The Artist In The Kitchen's Son

It all began in 1943--the war years. Air raid sirens howled warnings to pull the shades down in our house to prevent German pilots from seeing the lights and bombing us. Dad would come up from New York City on weekends, loaded with shopping bags filled with a week's worth of groceries.

The first eight years of my life were spent living on a gentleman's farm, walking over a mile to a one-room schoolhouse, and tagging behind my big sister, Alice. I was five years old then, and I remember it like it was yesterday.

In 1949, Mom moved with the three kids to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn, in a small basement apartment on Brighton Fifth Street. Taking the subway to Union Square to meet Dad on weekends became a real journey.

Dad continued to do great cooking, spending much time in the kitchen. The guests had three meals a day, and that was always fun when he came out from the kitchen to join. They all clapped as if he were the star--which, of course, he was. The travels to New York from the farm were always fun journeys.

You'll journey right through the freight train that came through my bedroom window. See the barn where Dad gave art lessons and skip the bother and skip the fuss and take a public service bus at Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey. The circus had come to town and the clown on top of fifteen chairs stacked high and rocked them till they fell down, clown and all.

The Museum of Modern Art was a whole new world! When I was nine years old, Dad introduced MoMA to me. With Frank Lloyd Wright's Mile-High building, Alexander Calder's "mobile," and the painting The Scream by Edvard Munch in 1893--it became a whole new world.