"My mother, may she rest in peace, always told me I was a bum and I’d ask why I was a bum, and she’d say, 'Because you are 33 and you are not married.' I reunited with my father in 1961. He never came to this country. He stayed in…

"I went to work for a textile company. The sales manager was a very nice man by the name of Frank Murphy, may he rest in peace. In those days I was known as Andy, I tried to become as Americanized as much as possible. My nickname in the NBA was…

"NYU in those days was a powerhouse; we were one of the strongest teams in the country. Before the NCAA it was the NITs (National Invitation Tournament). We won the NIT three years in a row. I am going to throw names at you that most of the time…

"My roommate was arguably the best basketball player who ever played the game. His name was Wilt Chamberlain. Even though the team was owned by a Jewish man, our traveling secretary, shall I say, was not exactly a big fan of Jews or blacks. I…

"While I was in Washington, since all of us in the ceremonial guard were six foot and over, we formed a basketball team. We went around and played other military places, some schools, and things like that. One night we were playing somewhere--…

"I get my orders to report to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, to be with the Marine Corps. They don’t have their own medical personnel. So us as Navy corpsmen are stationed with the Marines and take care of them... I wound up with the…

"Three or four days before I was ready to graduate from basic training, an officer and our company commander, who was a chief petty officer, came walking through the barracks, and they said, 'Everybody six foot and over stand in front of…

"Two weeks before I was ready to graduate high school, I got into serious trouble; I was taken before a judge and given two choices: enlist in the military or go to jail. Well, I didn’t know what the military was all about, but I had a pretty…

"We had a very small apartment in the section of New York called Sunnyside in Queens. Where [my mother] worked, the textile company was in Manhattan, so she would leave the house at 7 or 7:15 in the morning, catch the subway which was a block…

"On August 7, 1951, we boarded a very small former troop ship, which used to bring troops from the United States to Europe, the S.S. General Sturgis. When we boarded the ship, at eleven years old I was a pretty big kid, and they decided that I…