Oral History Interview with Robert Schulman, June 25, 2007, Part 1

O. LEONARD PRESS: Where we start is where you can remember, as far back as you can remember. We’re going to start with, with where you, where you derived from.

ROBERT SCHULMAN: Uh-huh.

PRESS: We want to know your roots. We, I want to know. This is my project. I want to know the roots.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: One of the—Terry did me, by the way.

SCHULMAN: Ah.

PRESS: So, I’ve had the experience from the other side.

SCHULMAN: Well, that’s important.

PRESS: And I got a lot of good ideas from him— SCHULMAN: Good.

PRESS: Of things to ask. But start out with, I want, I want to find out how you got here, which means— SCHULMAN: How I got into the world?

PRESS: How far back do you know?

SCHULMAN: Romania.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: If I can interject a fascinating thing? Last win— PRESS: That’s what this is for. Inject. Interject. Right.

SCHULMAN: Oh. 1:00[laughs] Well, I will tell you that I will interject again.

PRESS: Don’t have a flashback.

SCHULMAN: There’s a much praised movie made by a Romanian director which was the number one choice at the Cannes festival. It details what happened in a small village in Romania after the long-time dictator, Ceausescu was seized and murdered. And it takes place in my father’s village. Isn’t that incredible? Vaslui. [laughs] When I was growing up, I thought Vaslui, you know, there’s, there’s George and then Vaslui. Anyway, and Louise and I were there, and, before, when Ceausescu was still in power and we were under surveillance by this spy, this young woman. Anyway, [laughs] 2:00we didn’t find any roots from my father, but anyway, that—so, at some time— PRESS: How do you know about them then?

SCHULMAN: Oh, we didn’t find any, but I knew that he c-, came from Vaslui and he and my mother met in New York, not in Romania. I knew vaguely that she came from another village. It was not until our r-, until our rented Dacia, we came to this fork in the road, way out in rural Moldavia. It was a sign pointing to my father’s village, Vaslui, and thirty-five kilometers away, to Berlat my mother’s village. Yeah.

PRESS: But they did not meet until— SCHULMAN: Until both of them were in New York. Yes. And they, you know, my mother died when I was seven. So, I never 3:00really—they told—well, anyway. [Laughs] Well, my, my mother died when I was seven, so that I really did not get to hear much from her of her background. And unfortunately, neither of them taught me any Romanian. So, seventy years later when my wife and I went to Romania looking for their roots, we were dependent on this government person whom we’d hired as a guide to take us out in our rented car into the countryside. I’d made the mistake of calling the Romanian embassy in Washington, knowing that we were going to have some help. And it was a mistake because I told them that I was a newsman. This is what produced us under surveillance. We were met at the station in Bucharest by this young woman. And we knew we were going to have a guide, but not 4:00right at the station. And she introduced herself to us as a nuclear engineering student on leave during the summer and working as a guide. The reasons, the reasons that we came to know that she had us under official surveillance was, to give you one instance, I had made requests to interview the head of the state controlled Romanian version of the Associated Press and the head of the Romanian television network who had been identified to me as Romania’s Walter Cronkite. And the day that I was due to meet with this man in television—and you were not allowed to take pictures, even of the exterior of the building—she said goodbye to us at noon. She was not going to see us. 5:00But when we got to the television office that afternoon, guess who was there. And he, he spoke not a word of English. Marvelous, genial human being: I’d like to know what happened to him. He spoke not a word of English and, of course, I couldn’t even say, “Hello” in Romanian. So, we went back and forth through this young woman, and it was like a Marx brothers’ movie. I would ask him a rather complex question. She would repeat it. He would give a long answer. And she would say, “He says, ‘Yes.’” [laughter] And in my father’s hometown, Vaslui, which is indicated then right where we are today, in the, in the summer of 2007, when there’s a much praised, for the first time, 6:00Romanian movie that won the top award at the Cannes Festival. It was produced in the village where my father grew up. I knew nothing of that. But when we got there, talking about the surveillance aspect of our experience and my parents because my mother also, as I mentioned, came from Romania from a nearby village but I didn’t know that until we got there. She and my father did not meet until they got to New York. When we got to Vaslui, it had been urban renewaled.

PRESS: What year was this when you were in Vaslui?

