, returning to my roots.

I do not have a lot of early memories. One was going out on a lobster boat in Maine with my father and eating lobster cooked on the engine of the boat. Another was trying to kill rats at a barn in Maine with a .22 rifle (no luck). Other early memories relate to health—splitting open my lip in a fall from a runaway tricycle, being hit above the eye with a baseball bat (stitches again) and being stung by many bees (requiring a hospital visit and an adrenaline shot). The scars from the first two are still with me. I also remember Thanksgivings at Uncle Melville's house on Beacon Hill in Boston. (He was the advertising manager for the Saturday Evening Post. He was my mother's cousin but had the honorific title of “uncle.”) The house was grand and memorable.

My parents with me in tow moved to Brooklyn in 1942.