In the fall of 1929, four months after my birth in New Brunswick, we moved to Plattsburgh, New York, where my mother’s parents and sisters had settled. A city of seventeen thousand, Plattsburgh is, like much of upstate New York, scenically beautiful, with a long history of economic distress. On the shores of Lake Champlain, thirty miles south of the Canadian border, it has one of the finest sand beaches in North America. It housed the barracks of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry Division and a paper mill, a teachers college, and little else of note. My parents opened a dress shop there in 1930, just a few months after the great crash on Wall Street, at the beginning of the Depression. Plattsburgh was composed largely of two population groups, both Catholic: the descendants of French Canadians, many of whom spoke French at home, and the Irish. Each group had its own bishop, church, and parochial schools. There was little mixing between the two communities.
Was there an Old World orientation in the family when you were growing up?
My parents thought America was paradise. They never talked about the old country. They had dark, negative feelings about their early years and never expressed an interest in returning.
They were very progressive, and not at all religious, but they were honest and ethical. Mother’s father combined the roles of rabbi and schochet. Before making their home in Plattsburgh, they had lived in towns up and down the East Coast. Wherever they went, they lasted about a year. To survive, her father surreptitiously became a conventional butcher. So he’d be butchering hogs, and it didn’t take long for the Jewish community to become upset. He would lose his position, and they would move to another town.
My parents developed few social ties in the Plattsburgh community. They worked around the clock, spending much of their time traveling to small towns in northern New York and Vermont, where they opened six additional stores to form a small chain. My mother had good business sense, and my father’s training as a tailor proved invaluable. He was an excellent window draper. His window displays were successful in drawing customers, which gave them an edge over the competition. He was a superb salesman who charmed the local farm women, to whom they supplied inexpensive and tasteful garments for their difficult figures. The stores became magnets for Canadian tourists, including prostitutes, for whom the Plattsburgh store stocked gaudy, vividly decorated dresses that resembled the Parisian bordello attire depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec in his paintings.
When they traveled to their stores, my father would drape the windows and teach the managers to display garments. While the name of most of the shops was Stollman’s, in Burlington and St. Albans, Vermont, my brother Solomon, who had earned an industrial design degree from Pratt, installed modern stores for them, with my assistance, and those were called Bernsol’s. My parents were astute merchandisers. Dad used a unit control system on flip cards that I had designed for him, which showed every item in every store, and he loved to sit at home and observe what sold in which stores. If a store manager or a saleswoman liked a particular item, and it was selling well, they would transfer these garments there from their other stores.
Where were they buying the clothes?
New York had a flourishing garment district in the West 30s. On the avenues were the higher-priced manufacturers, and my parents bought coats and suits from them. They stocked well-made, inexpensive garments. For a number of years, my parents used a resident buyer in the garment district who knew all the manufacturers. They made seasonal buying trips to New York, driving down Route 9, an eight-hour trip, and they would stay at the Hotel New Yorker, adjacent to the garment district. The manufacturers had great respect for them—my mother was a lovely woman; my dad was a gregarious, dapper individual. They were a striking couple. One day I said to them, “You’ve just become resident buyers. Print up your order book; you’re going to become the AAA Buying Service.” They did that and began to get the 6 percent commission that the resident buyer had obtained from the manufacturers. The manufacturers didn’t mind, as it was factored into their prices.
As a youth I would travel down with them once a year, making the rounds of the showrooms with them. I knew nothing about women’s fashions. But I reacted instinctively to colors and designs. Besides, the raincoat showrooms had models wearing black slips to make it easier to don and remove the coats, and they were beautiful girls. I was thirteen or fourteen, and it was mind-boggling for me.
What sort of perspective came with being the oldest of seven kids?
My parents were away a lot. Our French-Irish live-in housekeeper cooked for us and looked after the younger ones, but she had two children of her own. She was divorced, and her children were being raised by her parents. I felt a responsibility to my siblings. I was the surrogate father. The youngest was about fourteen years younger than me. I’m told that the oldest child in a family often does not marry. I had many opportunities, but I just let them go by—until I was in my forties, which is late.
As the firstborn son, did you feel particular expectations from your parents or within yourself?
Both. During the years I was growing up, I had to get a hundred in my exams. My parents never raised this subject, but somehow it was implicit that I would have to excel. I was totally absorbed in school and in every extracurricular activity. Throughout high school I did little socializing.
Were you raised with much of a Jewish orientation in the family? Did you hear Yiddish around the house?
My parents spoke Yiddish occasionally, but only to exchange their thoughts privately. The Reform synagogue had a congregation of upper-class, educated, second- and third-generation German Jews. And there was a second congregation, in the Orthodox synagogue. It was a conventional Orthodox shul, with a bimah [altar] at its eastern end and a mikvah [ritual bath] in its basement. I had my bar mitzvah service in that synagogue. These were two distinct communities: the merchant community that went to the Reform synagogue and the Orthodox Eastern European Jewish immigrants. As a twelve-year-old, I became the organist in the Reform synagogue. I wasn’t trained, and I didn’t know how to work the pedals, but I could play the keyboard. The rabbi was a gnome-like man of advanced age; he would cue me and I would play the hymn. Once, during a sermon, I mischievously pressed a pedal that emitted a squawking sound.
What kind of musical education did you have in Plattsburgh?
I had weekly piano lessons from the age of seven until I was thirteen. My teacher was one of three daughters and a son of the late Charles Hudson, a sea captain who had married a Chinese woman on one of his voyages. The Hudsons were tall, handsome, distinguished individuals, none of whom married, living during their later years in the shadow of the father whose memory they detested and suffering the racism that characterized popular attitudes during that era. They lived together throughout their lives in a stately, white frame house on Court Street, in which they ran the Hudson School of Music. All were highly accomplished musicians. They taught string instruments and provided cultural life to the town. They created a string ensemble that would rehearse there. The smell of rosin was pungent in the living room when I came for my piano lessons. Their parlor was full of Chinese screens and art objects, which their father had collected in his travels. The environment had a profound influence on my outlook regarding music.
How old were you when the family moved to New York? Did the change affect you much?
When I was sixteen, my parents bought a house in Forest Hills, Queens, but couldn’t occupy it yet. I rented an apartment with my next younger brother, and for eight months we attended Forest Hills High School, living on our own. The year was 1945.
While I was a high school student in Plattsburgh, trains would come up from New York City with two daily newspapers: the New York Post, which was a very different New York Post from the Rupert Murdoch one of today, and PM, the radical left newspaper. I observed