SCHULMAN: Nineteen eighty-s-, 1988. It was before the, I mean, Sarajevo was a—we’d, we’d gone through Yugoslavia 7:00as they say now, the former Yugoslavia, before we took a train, and that’s another story. [laughs] Because we took what was, what was represented to us as the Orient Express and we thought, well, we’d have a nice break before going into this perhaps challenging and forbidding search for parental roots. And we were in Vienna, had a lovely couple of days in Vienna and then went to the station looking for the Orient Express. It turned out to be the Aur-Rom Orient Express. It was the Communist Orient Express. Filthy cars, uncommonly dirty and comfortable drawing rooms, fans that did not work. Our porter, quote-unquote, at the end of the car, was in a little cubicle with a little hotplate on which he fixed his meals. 8:00He was filthy. It was so dirty, for twenty-four hours from Vienna to Bucharest— PRESS: You didn’t eat. [laughs] SCHULMAN: [sighs] Louise, my wife, did not even go to the bathroom for twenty-four hours. When we got to the old hotel called The Grand Hotel in Bucharest, she went into the shower totally clad and washed herself off. Halfway through, when we were crossing, we locked our stateroom. There were tiny berths, but we thought we were okay. Middle of the night, the locked door opened. Two Romanian border guards with guns drawn got me out of bed, took all our bags out from underneath, went through them, found a book—I happened to be reading a book by Norman Mailer. “What is this?” one of them said, [laughs] holding up this book. I explained 9:00[ ] Norman Mailer to the man. He totally understood and sympathized, you understand. They said, “How much money are you going to change?” One o’clock in the morning. How, how did we know what kind of money. Finally, they let us go and we entered Romania. I mean, the whole thing was bizarre. And then we were met at the station by this little spy who was with us throughout our entire week there. Anyway, that was Romania. There were other—but, but what started me on this rant was my quest. My father was a— [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] SCHULMAN: And his name varied. It was Solomon Schulman, Sam Schulman. 10:00He was orphaned early in this village of Vaslui, which was then a tiny hamlet. I don’t know how many Jews lived there. Never could discover this. But he was orphaned early and raised by his Orthodox grandparents. In his later years, he told me that, that he’d always wanted to be a writer. But that was no future for a young Jew. Now, how he got himself to a gymnasium, a high school in the nearby city of Iasi, and how he got from there with technical ability which I never have developed, mathematics and drawing and so on. He got himself to Dramstock, Germany and was trained as an electrical engineer and then got an advanced degree 11:00in Zurich, Switzerland before he went to the U.S., to New York. But with not a word, unfortunately, I never went into this with him, and it’s, it’s still a mystery to me how he managed this. He was sandy haired. He was blue-eyed. He, he did to me, never looked Jewish.

PRESS: Did he, did he practice that profession?

SCHULMAN: Electrical engineering—oh, did he practice it? It was a depression. It was turn of the century, 1900.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: He could not find work at first in New York. He literally bummed his way on a freight train as far west as Salt Lake City 12:00where he worked for a while in the salt mine. You know, just like something out of a— [laughs] PRESS: Fiction, for sure.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Decided that that was not his bag, so he found his way back to New York and got work as a meter reader and then learned enough lan-, English by then that he was reading the New York Times, and there was an advertisement by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. They were building their Schuykill skyscraper at Twenty-third and Madison, Madison Square, in New York City. And they were going to provide their own power, and they were creating an electrical department, and they were advertising for an engineer. He applied. He was hired. And he worked there for the next forty years. 13:00He took early retirement forty years later. Why? And I’m getting ahead of the story, but because he met my mother in New York in 1915, I guess. She had her own rather intriguing background because her oldest sister who became known as Romany Marie, an epical character in the history of New York’s Greenwich Village, who in 1914, at the behest of a whole bunch of hungry admirers who were eating her and her family out of house and home, they suggested with some embarrassment, maybe it was time for them to be able to pay her when they could, and so they collected a hundred and fifty dollars and got her to rent a 14:00place in Greenwich Village, three flights up on Christopher Street. To get to the john, you had to go back down three flights to a Chick Sale. That was Romany Marie who developed a, I’ve done a recent book about this remarkable woman and her life. She went to work in a sweatshop in the Lower East Side, as did so many immigrants, and brought over her sisters, her three sisters, including my mother, and their mother, who was herself an extraordinary character. I know everybody says, “We’ve got extraordinary characters,” [laughs] but this woman was a healer and a fantastic cook. She used herbs and all kinds of other condiments out of a, an early precursor of organic foods. And she had a, she had a bear that would jump on people when their backs were bad, a performing bear. [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] SCHULMAN: Anyway, my mother— 15:00PRESS: [ ] SCHULMAN: My mother, Rebecca was the, one of these three sisters and a little boy who came over in the, that first decade of the twentieth century. And met my father, working for the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. They were deeply involved, as was Marie—Marie being a kind of polarizing point because she’d been an usher anarchist and at Emma Goldman’s meetings. And my father and my mother were part of that circle. Hugely antiwar, philosophical anarchists, although Emma Goldman’s boyfriend was responsible for a bombing. Of course devoted to free love 16:00and, and no religion, and all of those extraordinary challenging movements. And when my mother and father were married, and my father later told me this: she was warned that she had a weak heart, as they used to call it, and that it would be a jeopardy for her to have a child. They went ahead and had me. And then when I was seven years old, my mother was taken to the hospital and died of a bad heart. And I do remember my father taking me to the, it was a big ward, and past many, many beds to where my mother was, and she hugging me 17:00and I had no idea that— PRESS: How old was she then?

