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AI: Well, you just mentioned that you moved around a lot with your family. Where were some of the places that stick in your mind vividly during your childhood, places that were special to you or had some significance as you were growing up?

PI: Well, the first several places that we lived, I have no memory of. I wasn't old enough. I do know that we lived in Marblehead, Massachusetts. My father then went to Erie, Pennsylvania, where there's another General Electric plant. I don't remember Erie. The first place that I do remember was a, was Syracuse, New York. And there was a, another GE plant there. This was during the war, and my father was then working on a project to build jet engines for airplanes, which is sort of funny because both the Germans and the Americans were trying to build jet planes during the war. They, neither side succeeded before the war ended. But they were building jet planes, and in fact, they became, they started operating shortly after the war. And I do remember about that place. We lived in the most gigantic house I think I've ever been in. It was a mansion, literally. I don't know how we got into it. It's in a little town near Syracuse called Solvey, New York. And this house was so large that the kids had a playhouse outside which was the size of most people's houses. And we had solariums and music rooms and gigantic winding staircases. And that's literally all I remember about that house is just how huge it was and the grounds around it.

But my first real memories of things that I did was in another small town in New York called Skaneateles. Skaneateles is one of the, is the smallest of the finger lakes in upstate New York, the one at the very eastern end. It's a lake about twenty miles long and one mile wide. And at the northern end is a little town called Skaneateles. And we lived about eight, ten miles down the lake. A very small hamlet, in fact, it wasn't even a town, called Borodino, which was one of the towns in Russia that Napoleon's army had gone through. At any rate, that's where I first started going to school. We lived in a, in a farmhouse, a big farmhouse. And my father had left General Electric and decided to go into business making components of engines for himself along with his brother-in-law, my mother's sister's husband, and a friend of theirs. They were all skilled engineers. They'd all left General Electric, and they'd set up a little business, Skaneateles Manufacturing Company. And General Electric was their only customer. And the company decided for some reason to drive them out of business, which they eventually did. And my father went back to GE.

But the years we spent in Skaneateles were, I think, among my most enjoyable. We lived out in the country. It was on a farm near the lake. The lake was wonderful for swimming and sailing. We had a sailboat. And I remember going to school every morning really early on a school bus. And we'd go fourteen miles 'cause it wound around in the countryside before we got to school. And that was where my kindergarten was. And I had a great time. We had a farm and worked on the farm in the summer. And I remember even as young as I was, six, seven years old, driving a tractor, pulling the, the hay bales on a big, on a big flatbed, and baling hay and loading hay. You know, it was really a good time for a kid.

And then we had a year that I remember vividly because it was not much fun. My parents decided to send me and my brother, Rocky, off for a year to live with my dad's mother in Beaver, Pennsylvania -- Granny. And she was, and the image of her in my mind is that little old grandmother in Beverly Hillbillies. What was her name? Granny Clampett or something. Very small, very stern, and she didn't like kids. I'm not sure why we were there, but we spent a year there. I was in first grade at the time, the Abraham Lincoln Grade School. And it was, we had to behave so properly, and we really didn't have a chance to be kids, to go out and play and run around. And it was in a small house, and there wasn't much else to do. I remember that our only fun really was, was climbing up and down this huge slag-heap from the coal mines nearby or the steel mills. And we'd get all dirty, and my grandmother did not like that. And every day she would wash all of her, her window curtains and her chair coverings, the doilies that she had, and keep everything neat. And so we had to be very quiet. And I was really, really happy when we got back home after that year.

But I also remember very much enjoying my first grade. And I realized even then that I liked school. I did well in school. I was always a "teacher's pet." And so I would focus on doing well in school. My brother, Rocky, was much more exuberant. He had actually a harder time because it was harder for him to obey all my grandmother's rules. But I found much, much later, letters that my grandmother had written to my mother during that year almost every week, written out in pencil, and one of the lines that I never forget is, she said, "Rocky has all the friends, and Peter has all the grades." [Laughs] So... and it was interesting because I do remember after that, that I was much more focused on learning, doing well in school, relating much more to adults than other kids my age. And I became, I think sort of prematurely an adult, and I missed a lot.

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