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his mother and sister. He had had no time for an education beyond the one which would win his bread and butter for him. He was sensitive, intelligent, keen, passionate, though uninformed on most of the cultural matters which are important to me, and six years my senior.

    There are a couple of misalignments in this assessment. For one thing, though far from “cultured” in the sense that Mother meant, Dad was an extremely well-read man. It might be that he thought orchestra conductors were show-offs, and, to be sure, his idea of classical music was pretty much limited to Tchaikovsky’s
Romeo and Juliet
overture; his opinion of abstract art was that “a monkey could do that just as well.” But if you wanted to talk Samuel Butler or Dostoyevsky, he was your equal. And if you ventured further, into the realms of social philosophy, ethics, government, and certain arenas of psychology, Dad could beat you at your game as fast as Uncle Ira would whip me at chess.
    He was of his period and time. His politics were to the left of center, though nowhere as far left as those of some of his neighbors who formed a Communist cell. He believed in civil liberties and civil rights—in other words, what the Constitution said. When he was in his fifties, he led a strong organizational push for civil rights, even filing an amicus brief for his employer, the American Jewish Committee, in
Brown v. Board of Education
at the Supreme Court.
    He
was
elegant. My wife says his hands were two of the most beautiful she has ever seen. I am pleased to resemble him somewhat. There is a photo of Dad at his desk in the Fred F. French Building on Fifth Avenue when he is in his mid-thirties. Compare it with me at the same age and you can hardly tell us apart: thin, balding, severe.
    Dad was also an elegant speaker and writer. Mainly self-taught, he had learned how to create phrases for papers and speeches that went beyond mere rhetoric. His journal articles and speeches are models of engagement and clarity. He was an extemporaneous speaker of note. Whether at a graduation ceremony or an assemblage of colleagues, Dad could rouse, persuade, encourage, and damn the audience with what appeared to be minimum effort. Suddenly, before they knew it, people were with him in whatever cause he was espousing.

    SOON AFTER DAD AND MY MOTHER MET , Missy’s mother, Reba Bamberger, was introduced to my father and was charmed. Shortly afterward—much too shortly, to my mind—Edwin asked Elizabeth to marry him. She told him about Francis, and he asked her again. For three months he asked her, and one day she said yes. My mother wrote that “it seemed the only possible solution for everybody.” (Froelicher was clearly still in her heart and mind.)
    On February 4, 1931, at the ages of twenty-two and twenty-nine, respectively, Elizabeth Schamberg and Edwin J. Lukas became engaged. They went riding together in the Philadelphia and New York parks, each sitting erect on a good-looking horse. They went dancing and on cruises.

    IT WAS NOT A GOOD ERA for the country. President Hoover had failed to rescue the banks and the population from desperate times. Unemployment was at 25 percent. Hoovervilles, encampments for the dispossessed, had sprung up all over the United States. Average salaries plummeted. Food prices sank. Milk was fourteen cents a quart; bread, nine cents a loaf; steak, forty-two cents a pound. And even then, at those low prices, millions of people couldn’t afford basic commodities. Hoover nonetheless steadfastly insisted that while people must not suffer from hunger and cold, caring for them must be primarily a local and voluntary responsibility. But there were no safety nets, and the country sank deeper and deeper into the Depression. Despite such nationwide desperation, Mrs. Bamberger had done well. A cousin had urged her to sell stocks while they were still high, and she had kept her money in safety during the terrible crisis of October 1929. Now she moved