Introduction
To write of one’s beginnings is a formidable task.
We surely are trapped between what we truly recall from
the dim past and all of those memories which have been
reinforced in the telling and re-telling, by ourselves as well
as by our parents, friends, relatives, and passing strangers.
Any remembrance must be a rationalization. No
remembrance can be truly ‘true.’ There are bits and pieces
we cannot recall as well as bits and pieces we prefer not to
recall. There are old wounds we would not open, wounds
to ourselves as well as to old friends.
The past has a way of softening one’s memories of
dedicated enemies. Age may also bring with it a softening,
a forgetting, or at least an ignoring of ideas once firmly held
in our youth. I believe we must guard against this tendency,
else we simply continue our past mistakes and the past
mistakes of contemporaries. A rejection of one’s ideas ...
never—of actions, yes.
My belief is that in early youth (given great good luck)
all the universe is revealed to us. The germ of our best ideas,
therefore, comes to us very early in life. They are the most
mature of human attitudes arrived at by an unbiased
experience. With great good fortune we may expand on
them and bring them to fruition, discarding in the dustbin
of history those ideas that do not contribute to maturity.
Can anyone believe that my hometown of Lynn,
Massachusetts, a small city of fewer than 100,000 persons,
housed ten movie theatres and three legitimate theatres?
10
One was a Theatre Comique supported by Italian
immigrants treading the boards after working in the shoe
factories for ten hours per day.