As I already mentioned, when I was seven we moved. It was after the war and we moved to Miami Beach where I lived for five years in the Roosevelt Hotel on 13th and Pennsylvania Avenue, dad and his brother leased that hotel and things seemed to go well for about a year. I lived there until I was 12 years old. but eventually there were disagreements and some of it caused by my mother, who I doubt would approve of anyone my father partnered with, but especially his brother. It was difficult trying to keep the old building repaired and full of guests and the arguments were about management, gambling, money and who did more. His brother Morris liked to gamble and I think he enjoyed life more than my father who was too busy working to stop and smell the roses. Besides mother wouldn't let him

Dad was not much of a thinker either but he was a hell of a worker. He had to be since he crawled and scraped his way up out of poverty. He may not have thought much about philosophy or economics or politics and I doubt that he knew very much about Hegel, Marx, Spinoza or Erich Fromm, but he like everyone else was looking for answers to life in his own way and he turned away from religion and to the mystics. He had the soul of a flower-child and it was only the 50s. He turned east. That was where he looked for his answer to the mysteries.

Meanwhile, the brothers, Morris and Al, supplemented the room rents at the hotel with whatever extra they could make from gambling in a back room, where they took bets on horse and dogs and guests could play cards for money, which then could get them all arrested. Dad was a bookie and for his first five years in Florida, it paid his rent on the lease.

There were about 200 rooms in the hotel and we had some really great times there. And even as a youngster, living in the hotel, I worked hard, mostly painting or cleaning up after guests and whatever else dad could find for me to do. It was an obligation families expected then, for their kids to do whatever they were needed to do to help the family survive. I didn't have much time to goof off and not much time for sports then. After school I cleaned up stinking hotel rooms and took out somebody else's smelly garbage.

At the hotel I really hated cleaning out the garbage room in the alley which was always one of the chores that I disliked the most because it smelled so bad and what kid likes garbage? Nobody likes garbage. I also didn't care much for cleaning up the rooms after a guest moved out too and they always were a mess and they always smelled bad too and it seems I was always smelling cabbage cooking on someone's hotplate.

It was an old hotel and something was always breaking down and sometimes I had to fix them and at ten I was learning how to do those things, which is probably why I dislike it so much today and rarely fix anything around my house.

And something out of ordinary was always happening, like the hurricane that knocked out all the sky lights and everyone huddling together in the lobby until the storm had passed and there were no lights and in the dark we all sang songs. Or the time my dad saved that kid from falling off the roof when the kid crawled out on the roof of the hotel and dad had to rescue him. There was a solarium on the roof where guests could go to sun themselves and sometimes female guests wanted a complete tan and those were times when I would also sneak out on the roof.

But when pop saved the kid he was my hero and everyone else's too. The kid teetered on the edge of the roof and dad grabbed him up before he could fall.

And,I never met any man who could work as hard as he did. He worked hard and he played hard. When I was that young he also seemed like the smartest man in the world. I try to remember that whenever I get too critical of him now.

He would take me and my brother fishing and we'd remove man hole covers on the bridge and climb down a steep ladder to fish in the channel under the Haulover bridge because that is where the best fishing was. And, he would take me deep sea fishing. I had a good time with him and we did a lot of father and son things. That is a memory I will also always cherish. Sometimes it is hard for me to see that part of him. Today he is a lot older and he has changed. But in his 90s he is still spry and a better man than most. This is a picture of my brother, Bob and the fish he caught fishing with dad.

Dad also had a "cat-o-nine tails" strap which someone gave to him, maybe as a joke, and I can't really remember him using it on us, but the threat was there. It was enough. He did discipline us but like my kids, but my brother and I were always more afraid of mom who merely had to raise her voice to us which was intimidating enough.

As a kid I enjoy going down to the beach which was on a few blocks from the hotel. I can remember watching the army conduct one of their beach landing exercises there. That had to be good duty. Miami Beach was always an exiting place to be.

When I skipped school, when I was too bored to go, I went to the beach or I would go to Flamingo Park where I would always sit under a palm tree and read. Or I would go to the 5th street gym, where all the famous fighters came to train, and I'd watch them spar. In those days it was very safe to hitch hike up and down the beach and kids often got around that way, or I would ride my bike anywhere, even into Miami and up Flagler St. where the neat store were, including one I really liked, a magic shop. I had a job once working with a magician and that was fun.

