Alan's teenage years

Alan’s Teenage Years Besides baseball I got into Morse code. In the late 1930s, cowboy films were the vogue- we’d pay 25 cents to go to the local theater to see the latest adventure of Hopalong Cassidy. But the characters who really intrigued me were the telegraph operators. Not only did they have the power of instantaneous communication at their fingertips- at crucial moments in the plot they could call for help or warn of an impending Indian attack. A skilled operator could communicate forty of fifty words per minute and the equally skilled person at the other end would not only get the message but could tell from the rhythm who was transmitting the code… Secretly I yearned for a way out of New York. At night I would sometime huddle by the radio turning the dial trying to pick up stations far away. From the age 11 I collected railroad timetables from all over the country. I spend hours memorizing the routes and names of the towns in the forty eight states… When I was thirteen my father unexpectantly invited me on a business trip to Chicago. We went to the Penn station and boarded the limited which headed down to Philadelphia before turning west. Then it carried us through Harrisburg and Aloona and by the time we reached Pittsburg it was night. In the dark I saw the huge steelmaking furnaces spewing flames and sparks- my first exposure to the industry that would become my specialty … The trip help solidify my dream of finding a more interesting life than being an average kid in Washington Heights .. My other passion was music. I took up the clarinet at the age of twelve after hearing my cousin Claire play and practiced with total dedication between three and six hours per day… One of my heroes was Glenn Miller who gave music a new velvet dimension by grouping a clarinet with two alto and tenor saxes in his band. When I was fifteen I took the subway to the Hotel Pennsylvania to hear the band play. I was able to maneuver myself right up next to the bandstand, just ten feet away from Glenn miller himself. The band started to play a dance arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. I piped up “that’s the Pathetique’ and Miller looked over at me and said ‘That’s terrific kid’. George Washington High School was about a mile and half from our apartment, was one of the city’s largest and best public schools. When I started fall of 1940 there were many more than three thousand students… there was also the uncertainty of war. Although Pearl Harbor was over a year away, Nazi Germany had just conquered Europe. The radio was full of news of freighters on the Atlantic being sunk by U boats and the crackly transmission of Ed morrow reporting from London under siege by the Luftwaffe. We were particularly conscious of war because our classes had swelled with refugees- mainly Jews whose families had fled the Nazis a few years before. Henry Kissinger was a senior when I enrolled though we would not meet for three decades. I remember sitting in maths with john Kemeny, a Hungarian refugee who would one day become Albert Einstein’s mathematical assistant and who would co invent BASIC computer language with Thomas Kurtz. John hadn’t been in America long and spoke with a heavy accent, but he was brilliant at maths. I wondered if this might be at least in part a result of superior schooling in received in Hungary. So I asked ‘Is it because you’re from Europe?’… but the question seemed to bemuse him. He shrugged and said ‘Everyone is’ … I remember exactly where I was on the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. I’d turned on the radio to take a break from practicing clarinet and there was the announcement. I didn’t know where Pearl Harbor was- nobody did. I didn’t immediately think, Oh we are going to war. Instead I hoped the calamity would just go away. When you are a fifteen year old boy you just blank out a lot of things. P23-25 Alan Greenspan 2007. New York is a world of its own- and we are in period of history when USA lived in a world of her own. Sure more than any other city …London?- But right here London is under attack and all effort is being made to isolate her from her empire and vital supplies- Sure more than anywhere else New York was at this time linked to the world, but it had yet to see itself as World Capital. The 1939 World Fair in New York was never memorable and mostly known only to history buffs and like the 1939 international Masonic Conference Boston Sept 23rd 1939- which met briefly before adjournment and giving up … But as a New Yorker young Alan has the desire to find out what USA is all about and that will become his passionate work for three decades… Then joining fellow Jew Henry Kissinger in the aftermath of Nixon error finding out where New York Empire State fits in the world. Smart Jewish kid from Washington Heights finding world! P.S As research for this I am looking as young Alan must have visiting it- Although he never mentions he did- The World Fair and in the General Motors exhibit they have the city of 1960- a truly terrifying place with widely spaced sky scrappers of 150 stories –six lane highways in flowing- three wide, double decked streets and parks on the roofs of low buildings. While on another page and young Alan would have known about this even if he wasn’t there- May 28th 1939 over 100,000 Jews witnessed the dedication of Jewish Palestine pavilion- And this gets freaky: At the Same Location Flushing Meadows New York where the United Nations meet in Nov 1947 to vote For partition of Palestine leading to May 14th 1948 Israel becoming a nation. Interesting Alan never mentions these New York Jew things as he was growing up. You actually live in New York? Visiting New York –Well prayer for Israel in the Flushing Meadows park looks like a good Empire State Sunday afternoon activity- The story isn’t finished more chapters to write!