ABSTRACT
As a grown man traveling to my father's funeral with a couple of my uncles, I heard for the first time that my conception was an unwanted pregnancy. Indeed, some years later my older brothers told me that my mother had tried, unsuccessfully, to abort me by riding on a roller coaster. However unwanted, I made my entrance into the world on March 11, 1931, just as the Depression was descending on the country. I was the sixth, and last, child of Peter and Bessie Elkind, who as adolescents had immigrated to the United States to escape the pogroms against Jews in Russia. My father was a machinist and moved to Detroit, where the growing auto industry provided him the best job opportunities.
