Born in West Virginia, October 29, 1932, then raised until six in Cochran, Georgia. A divorce bought my mother, my two older sisters and I to the Bronx, Gates Place, opposite Van Cortland Park, where I was raised until breaking out to play baseball, study acting and go to the army during the Korean War. I hardly ever saw my father who had substituted his Yiddish-Polish accent for a southern drawl very quickly. People actually paid to hear my accent when I was 6.

At 19, The US Army was like a grant for me. I was sent to Japan when the war ended in Korea. There, after telling an officer some nonsense about my journalistic experience, I spent almost two years in Public Information. Japan thrilled me. It awakened talents that lay buried for several years. I began to paint and managed to study with a Zen master-painter, Kimura Kyoen in Kyoto. "Study" is incorrect.
The man loved me, even showed my work in a giant temple because my black and white brush drawings contained nothing of traditional art. It did have the excitement achieved when one draws without preconception. The Army kept giving me leaves to be rid of me. I often lived in a Buddhist temple run by an woman priestess whom I loved. A painting of her and I is in "Models".

I returned to N.Y. considering myself a painter but was frightened to just do it, so with the GI Bill I went to New York University. There I met Philip Guston who told me it's best not to teach painting because it could waste you. Therefore I studied art history while painting at night. After the B.A. I went on to the Institute of Fine Arts for three years. I quit just before my M.A.