TOBIN: I was stunned. I just couldn't believe it. All the relatives who saw it were amazed.

JM: What did you think when you saw the caption, about them selling gum?

TOBIN: That was typical for them at that time. They would go out and hustle, I mean in an honest way. My father and Uncle Morris sold gum and newspapers on the streets of Washington to help out the family after my grandfather died. They could earn 25 cents in an evening. They got pretty good at it. Their favorite ploy was when it rained, my father would stand in the rain with one newspaper and stop passersby and say, 'Sir, if I can sell this last newspaper, I can go home.' The guy would buy a newspaper from him, and then his brother would be waiting under an awning ready to hand my father another newspaper, and he would stop another passerby and do the same thing, etc., etc.

One of my father's jobs as a boy was a messenger boy. At that time, the government had a huge amount of messenger boys, who carried messages from one government office to another. He would have been about 12 or 13 when he was a messenger boy for the Interior Department. He could remember large groups of Indians coming in wearing their headdress. His boss would send him occasionally to the White House. During the war (WWI), butter was in short supply. His boss had a friend who worked in the White House kitchen, where they would have plenty of butter. So my father's assignment was to pick up a tub of butter. This was probably some sort of scam. On one occasion, President Woodrow Wilson came into the kitchen to get a snack and wondered what this kid was doing carrying out a tub of butter. My father knew it was Wilson. He was probably shaking in his boots. Whatever he or the cook told Wilson apparently convinced him it was okay. Where the butter went when it got to my father's boss, I don't know.

All the kids worked hard to get ahead. Morris got a law degree in night school while he owned or ran a paint store, but my father did not go to college. After high school, my father got into partnership with one of his sister's husbands, running a grocery store, and then he got a store of his own. He was in retail meat for about 20 years.

JM: Were your grandparents the first generation to come to the US?

TOBIN: On my father's side, they were the first ones to come. His father (David Marks) came first, I believe about 1892, to New York City. Then he brought his wife over, when he had earned enough money. He did all sorts of things and apparently became reasonably prosperous enough to own a wrecking company and buy a house in Brooklyn, but then he was killed in an accident on the job. That left his wife with six kids, and pregnant, and I guess there wasn't any insurance in those days. So she sold the house for I think $6,000. That would have been about 1906 or 1907. They moved to Washington because they had relatives there.

JM: When your grandfather died and your grandmother moved to Washington, how did she support her family?

TOBIN: The relatives loaned her money until she could sell the house. The oldest son got a job, and then all of the kids did something. She didn't have job.

JM: Could your father speak Yiddish?

TOBIN: A little bit, mainly expressions. He could understand it, and because of that, he could probably understand German as well. Washington was really like a Southern city at that time, so he spoke with a Southern-style Washington accent, as did his siblings.

JM: Was his world confined to the Jewish community?

TOBIN: No. There wasn't that much of one. My father's experience growing up was very secular. I guess they were just so busy, and religion wasn't as strong in the Jewish community in Washington as it was in Brooklyn.

JM: Where did he go to high school?

TOBIN: McKinley Technical High School. He graduated about 1922. Maybe because of World War I, he was in the cadets. They would march on the Washington Monument grounds.

JM: Did your father tell you frequently about his childhood?

TOBIN: Yes. We'd be driving through a neighborhood, and he would say something about it. I didn't get this sense that he had terrible hardships as a kid, not like things were unfair. It was a very closely-knit family, and the older ones took care of the younger ones. I got the sense that he basically enjoyed life. His sister said in her memoir that until the boys were toilet trained, they wore skirts. He told me that he used to put cardboard in the bottom of his shoes to cover holes. There were places that sold what they called speckled fruit. If it got a little old, it would go to another store, and it would be much cheaper. He said that the first time he saw a grapefruit, he couldn't figure out what the heck it was. It was too big to be a lemon or an orange.

JM: What do you think about your father being a newsboy on the streets at such a young age?

TOBIN: Kids have paper routes today. He made about 25 cents for one evening. That was in 1912. What would that be worth now? It might have been good money for an 8-year-old kid. I think the difference today is that the parents wouldn't want them out on the streets, especially at night. I never heard him talk about fears they had of being robbed, or of child molesters. He would sometimes tell jokes about policemen, because they would chase the kids and tell them to go home. He knew some of them. He remembered reading an article once in the Washington Post about a policeman named Reddie Williams, obviously red-haired, who was chasing the kids around. He knew him.

JM: You said that Morris graduated from law school. What type of a lawyer was he?

TOBIN: I am not sure he ever practiced law. He was mainly in business. For some reason, he liked farming. Maybe it was because his father was from a farm in Poland. Not necessarily that he liked doing it himself, but he would buy and sell farms and cattle. In the Washington area, these farms eventually turned into the Maryland suburbs. He owned a lot of land where the National Institute of Health is now (Bethesda). It was once a farm called Ayrlawn. A developer built huge numbers of cottages there right after the war (WWII). My father and his brother were in the building business for a while, and so they would buy land and build houses and sell them. The home I was brought up in was in Bethesda. It's still there. I went back once and showed it to my wife and daughter, and they said, ‘My gosh, it's so small.' They bought it in 1953 for about $20,000, and now similar houses in the area are selling for $800,000.