Strictly Personal

The volume of email I’ve sent since becoming semi computer literate has included as little as necessary about me. I consider people who talk about themselves bores and those who talk of others as at worst gossips. Give me a gossip any time. So please excuse this self centered dissertation on the role my early years have had on the nature of these letters.   I was raised in what was by any standard considerable wealth. My father, Barney Balaban, was President of Paramount Pictures for twenty nine years. At that time typical CEO salaries were forty times those of their employees. If that number had been four hundred or so, as it is today, some of us would probably now be hanging out at the latest version of Eddie Condon’s.   In 1936 our family moved to New York City from Chicago when my father, then President of the major Midwest theater chain of Balaban & Katz, was picked by Adolph Zukor, founder of Paramount, and the Board of Directors to head the Depression ridden company. For the next five years we wintered in Zukor’s lavish duplex apartment at the Savoy Plaza Hotel at 59th St. and 5th Avenue, the site of what is now the Ford Building. My elementary schooling was at the “progressive” Ethical Culture School.   I was anything but proud of being raised in wealth. One classmate who took a particular dislike to me, ridiculed me in front of other students as “Savoy Plaza in person.” My birthdays were spent with friends at the Paramount Theater where we saw the current film and stage show. Each year I would plead with my father, without success, to go through the motions of buying tickets inconspicuously like others rather than walking in the side door free of charge like privileged people. On rainy days I was driven to school by a chauffeur and insisted on being let out a block or two away.    After elementary school my parents bought an eighteen room house with eleven acres on the waterfront in Mamaroneck, N.Y. They always had more than a handful of servants. My embarrassment at these surrounding diminished with time. But as late as my freshman year at Dartmouth I still felt special respect for the students who worked in the commons where we ate, to help pay for their tuition.   At voting age, which was then twenty one, I was politically non partisan, although in retrospect it was inevitable on which side of the fence I’d land. While neither political party has impressed me with its ethical purity, our flawed system won’t allow it and the line between public need and individual greed is often blurred. But I see pure greed as far more obviously prevalent among Republicans, particularly in recent years, which is why today I’m an unadulterated Democrat.   So much for introspection! Next time it’ll be all gossip.