SCHULMAN: She was 32. And it was Halloween. Well, no. No. A few days later. We were living by then in the Bronx, across from a park, Crotona Park, named after a local Indian tribe. Not a signi-, not a casino tribe, by the way. And in a, in a, what in the Lower East Side, in the village, would be called a tenement, but where we were, across from Crotona Park, it was not a tenement, it was an apartment. But it was up a dark stair. We lived one flight up and there was a dumbwaiter where the iceman who brought the blocks of ice would leave them downstairs and then you’d pull up the, pull up the dumbwaiter and then you’d also, when the milkman 18:00came with his horse and wagon and he’d put the bottle of milk and take the old bottles out, pull up the dumbwaiter. Anyway, two or three days after I was taken to see my mother—my father’s way of life was to get up early in the morning and walk up what seemed to me to be a large hill. In more recent years, I’ve gone back, and it was hardly a hill at all. You know how it is. And he would walk up that hill and down another hill on the other side of the slope to catch the subway to 174th and go downtown to the Madison Square. And he bought on his way the New York Times. All of his colleagues knew what Sam Schulman wanted during the day. 19:00They would give to him their copies of the other seven or eight daily newspapers: the Sun, the World, the Telegram, the Post, the Daily News, the Graphic, the Mirror—those were the tabloids. And Sam Schulman, when he came back in the evenings, and I could see him walking over the crest of that hill, his arms absolutely laden with these grubby newspapers. Now that may have had an influence in my later life. Who knows. [laughs] But that day, it was three o’clock in the afternoon, and here he was coming over the hill. I thought, Gee, what’s Pop doing? As I said, I was seven. And he did not have the newspapers with him. And he came 20:00down to the stoop. Every apartment house had a marvelous stoop on either side of the steps where kids could sit or the women and the men could sit and gossip. And he said to me, and he hugged me, he said, “Your mama died.” And he took me upstairs to our apartment and, what I knew was that it was Halloween. And was I going to get my mask. So, this man, having just lost, took me by the hand and we went downstairs, and we passed through a bunch of kids on either side of the stoop who had already gotten the word. And my feeling was of deep embarrassment. You know, everybody knows. And he took me up 21:00a block and a half around to the nearest candy store and news station, where he bought me a Halloween mask. Ah. Well, little dramas go by the wayside. At any rate, it was because of that situation plus the, the simple fact that I was an only child that I became this man’s life. Truly, literally. During, in, in, well, I got out of high school and it was time to go to, I went to the NYU campus in the Bronx which no longer exists. Hard by, hard by the original Hall of Fame, which is still there. A marvelous semi-circular stone arcade containing busts 22:00of all the then great Americans. The Hall of Fame. And I was not asked to turn a hand at work. Somehow, and he used to get his, you know, second-hand suits from some warehouse downtown. He sent me to NYU and when I graduated, and I’ll, I have to digress. Maybe I will in a moment about how I happened to go not to medical school, but to the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. He paid for that. And I accepted it. This was so, so totally involving a feeling on his part. And my stepmother—after my mother’s death, he brought 23:00in a woman whom I scarcely remember and she lasted a week or two and somehow there was no compatibility. So then he found a woman recently immigrated from Odessa, Celia Linetsky, Celia Linet, her name. And he met her through Russian friends. And she came to take care of me. And for the next forty years, she was my stepmother.

PRESS: He married her.

