"I am a second generation American, my parents having escaped the horrors of post World War One Poland and Ukraine before the immigration act of 1924 closed the door to many Eastern European immigrants. My mother's family was from Lodz in present day Poland and my father's family from Raiusk near Lviv in present day Ukraine. Fortunately my father had two uncles who had escaped and were living on the lower East Side of Manhattan and could help my father get a foothold in a new land.

My brother Harvey and I shared a room as children as was common in these days. My father sold chickens to Jewish housewives like my mother. At one time he owned the largest poultry living in the Bronx. I worked there as did all members of my family, killing the chickens, plucking the feathers, and then selling them to the customers. I can't help but think of the cruelty we inflicted on those chickens. He once told a woman who was relentless in her description of the perfect chicken that she should, " Go down to GREEN Witch Village and have a picture drawn of such a bird", and bring it back to him so that he could see how to please her. Such was life in the chicken business in the Bronx.

As a child I used to copy images from magazines, drawing on a pad in my lap which I had no idea, a practice I continue to this day. We lived in a tiny six room flat so there was no space for a separate studio. I just sat in the living room and drew and drew.

By the time I was eleven I had completed drawings of Notre Dame, and the Statue of Liberty among other things, and was ready for more. I discovered the Bronx Zoo, and the New York Botanical Gardens and spent many, many hours at both drawing everything I saw during my teen years.

I became an art major at CCNY though I had to unlearn whatever I was taught there in subsequent years however that didn't keep me from attending NYU on a fellowship working on a PhD. in art until the day I realized the folly of a PhD. in art and quit.

My backup plan was to be a teacher which I was for many years in the New York School District where I worked with behavior problems and opened a museum for failing youth. There's been no "plan".

By this time I was in graduate school it was old enough for big trouble. I started hanging out at the Cedar Street bar in the Village where Liebestein and Pollock and Franz Kline and Philip Guston and other art luminaries of the time, doted on me. Abstract Expressionism, artists living in Soho lofts before there was a Soho scene as such. Abstract Expressionism was all the rage in those days and had become all that mattered to me and so I threw all thoughts of a Soho studio aside.

I spent the Seventies attending hundreds of loft parties including Robert Rauschenberg's and many others as well as Warhol's Factory parties, endless gallery openings, and the associated art scene around the Factory and the whole Soho art scene in the 70s., All of this while in the Washington to my art teaching career I never paused that I never paused that my teaching.

Following my teaching career I enrolled in an RN tho day. All of my contacts were dead or gone. Bill I continue "nonfiction"."