I really enjoyed the parties and movies at the hotel and a friend of the family, Sam Moss, would show movies to the guests, which several of the hotels did in those days. They were 16mm, which was standard then. Sam would set up his projector and screen on the front patio and I remember seeing Pathe News, on the little screen. Movie theaters always also showed the latest news. There was no television in those days. The schedule of movies at the hotel was always on a blackboard in the lobby.

We didn't have any television when I lived at the hotel so there was more interaction and people actually talked to each other. There were always card games and games organized by my father for the guests. Sometimes there were plays and skits put on by the guests and sometimes mock weddings.

There was no TV, but I loved my radio and would sit for hours listening to it. I remember the famous Joe Lewis fight when I was a kid and some of the radio shows. I would get up early (before school) just so I could listen to these radio soap operas. When I was very young I thought the voices in the radio came from people who lived inside the radio.

My playground was the alley behind the hotel where I played stick ball and on the roof of the hotel was a boxing ring.

Then dad also bought me some boxing gloves and put a ring and punching bag on the roof where he taught me how to box and defend myself from bullies. I remember those stinging jabs to the face but soon learned how to duck and punch back and how to take that sting and shake it off like sweat.

Some kid much older than I was once hit me over the head with a stick because he said I was Jewish. That happened in N.J. and I was only seven at the time. I still have the scar and my father wanted me to be able to defend myself. I did and it seemed like I was always trying to prove myself, that I was stronger or faster, and nobody could mess with me. I was obsessing and that behavior was why I was sent to military school.

I wasn't passive. I fought back. The struggle against bigotry still goes on. And I'm not the only one fighting back.

When I was twelve or thirteen I went into a drugstore in Miami Beach, with a friend of mine who was black.. There were no blacks in school on Miami Beach when I lived there in the 40s. And in the 50s everything was segregated. We only wanted a coke and they served me, but they refused to serve my friend. They offered to give him his coke in the kitchen, but not in the store. We took our cokes outside and then we threw them at the store and ran.

Once when my father tried to stay at a cabana at a hotel in Bal Harbor the hotel clerk told us, "No Jews were allowed." There were a lot of restricted hotels then. Both those two experiences left an indelible impression on me about bigotry and I've been fighting that stupid attitude all my life. Any kind of bigotry deeply offends me.

After the hotel business, my father bought a motel in Surfside, Florida (between Miami Beach and Bal Harbor) and he also opened a camera shop there, which was called The "FotoFair". That's where I learned about photography and acquired a couple of Speed Graphics (4X5s and smaller) and an Argus 35mm. I got a job at Pilkinton Studios and free lanced taking pictures of weddings, bas and bar mitzvahs, and other events. Even at 12 and 13 I didn't have time to play much after school because I worked most of the time. But any leisure time I did have was spent on the beach, boating, or ham radio. In this picture I'm about 17 and I think it was on one of my breaks from military school...

When I was seven I sold newspapers and when dad bought the hotel I worked there. When dad sold the hotel, I worked in a grocery store and then working for Pilkington Studios as one of their youngest photographers where my assignments included working in the darkroom and taking pictures at parties, weddings and Bar and Bas Mitzvahs. And then I worked for a magician and then I joined the army.

Sam took me for a ride in a Piper Cub airplane when I was only 13 and he also sparked my interested in Ham Radio. Because of Sam, I obtained my amateur radio license when I was only fourteen years old. And being a ham operator in those days was a lot of fun for me. I built most of my equipment with vacumn tubes and loading coils and just talking to someone across the "big pond" in Europe was an exciting adventure.

I stayed active in ham radio for over 40 years and finally sold my last ham "set" so I could buy a better computer, which in the 80s wasn't cheap. It was an IBM XT. Before then I built my own and had several Commodore computers, but nothing like the new customized XT, a DOS machine which enabled me to get on the internet before anyone knew there was a net in 1982. And we are in our infancy with computers too (even in 2004)

Someday memory won't be based on hard drives like they are now but on chemical molecular technology and there won't be any need for defragmentation because they'll contain all the knowledge we ever accumulated, just like our DNA.