SCHULMAN: Well, PRESS: or whatever SCHULMAN: . . at some point.

PRESS: Yeah.

SCHULMAN: At some point.

PRESS: Was she okay?

SCHULMAN: Fantastically devoted. Incredibly devoted. So much so that on occasion, in 1936 when getting out of NYU—’37, excuse me—graduating from Columbia 24:00Graduate School of Journalism, I sent letters to newspapers all over the country. It was not until three days after it arrived, the telegram from the Post Dispatch in St. Louis, offering me a job, that my stepmother, Celia, persuaded my father to show me that telegram. Yes.

PRESS: He didn’t want you to leave.

SCHULMAN: He didn’t want me to leave. And I did go to the Post Dispatch and a year later—to St. Louis—and a year later was when my father took early retirement with his badge from the Metropolitan, each year, each decade, getting first a gold thing, then a diamond, and so on. He and my stepmother moved from New York to St. Louis to be near me. [INTERRUPTION—TAPE STOPS] SCHULMAN: Later, 25:00in 1942, when, details that I’ll maybe touch upon later, I was in Fresno, California, and the Air Force had accepted to Officer Candidate School in Miami Beach. They left St. Louis and moved to Miami Beach, although I was there for only 90 days, to be there for who knows. It was [ ].

PRESS: They did return then?

SCHULMAN: Oh, yes. Well, yes, it was, he took early— PRESS: He, he, you keep saying early retirement, but he worked for forty years— SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: And he had a, and he had an education already, and he was a 26:00young man when he came to this country.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: So, he, he had to be sixty-five or so.

SCHULMAN: Oh, six-, fifty, that’s right.

PRESS: Sixty.

SCHULMAN: Sixty. Yes. No more than that. No more than that. And they remained, during, after I left and went off to Special Services School and then to two years in Labrador and elsewhere—for four years in World War II, they remained for the rest of their lives in Miami. Yes. And that was not ideal either because my life, when it, after, I went back to St. Louis, and thereby hangs a tale or three. [laughs] And then went to Chicago was when I joined Time and Life, and then I went to Seattle, and then came 27:00to Louisville, Kentucky so that the occasions to be as close to my father and mother as really circumstances and devotion demanded was very difficult. So, anyway, those are some of the familial beginnings.

PRESS: Your upbringing as a child of immigrants was probably less than typical from what, from what you’ve described.

SCHULMAN: [laughs] Very.

PRESS: Not in, not in terms of, maybe of affection, but of concentrated affection, perhaps.

SCHULMAN: Indeed. Indeed. And, you know, when I, I remember one time there in the neighborhood in the Bronx, because, as I grew older, into high school age, we moved to other locations in, in the borough of the Bronx. And then, finally, 28:00it, in the last years in New York, before I left for St. Louis, we lived in Manhattan, right off Central Park West. Thirteen West 106th Street. [laughs] It was in, again, in apartment house. And it was— PRESS: Up-, Upper, still was [ ]— SCHULMAN: Well, but not all that expensive at that point. Hundred and sixth.

PRESS: Just below Harlem?

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. And in, in later years, I mean, I went back in the ’60s, to look and it, it of course had become almost totally Black and Hispanic. Now, maybe by now—I’ve not been back lately. I should go look. But my— PRESS: May be million dollar condos.

SCHULMAN: My home, my home on Crotona Park, those houses are now gone and there’s a community center serving primarily African-American and Hispanics. 29:00Right across the street from that park, which has got more concrete in it than I could ever imagine. [laughs] But anyway— PRESS: [ ] SCHULMAN: Your question about upbringing. It, it— PRESS: You, you went to college. He would, he would have been sending you to college during the Depression, then.

SCHULMAN: Oh, very much so. The deep Depression PRESS: The early days of the Depression— SCHULMAN: College—I went from NYU from ’32 to ’36.

PRESS: Wow.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: That was it.

SCHULMAN: He had, he had nothing by— PRESS: You had—that was another thing that wasn’t quite typical either. He apparently had a steady income throughout that entire time.

