"They met by accident. Kurt and Alexander, my grandfather, were walking out of their store at lunchtime, and they saw a woman trapped between two electric cars, or electric streetcars, down the road from where they were working, and she was…

"[Alexander Jacobi, my paternal grandfather,] was born in a small town in what was then Prussia called Schönlanke. It’s now Trzcianka in Poland. I don’t know that much about what his family life was about. I know that he had an older brother…

"My father was born in December of 1924 in Berlin. They were fairly well-off economically. He was one of two children. He was the older of the two. His sister, Ruth, was born a couple years later. My grandfather was a leather maker-- at…

"As far as I can tell from the genealogy records, [my mother's] family came from Holland in the mid-1850s and settled in the central London area in the Jewish district. My [maternal] grandfather was a cigar maker and also worked with…

"[My mother] was born in 1927 in London, in Stoke Newington, and, you know, it was between the two wars, and times were tough. And they lived in a multilevel series of flats in Stoke Newington. In fact, the same apartment that she lived in, my…

"I was studying Civics in high school, and the word came out that President Roosevelt was at Warm Springs, and he was coming across Pine Mountain to Highway 27 and was going to Fort Bennett. So we turned our school bus up to the top of the…

"I received a scholarship from the Callaway Foundation. We called them work scholarships. If you qualified for the scholarship and received the scholarship, you would also receive a job so that when you were not in school, you could work three…

"I had all kinds of quick get-rich schemes, but because I was so interested in civil engineering and in the energy that was in all the little streams that was going across the farms, I built a paddle wheel. That paddle wheel had five blades on…

"My mother said, 'I know this wonderful, wonderful school, and the girls all have all these toys to play with and each other, and nobody’s ever lonesome, and there's a big bedroom, and there’ll be thirty beds up there, and there’ll be…

"My dad's name was Charles, my mother's name was Elsie, but they divorced in 1932...It was such a small deal. I didn't know they were divorced. My mother never told me. My dad never told me. And I found out when I was thirteen…