My father was an electrical engineer who worked at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh. When I was growing up, my mother wrote humor columns for the local paper. She was the Erma Bombeck of Murrysville, Pa.
My mother was a housewife but she was also an artist. My father was an electrical engineer.
My father, a math professor in Hong Kong, worked as an electrical engineer here. My mother was an art teacher, but once we came to the United States, she went back to school and became certified as a special-education teacher.
I was born in the small town of Gorizia, Italy, on 31 March, 1934. My father was an electrical engineer at the local telephone company and my mother an elementary school teacher.
When I was growing up, I installed refrigerators in supermarkets. My father was an electrical engineer.
My mother wrote a teen column for the South China Morning Post in the 1950s when she was growing up in Hong Kong. Her name was Lily Mark, but she sometimes wrote under her confirmation name, Margaret Mark. That was how she met my father.
I was born five days before D-Day in 1944. My father was a mechanical engineer, which was a reserved occupation, so he didn't have to enlist. My mother was a housewife. She worked in a bank before marrying my father.
We were working class, but my mother stopped working at the mill when she married my father and he went on to become an electrical engineer and later a draughtsman. So although we were never rich he was bringing in enough money to be able to splash out occasionally.
I knew I wanted to be an engineer, but I didn't know what type of engineer. I chose electrical engineering primarily because it was the hardest one to get into. It's ridiculous when I think about it now, but it worked out OK.
My parents were born and brought up in New York City. My father was trained as an electrical engineer, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. They were the children of Jewish immigrants who had come to the United States from England and Lithuania in the late 1800s.
I can't imagine my life without books. My father was an electrical engineer, and my mother was a public school teacher. Books were an integral part of my childhood.
My father is a doctor and my mother ran the local pharmacy. Growing up, I saw firsthand the difference they made to our community.
Growing up, my mom was my mother and father figure. She was my role model. I looked up to her. She was all we ever needed.
When I was growing up the publishing world seemed so far away. When my mother wrote a book, she would look up the address of publishers on the backs of the books she owned and send off her manuscript.
As far as my memory being reliable, at the risk of sounding like some sort of gorgeous two-headed monster with the voices of Dave Barry and Erma Bombeck, I do think that women, like elephants, remember everything and love peanuts.
Stasis is something that has marked my life since I was a boy growing up in Pittsburgh with my mother. It was the natural state that we existed in. For one thing, she suffered from a debilitating depression throughout my childhood, and depression is nothing if not static.
I don't forget my roots. My father was an emigrant from Italy who worked in a steel factory. My mother worked part-time. When my father came home she would go out to work, cleaning offices.