SCHULMAN: That is correct. And he, and he marshaled whatever he had. It was not magnificent by any means. And growing up in those early days in the Bronx, I remember that the way we had an early radio was that he collected the battery 30:00[laughs] with acid to put into the battery to keep it going, and components and the big horn. And you know, we, we had an old Victrola, but we had dozens and dozens of course of RCA and Victor records, Caruso and what not, [laughs] and lots of books. He remained a voracious reader. I was surrounded and, and pushed. And on one occasion, I got into a fight with a neighbor. His, I know his first name was Bummy. And Bummy really walloped me and got me a bloody nose. And I went home with a bloody nose. Guess what? Sam Schulman took me and went directly to this kid and his parents. “How dare he have beaten up on Bobby!” you know. [laughs] How did I, how did man-, how did I manage to come out with that? With any kind of independence or character, and not to be subservient? 31:00I don’t know. Maybe that’s what I am. [laughs] PRESS: Tell me a little bit about the community you— SCHULMAN: Grew up in?

PRESS: You remember of that. Was it, was it a, a lively Romanian—I mean, was it, was it— SCHULMAN: Was it lively? Oh, immense— PRESS: No, no. I say, was it lively, an ethnic Romanian or Jewish neighborhood?

SCHULMAN: It was heavily Jewish, bordered by Italian.

PRESS: Was it the Bronx version of Orchard Street in New York?

SCHULMAN: Well, and, slightly upper income. Slightly upper income.

PRESS: Okay.

SCHULMAN: And there were no pushcarts on Crotona Avenue. [laughs] PRESS: Right. Right.

SCHULMAN: My father and mother’s friends were members, active members and leaders of the Socialist Party. The Socialist Party, I should hasten to add, not really known despite the huge volumes 32:00of stuff that have been written. The members of the Socialist Party were the most intense and knowing anti-Communists for reasons, in terms of my own student life that I can elaborate on. And I remember in the adjoining larger apartment house, Sam DeWitt was a Metropolitan, a New York leader in the Socialist Party. The Jewish kids around the block, up the block and so on, all went in the afternoons to Hebrew School. The word is Cheder. Not Bobby Schulman. Bobby Schulman stayed at home, practiced the fiddle, read detective stories, and had a totally 33:00different life because one of the, part of the ethos, part of the general attitude of my parents and their friends with whom they dealt was that all organized religion—they didn’t believe it was the opiate of the masses, in the Leninian and Marxian terms. They did believe that it’s criminalities throughout the centuries outweighed the benefits. So, but this was a—you know how that goes—it was a little tough for me as a kid— PRESS: Sure.

SCHULMAN: Because it set me apart.

PRESS: Sure.

SCHULMAN: So much so, so much so that when I was twelve or thirteen, the Miller, twins up the block—I’m pointing up the hill—they lived up the hill—were sent to camp. And I came, “Why 34:00can’t I go to camp?” They were sent, as it turns out, to a YMHA—Young Men’s Hebrew Association—camp. Well, at first my father and mother sent me to a Socialist camp called, and I, you know, I picked up because my father and mother used to talk a good deal in Yiddish. The camp they sent me to was called Nisht, Nishtgedeiget— PRESS: Nishtgedeiget.

SCHULMAN: Which “Don’t,” means “Don’t Forget.” [laughs] They put me—doesn’t it? Nisht gedeyget?

PRESS: Don’t worry.

SCHULMAN: Don’t—oh, don’t worry.

PRESS: Not to worry. Not to worry.

SCHULMAN: Not to worry. It was already late in the season and they put me in a kitchen all by myself. And I heard noises at night and so on. And I was crying. And so they called. They said, “You got to come get Bobby.” So what did they do? 35:00They arranged to send me to where the twins were, the YMHA camp. What happens the first morning of breakfast? You got to say grace. Grace? I didn’t know Grace from, from Alice. [laughs] I, I remembered the opening lines of it by rote. Baruch atah Adonai Eloheinu Melech Haolam, and so on. I forgot the rest of it. And I managed that way for that summer. And you know, those kids didn’t read, they didn’t read Eugene Debs, let alone Dostoyevsky, you know.

PRESS: But you did.

SCHULMAN: I did.

PRESS: You, you, answered another question. Apparently your father and your, your mother and then his wife, did not talk Romanian.

SCHULMAN: No. No.

PRESS: They did talk Yiddish.

SCHULMAN: Yes, they mixed their English with Yiddish. Yes.

PRESS: But you did not have a religious—you didn’t go to—you did go to Cheder, 36:00you said? You did go to Cheder?

SCHULMAN: Oh, no! Heavens, no.

PRESS: So, so, you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t have to, you weren’t, you weren’t Bar Mitzvahed. You were— SCHULMAN: No. And I certainly wasn’t—I was never—no. I’m— PRESS: You had no religious training whatsoever.

