So dad packed us all up into a station wagon and set off for the west. Aaron was 4, I was 6 and Janette was 9. Out of boredom Janette started teaching me from her 3rd grade books and that’s when I think I started to develop intellectually. We sang on the trip, played auto car games, got restless and argued, not too much though. We were raised with the affirmation “chiildren should be seen and not heard”.

I specifically remember a long stopover in Phoenix, AZ. We stayed in a motel and I have no idea what my dad did during this time. I remember my parents telling us we had to be nice to a man in one of the motel rooms because he was an old school comedian. I also remember a lot of car trouble. We got stuck in the hot desert and this very nice man stopped to help us. It turned out he was a preacher who had our same last name. We thought that was funny because we were Jewish.

I may have been born Jewish, but up to that time I had no idea what that meant. I did know what crimes Hitler committed against humanity. I did know that we ate especially well on Jewish holidays. But going to temple was not in my parents, nor did they think their children needed to go. At least until it was time to get my brother Bar Mitzvahed.

We finally got to California and rented an apartment in Toluca Lake. My mother enrolled us in school and after being tested, they couldn’t decide if I belonged in kindergarten or 1st grade. So they compromised and I spent 1/2 the day in each grade. That was strange. It was hard to make friends splitting my time like that. But my sister and brother were my best friends and the 3 of us shared one bedroom.

Talking about money seemed to pop up every day now. My father had difficulty finding a job and ended up delivering vending machines, which didn’t pay well. We children never asked for anything because an argument from our parents would always be the end result. We were seen and tried not to be heard.

The apartment complex had a pool and I learned how to swim. “A natural born fish” my mother would say. We spent a lot of time in that pool. There were no video games. There were only a handful of television channels. Another big outing was all of us kids and some of our friends would get into the back of my dad’s pickup truck and he’d take us to a local ice cream parlor shouting “I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream!”

I don’t think we lasted 9 months in California. I do remember packing up boxes all day and sneaking out at night to pack up the U-Haul. The one thing that struck me as really odd, my father didn’t pack one box or lift one box out to the car. I remember the four of us (including mother) would mumble under our breaths how lazy he was. We were “sneaking” out because the rent had not been paid.

That’s when I started to realize that my parents had children to make their life easier.