New Jersey in 1905. His father, who came here from Sweden
as a child, owned a moderately successful restaurant, but he
was also a hard liver and a hard drinker, and he died when my
father was eleven years old. My father’s mother, Elizabeth,
went to work as a seamstress to support her three children.
The oldest, also named Elizabeth, was sixteen at the time, and
the youngest, John, was nine. My father was the middle child
but the first son, and he became the man of the house. Almost
immediately, he began taking odd jobs—everything from
deliveries for a local fruit store to shining shoes to hauling
lumber on a construction site. Construction always interested
him, and during high school he began taking night classes in
carpentry, plan-reading, and estimating, figuring that if he
learned a trade, he’d always be able to make a living. By the
age of sixteen, he’d built his first structure, a two-car frame
garage for a neighbor. Middle-class people were just
beginning to buy cars, few homes had attached garages, and
my father was soon able to establish a very good new business
building prefabricated garages for fifty dollars apiece.
He graduated from high school in 1922, and with a family
to support, he couldn’t even consider college. Instead, he went
to work as a carpenter’s helper for a home-builder in Queens.
He was better with his hands than most, but he also had some
other advantages. For starters, he was just a very smart guy.
Even to this day, he can add five columns of numbers in his
head and keep them all straight. Between his night courses and
his basic common sense, he was able to show the other