SCHULMAN: I haven’t been immersed either. [laughs] PRESS: Well— SCHULMAN: No religious training. But I have always maintained by whatever accumulation of environmental and nurturing and the environment and so on. I, I, I count myself religious to the extent that there, there is an order and a pattern in the universe. Nothing is accidental. Where I differ in my own religion from organized religions, like so many others who do not go with organized religion, is to identify the pattern. For me, it is nature.

PRESS: A pantheist. 37:00SCHULMAN: Yes. Exactly so. I don’t mind that label. But, you know, you can still have and be aware of the virtues and, and the values of compassion and— PRESS: You’re talking to somebody who believes that religion is fine until it organizes.

SCHULMAN: Yes, precisely, yes. Exactly so. Yes. You know there was a line here, “Don’t forget to forgive, but also, don’t forget.” [laughs] PRESS: But this, this meant you were always a little bit of a, of a pariah in, in—not, not in the religious sense [laughs], but— SCHULMAN: Well, and that so-, social— PRESS: But in the sense of being differentness, of differentness— SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: From, from the others.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. In fact, in my teenaged years, again, 38:00somehow economically, I never could understand exc-, except that the things in Rock-, in the Rockaways on Long Island,--we would go for a month or two to the beach to spend the summer in some kind of shanty and my father would schlep, would commute on the subways, you know—what a hideous task—everyday, while I went out and got blistered in the sun and learned to swim in the depths and whatnot. And as a teenager, it was my habit on Friday and Saturday nights with a buddy or two, we had a portable ladder. We would take it out on the boardwalk. We would mount it. 39:00We had a little flag and Socialist materials and we would do, pontificate about the importance of a society for use not profit. [laughs] That was of course, I was then in high school, but even more in college, a member of the YPSLs, the Young People’s Socialist League. As significantly differentiated from the YCLs, the Young Communist League and from the middle road LID, League for Industrial Democracy. This was really segmented but wonderfully well organized society.

PRESS: There was another one I re, I’m trying to remember. I’ll remember it— SCHULMAN: National Student League.

PRESS: No, no, no. This was, 40:00it was, it had Socialist in it. Young Socialist something, which was—I was living in Jersey City, when I was in my teenaged— SCHULMAN: Ah.

PRESS: And I belonged to a social club and had that acronym.

SCHULMAN: Really? Socialist?

PRESS: Even had that—yeah. It had, it was the Socialist Club or something. But if it had any political or other significance— SCHULMAN: Ah.

PRESS: We, we weren’t aware of it. It was just—I remember there was liter-, literature around. But we did what young kids do, we partied, we— SCHULMAN: Yeah, of course.

PRESS: We hung out. We hung out together. But— SCHULMAN: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

PRESS: It was, it was, it was founded undoubtedly by the, by whoever was [ ].

SCHULMAN: Oh, well, I’m not—because those were the deep social movements.

PRESS: Right. Yeah.

SCHULMAN: But I, I would hasten to say Len, that we were certainly not in the majority, to put it mildly. The majority of kids in my high school in the Bronx, 41:00Evander Childs and then at the Bronx campus at NYU, the majority of kids were not at all interested in political action.

PRESS: Well, neither was I or the friends who were with me.

SCHULMAN: You got it.

PRESS: I mean, it was, it was purely a neighborhood group.

SCHULMAN: A get together. A gang.

PRESS: Some, somebody had put up a name and the money I guess— SCHULMAN: [laughs] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

PRESS: So we had a club room.

SCHULMAN: But— PRESS: But it never meant anything to us in any significant.

SCHULMAN: [laughs] Now in high school, I did not, to my recollection, get involved at all with the high school paper, if there was one. Nor did I get involved in, in high school athletics. My chief recollection of Evander Childs High School was a well developed girl who used to sit ahead of me in Latin class 42:00and with whom, you know, I had dreams of conjugating. [laughs] Yeah. It, it waited, later. [laughs] PRESS: Yeah. I understand. I understand. I understand. We always have that urge to deal with.

