The Tree Bears Fruit
7
claim: "What a rich country this is. Even the animals are in
mass production here!"
Twenty miles removed from the "nationality islands" of
New York, I grew up much as any American boy. I joined the
Boy Scouts and the Order of DeMolay. I attended church, I
fought with school bullies, I earned spending money by selling
subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies' Home
Journal. The first week after our arrival, I was enrolled in the
third grade of the Mineola grammar school, and never failed
a course until I reached algebra. I made the track, football,
baseball, and debating teams, and spoke enthusiastically on
brotherhood and Americanism.
In this wholesome, small-town atmosphere (Mineola's population was then 5,600) I lived at peace with Protestant,
Catholic, and Jew; Democrat and Republican; Anglo-Saxon,
old-line American, and European. Our family was accepted
into this all-American community. Native-born Americans
were my playmates and my teachers from the outset.
These were the main influences upon me in my youth, and
this the environment in which I was molded as an American.
My idealism—my conception of freedom, democracy, tolerance, the "American Way"—was shaped in this atmosphere
for eleven idyllic years, till the end of my college days. The
Communists would disdainfully call this bourgeois. But such
is my background in the land of my adoption. By November
1926 my parents had become American citizens. We celebrated with a feast the eating of which lasted four hours.
Today, Father is eight years past the three score and ten
mark, and still carries on a small import-export business.
Patriarch of the household, he has become an excellent cook,
especially of difficult-to-make, easy-to-eat Armenian pastries.
Mother, while she'll never admit it, is approaching the same
milestone, and still docs her own housework. But despite that
honorable mark, she's still fond of hats made from the multicolored plumage shed by the family parrot. She has been collecting and distributing Polly's feathers for twenty-five years.