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Grosvenor Apartments in Bethesda, Maryland 
Interviewer: Dr. Martin Flavin

Flavin:                            So, I feel that Julie Axelrod's early life is probably never going to be known except from what we're able to talk about, and I know he thinks it's uninteresting and I can understand why.  If he thinks it's not fun to think about, then it's really not good and we shouldn't go beyond this session probably.

We were just talking beforehand about getting into various graduate schools right after the end of the war and how different it was from what it became later on.  I guess maybe I'll--  I'm interested in how you started reading.  Now normally I shouldn't talk about myself, but I'll say one thing.  I started reading, becoming an intellectual, very suddenly at 14.  And it wasn't because of teachers, schools, or parents.  My father was a writer and had thousands of books.  None of them had any influence at all.  It was because of the one boy who had always been within walking distance of where I lived and was my age, and I came back from boarding school in Europe and before that we'd been firing our .22 rifles around and playing with toy soldiers and things like that, and bang, he was transformed.  He was interested in Marxism and in Hinduism and classical music.  And we set up all these things in an abandoned tool shed and got our little study together and the first two books, the key books, were called Erewhon and South Wind, the first adult books I read, and from then on I became a reader. 

Axelrod:                        It was just pure chance that the library, Hamilton Fish Park Library, was a half block from my house, and I just may have stumbled into it, or I don't know why, but I liked to read.  At that time, I remember, when I was 7, I used to read books like Pinocchio and Robinson Crusoe, and things like that.  The adventures.  But, it took me away from the kind of life I was living and I was very easily fantasized by, what kind of a life that could be and my real life wasn't very interesting.  We were very poor.  My mother had to go out to work, you know, as a maid, as a domestic.  My father, he made some money, but he gambled a lot of it away.  Our diet was mainly chicken soup and spaghetti, something like that.  And I just loved to read, and reading just took me away from my life, my real life.  I really was very much just transformed by these books.  I loved reading, though it wasn't a very systematic type of reading.  I just looked at the pages and if I got interested in it, I took it out of the library.

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