SCHULMAN: On the other hand, I was not beyond lots of participation in the neighborhood athletics. You know, I and a number of other not quite as athletically proficient kids who were being left out by the older kids organized our own teams, and we played, we played soccer without any protective equipment, of course, you know. Got banged up knees and heads and arms and whatnot. And they had, they had, the big kids, including a red-headed bully had 43:00a team called the Crotonans. So, we formed, it was not quite precise. A, what was meant to be a, spelled backwards, the Amators. And we challenged these big guys. I have no recollection of victory. We played hardball, baseball, on one occasion warming up at a nearby field. The guy came close to me and was throwing up the ball to hit it himself and he swung the bat and hit me in the head. And all of the years since, I have a bump on the right side of my forehead. They, they dragged me to a nearby drugstore. When the pharmacist fixed me up, I probably should have, you know, been hauled away to the hospital. You can imagine, when I got home, my adoring father 44:00and mother. [laughs] Holy smoke, and “Who did this?” You see, he was ready to go get somebody. And, you know, the great old games some of which I’ve learned really existed elsewhere in the country. Ringalevio— PRESS: Oh, yes.

SCHULMAN: And Johnny on the Pony.

PRESS: Oh.

SCHULMAN: And Johnny on the Pony is where one team bends over against the tenement wall and, with head under his—so that it’s like a little bridge. Then the opposing team takes a hard run and jumps onto the backs of the, the downtrodden. [laughs] And then when everybody is on, you jump up and down three times, and that’s Johnny on the Pony. And if the ponies collapse, they’ve lost. And, of course, Hide and Seek and all of those others. Ringalevio is a lead ring and a kind of game.

PRESS: I remember the name but not the game.

SCHULMAN: Well, a pity. We ought to look up those things. Anyway, 45:00in, in, when I got to NYU, it was the time, of course, of the growth of Nazism and Italian Fascism. I remember an occasion when the NYU Heights campus was visited by a whole squadron of Mussolini’s Italian airmen, pilots. And they came marching—and we were all arrayed, we activists, on the steps of the Gould Library with signs denouncing Fascism. And they, in a squadron, organized, came marching up to within several feet of us, yelling “Duce, Duce, Duce.” Who won, I don’t, on that occasion, 46:00remains to be seen. [laughs] [sound of a train whistle] PRESS: Wait a minute. Okay.

SCHULMAN: Well, I’m pulled—and this is a, hardly in any sense of continuity, Len— PRESS: We’re not looking for continuity. We’re looking for [ ].

SCHULMAN: Well, fine. It was very meaningful to me, the, when, as I said, we were a minority. Indeed, it was during that period at NYU when I became deeply interested and involved in theatre. And there was a, then a remarkably talented director of the campus theatre who later achieved considerable fame, Henry Howard, as a director on Broadway. And he was always selecting plays of real consequence. 47:00I acted in Journey’s End, which as you know was revived this year of 2007 on Broadway.

PRESS: Didn’t know.

SCHULMAN: Didn’t last. Yes, but it was, it was a, a, a drama in the trench about World War I. And, of course, World War I then seemed so remote to us. But look, it was only eighteen years before we were in college. Nineteen eighteen, 1936, you see.

PRESS: It’s interesting you say it was remote to you.

SCHULMAN: Seemed ter—not now. But as young people, in the ’30s, oh, yes.

PRESS: I was, I was six or seven years younger than you and I remember that period for its pulp magazines about the SPADs and the air aces and— 48:00SCHULMAN: Yeah. Yes.

PRESS: And I remember having a nightmarish, recurring nightmarish experience of, of trench warfare. I read a lot about trench warfare. We all did in those days. And, and I thought it was the most horrible, terrible thing I could imagine. And I feared this would happen to me, you know.

SCHULMAN: I— PRESS: So, I was, I was— SCHULMAN: That’s interesting.

PRESS: I was, I knew— SCHULMAN: I, we departed at the point—well, having acted in Journey’s End, I had all of that feeling, but perhaps because of what my familial precursors had, that is they had been so violently opposed—several of my family friends were put into jail and my father, of course, during World War II—World War I—at the end, with the Palmer Red Scare Riots, 49:00innocent people, our neighbor, Sam DeWitt and Eugene Debs, the leader of the Socialist Party, were put in the jail, perhaps because there were such protests in, with, with which were involved, but maybe we had a feeling that could never happen again.

PRESS: It wasn’t our, our, not our war.

SCHULMAN: It’s not our—that’s right. That’s right. It was a capitalistic, you see, involvement and false promises war to end Democracy and make the world safe for Democracy and so on. So the, the, the human, you know, where the poppies grow and the, the Rupert Brooke’s and the tragic poet deaths and so on—we were all intimately familiar with that. But in terms of how, historically, how long ago—that’s the point. 50:00How long ago before our time this existed, which apparently we did not have that sense. To us, it was horrible— PRESS: To me it was— SCHULMAN: But it was remote.

