46 West 95th Street, where I and my parents lived beginning in the summer of 1952.
My parents and I lived in a small 2 bedroom apartment on the 2nd floor left; the windows are visible in the photo. In the same 36 unit apartment building were four other lefty/red families. We were each and all under steady surveillance by the FBI. And , trust me, this surveillance was not surreptitious. They really wanted us the know they were there. Every morning, for years, separate FBI teams would wait outside the apartment building waiting to follow my parents and other grown ups to work. Of course, because everyone took the subway, the idling automobiles were really designed to remind us that we were being watched.
There were odd, harassing phone calls too. “You can win the contest if you guess the color of the day” — was one steady call. “Red” my mother would say and the the guys on the other end would hang up laughing. Now I’ve had some experience with telephone tapping on behalf of the government and I realize what a huge investment of people power was made in keeping watch on us. At least five teams of agents to follow five red families. Telephone tappers who must have been bored silly as these were days before voice activated taping came into its own.
In our apartment building we had a live-in Super. Mr. Stuart, a beer drunk. His wife kept the purse strings tight to deny him beer money. Whenever he got money, he’d become falling down drunk and (when I got home from school) he’d apologize. “I’m so sorry” he’d say over and over again. What was he sorry about? Letting the FBI in to search the apartment, they’d give him a few dollars (that his wife didn’t know about) which he’d promptly convert to beer at the corner bar.
I was, in part, jealous of the children whose parents were jailed or hauled before the House Un-american Activities Committee. I was disappointed that my parents were not important enough. Finally though, the subpoena came for my mother. She was public relations director for the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion on West 68th Street (its now on 4th Street near NYU.) She’d been hiding her politics from the people at the college and now she had to tell them that she planned to take the 5th and that there might be some publicity. “Oh we know you’re a red, Dottie” said Nelson Glueck, the president. “The FBI was here trying to get us to fire you the week you were hired.”
Since then, I’ve met, worked with and liked FBI agents. I’ve always expected that they knew a little about me.
Red Diaper Baby Diary 