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TI: But about this time you dropped out of high school. And tell me why you dropped out of high school. What did you do?

RD: I wanted to go to sea. I wanted to get in the war, and I tried to enlist, and they wouldn't have me: eyesight. And I found out that they weren't too particular. And you talk about the Merchant Marine, but there's no such thing, either. Seamen who have seamen's papers, and they work through the union hiring hall and get on ships. And I knew people in the NMU, and somebody whose name I won't mention, got me some phony papers. They weren't phony papers, they were basically legitimate papers, but they were for somebody else, and fixed them up so they sort of described me. I think if anybody had ever made a close study of it, they'd have understood that these had been doctored. But I was big enough, I was clearly an American, and nobody cared very much. And once I'd used them once, I was a known quantity, and I shipped several times to various places, including Murmansk, although not late in the war, so it wasn't very, very dangerous. It was very, very uncomfortable, but it wasn't particularly dangerous, although it was overseas duty and paid very well. But I did this on an off and on basis, and I created a false identity for myself. Not papers, but I pretended to be older, pretended to be a college graduate, was able to get a job -- I'd always done a lot of writing. My father had been a writer, and my mother expected me to be a writer. She was very careful about my writing. I spent two years in a military prep school, 1941 to 1943 in Virginia. And I wrote home every day and my mother usually -- I was instructed to -- and my mother usually answered once a week. And in the letter would be a little piece of paper, very neat, sometimes not so little, listing grammatical and spelling mistakes. And occasionally she'd list a misspelled word and tell me that on such-and-such a date, "You misspelled this word previously." And she was like that. Although she only had a high school education, she'd worked for important magazines as an editor, and continued to do so. Before I was born, she worked for Bernarr Macfadden, sort of an eccentric publisher.

TI: What was her reaction when you joined the Merchant Marines?

RD: Oh, she didn't know about it until after it happened. And you see, it didn't happen like that. You didn't join --

TI: Or you didn't join, that you started, I guess.

RD: Well, I didn't give her a chance to put the kibosh on, because she could have. But I left the house one day, mailed a letter to her, and got on the ship, which had been arranged, I'd signed on, etcetera. And so she found out about it when I came back, and was very upset. But she said, "I don't suppose there's anything I can do about it. You're making money." I said, "I'm saving it for college," so that was a good thing. She didn't like the fact that I wasn't in school, etcetera, we don't have to go into those details very much. If she had known about it in advance, I think she would have picked up the phone and put a stop to it, which she very easily could have.

TI: But looking back at that experience, when you worked at sea, what did you learn from that?

RD: That's a very difficult question. It certainly made me aware of trade unions. I later worked briefly for the CIO. It gave me an independence, there was no way I was going to go back to school. I always intended to go to college, but there was no way I was going to go back to high school. I'd read about veterans who went back and completed high school after having been in various kinds of services, but I had no notion of doing that. I was just, like I was concerned, I was a man. Although in those days it was very strange. Twenty-one was legal age, but they were drafting people at eighteen, and at seventeen you could get into the navy, although if your parents complained the navy would discharge you. But I was passing for twenty-odd and later claimed a college degree I didn't have to get certain jobs, and nobody checked because I sounded like I knew what I was talking about. And if you do that and have a certain amount of self-confidence, in those days, anyway, people didn't look. Now I guess everybody has to look for various legal reasons, but people didn't necessarily check up on references in those days, particularly if it was just a small job. So I was working on a New York newspaper as a junior reporter before I was eighteen. And I learned how to write quickly. One of my jobs was, occasionally, when the senior people didn't do it, was to do the market story, story on the stock market. And I worked for the New York Journal-American, which was a Hearst newspaper, which had its own news service. And the story I wrote under the funny byline "Broadan Wall," which is a...

TI: Play on Broad and...

RD: Broad and Wall Streets, which is where the stock exchange is. So that anybody who wrote that story was Broadan Wall. And this was not only for the Journal-American, but for the INS News wire. And the market in those days closed at three o'clock, and the story had to be moving on the wire by three-fifteen. It was no long story, several hundred words, sometimes less, sometimes more. And if there'd been a big disturbance on the market, one of the senior people would probably do it. But we'd been watching in the office the Dow Jones ticker all day, and you pretty well knew what you were going to say, and what you had to get at the end. And you'd pull this off the wire, this is the broad tape of the ticker tape machine. Not the ticker tape machine, but the broad Dow Jones machine. You'd get the closing prices of certain stocks and get that in there, you'd pick a few most active, whatever they did. It wasn't a very original piece of work, but it meant that I was used to sitting down and writing a hundred words or so in a very, very short period of time. And this is a useful attribute, writing one's words... and I wrote other things and rewrote other things, so that I learned to write. Not fancy prose, but effective prose.

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