PRESS: It, it may have been the age difference, but it was not remote— SCHULMAN: See, yes.

PRESS: And it was horrible. And— SCHULMAN: And we were so involved in new, in new movements and new potencies and forces and so on. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt and Norman Thomas getting more than a million votes in the 1932 election, a Socialist candidate. You know, for, if it hadn’t been for FDR, there may have been a Socialist President, just like there were Socialist majors— PRESS: Henry Wallace, you mean?

SCHULMAN: In Milwaukee. Huh?

PRESS: You mean Henry Wallace?

SCHULMAN: N-, no, no. Norman Thomas. 51:00Henry Wallace did not, did not emerge—he was— PRESS: A leg—yeah.

SCHULMAN: He was Vice-President.

PRESS: Yeah. Yeah. You mean if, if Roosevelt had not made it as President.

SCHULMAN: Had not made it. That’s right. Yeah, if Norman Thomas had made it instead.

PRESS: Right. Right. Right. Right.

SCHULMAN: Yeah, but that’s interesting, Len. It, it, and in a, I think we’ve, I’ve perhaps made the point in a timeframe kind of way, it seemed ancient. It was appalling, but it was ancient.

PRESS: Well, I, I think I can understand that because the year, the period that you’re talking about that involved you then, engaged you so.

SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: The political— SCHULMAN: Yes.

PRESS: The politics of the Depression and the— SCHULMAN: And Fascism and Nazism.

PRESS: And all of that. I was too young to really appreciate any of that.

SCHULMAN: Ah.

PRESS: I mean that, that didn’t mean anything to me.

SCHULMAN: Yes. Yes. Yes. It, and just those few stories— PRESS: The stories were a lot more vivid to me than what we had in the newspapers.

SCHULMAN: Yes. [laughs] Yes, quite. I, I can’t ever think of my YPSL 52:00days without remembering in 1935, 1936, there was an effort on a number of us in campuses around the country who felt it was a waste to be, that for there be to such competitive differences on campus when it came to sharing ideas among member of the Communist League, the Socialist League, the League for Industrial Democracy. And the more conservative students, especially those in engineering school, would it not be possible, and later it was sort of in the spirit of the Popular Front, quote-unquote, would it not be possible to create a, a receiving national student organization that would find enough common ideas, commonalities to pull activist students together on all these campuses. 53:00So there was a momentous national convention to form such an organization. In Columbus, Ohio, a miserably cold winterland. It was, sh-, and what was fascinating, is that the members of the Communist League so prepared, they boned up on every nuance of parliamentary divisiveness. They prepared themselves for ploys and, and movements and activations when we all got together, so that they really ended up taking the cake and the program that was established grudgingly by the rest of us under a new rubric, The National Student League, was so objectionable 54:00to the very people we wanted to engage; the, the conservatives and the League for Industrial—and one of the leaders of that, from our campus, from the NYU-Heights campus, was a bright guy named Herbert Whitt. He was a friend of mine. I knew, some of us knew, that Herb Witt had a Communist Party name at that early age, he was so actively involved. Never did—if I knew the name, I’ve forgotten it. But I lost track of him in the ensuing years until World War II. And after my two years in the, as I mentioned, after my two years in Labrador and then another six months or so, marvelous, at LaGuardia Field, 55:00and then the remainder of the war flying out of West Palm Beach and the Caribbean wing of the air transport command when it was at Miami. As, it, by then he was an au-, an officer in charge of morale. And I had an essay-writing campus, contest: What would be the number one challenge for the country after World War II. And I had, happily, a jury that included the base chaplain, because, by all odds, the very best entry was written by Private Herbert Witt. It turned out that he had been stationed in North Africa and was sent back for trying to organize the Navy workers [laughs] against the base command. 56:00And, and he still had his party name. And I was, the Adjutant General and the Adjutant—on the base, the officer in charge of, of—no not the Adjutant, he was in charge of security. He called me in. He said, “This is bizarre. This is unforgiveable. You can’t give this Communist—this Commie.” I, and the, we had to call the chaplain in. The chaplain went to the commanding officer, and low and behold, there was a ceremony where this Commie got the award. Twenty-five dollars—I’ve forgotten what it was—and a citation for having written this marvelous piece. [END OF TAPE]