NEW BRUNSWICK HISTORY DEPARTMENT: ORAL HISTORY ARCHIVES OF WW-II INTERVIEW WITH ELLIOT BARTNER

The Rutgers Alumni Association has bestowed upon this Rutgers College Alumnus the title of Loyal Son of Rutgers for his years of dedication to improving the quality of the University.

Kurt Piehler: This begins an interview with Mr. Elliot Bartner on November 4, 1996 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick,
New Jersey with Kurt Piehler and ...

Elise Krotiuk: Elise Krotiuk ...

Tara Kraenzlin: and Tara Kraenzlin.

KP: And I guess that we would like to begin by asking a few questions about your parents, particularly both your parents came
from Poland.

Elliot Bartner: Right.

KP: And I guess one question is why did they come from Poland, and the second sort of follow-up question is, why Georgia?
We were most struck by ...

EB: Why?

KP: Why did they settle in Georgia?

EB: Oh I see. Okay. I think I can answer those questions. First of all, they came from a section of Poland which on what
particular day they lived there, was either Poland or Russia. They could be across the border with each other. But on the
whole, we say they were from Poland. They, both of them came from comparatively small towns, there they call them shtetl and
they were growing up in this small village and they went to some of the bigger towns that their father would take them there for
business purposes, but otherwise their whole world was encompassed by this small town. My father left, I think he was about
sixteen or seventeen years old. And he came to the states alone. He wanted to see the world, if you want to call it that. So he
came here. He had a few relatives that were scattered on the East Coast anywhere from New York to Philadelphia to Georgia.
So when he arrived he went to Philadelphia and he worked for his cousin in the bookbinding business. ... His cousin's father
had a comparatively good sized business there. But he didn't enjoy that very much, it was more of a labor situation.

So ... instead of "go west young man," he went south, young man. He went to see his cousins in Savannah, Georgia. And they
had a store there. And ... I think it was a clothing store. So he was interested in that. And, he learned the business, and the
people and how to speak English and things like that. But he was an enterprising guy and he wanted his own business. So ... he
looked around and found this small town with a small store in a place called Brooklet, Georgia--B-r-o-o-k-l-e-t--which was
about twenty miles west of Savannah. It had a population of about 550 people. And ... he went there and looked around and
found this little store and he ... bought it and started his own business.

Of course, he ran into some problems. The Ku Klux Klan wasn't very happy with his being there, because he was a Jew. So
Jews and Catholics were on the no-no list. But he didn't let that bother him. He decided he was going to stay there to start a
business which he did. And ... he enjoyed people and in turn they enjoyed him. So the threat of the KKK subsided. And he got
to know everyone.

Now, occasionally he would go to New York for buying trips and while he was in New York he met my mother. He was
introduced to my mother. And my mother had an interesting situation on her arrival here. She was in this small town and she
decided she wanted to come to the States too. The first of her family. She and her girlfriend were going to come together. And
her girlfriend had already obtained her visa, and my mother was waiting for her visa. But before you did anything in the town,
made any movement, you had to go to the head of the town, Rabbi, and sort of get their permission and advice and so forth
and so on. So she went. ... She asked him the question, "Should I go to the states?" and he replied, "Not only you should go,
but go immediately. Don't wait." So she didn't have a visa. So she got together with her girlfriend. And her girlfriend said, "I
have mine. You can have mine and when yours arrives, I'll use yours." So they sort of switched identities. And she left in about
two or three days. Said goodbye to the family and went to Hamburg and got on board a ship. And while they were at sea,
World War I started.

TK: Oh, wow.

EB: So whoever was head {Rabbi} of that little town, he really picked it correctly. So she arrived here ... and she retained the
name of her girlfriend. Now maybe I shouldn't tell this.

KP: So she assumed another identity?

EB: Well if you want to call it that. It wasn't uncommon, by the way. So she worked in the garment industry. ... You've heard of
the Triangle fire and things like that. In was in that area, a lot of the young people coming ...

KP: The Lower East Side.

EB: Right. ... She met my dad and, to make a long story short, they got married. And he brought her down south. And that is
where I was born, in Brooklet, Georgia. So, things were working very well there. They enjoyed it and so forth and so on, but
my mother was having a ... health problem. It had to do with the water in the area. Apparently there was something in the water
that didn't agree with her. So they decided they'd come north and they moved north.

And we were in New York for about a year, and then we moved to Newark and I started school in Newark. Kindergarten,
that's as far as I got in the Newark area. And then we moved to Irvington. And my dad had a nice store there and ... my youth
was in the Irvington. I went all through school there from first grade, second grade, whatever I started, through high school.

My summers, while I ... helped my dad out in the store. And most of my summers I worked in an amusement park. There was
a large amusement park called Olympic Park. You're all too young to remember Olympic Park. But it was a very, very large
park and it drew a lot of people. And to give you an idea of prices, we used to have what they called a three cent day. You'd
go in for three cents. And I had a number of interesting jobs there. One of them, I worked in the penny arcade. A penny arcade
was the beginning of the gambling, you know, one-armed bandit things and things like that. But nothing what we have in Atlantic
City. It was all for amusement rather than for the monetary aspect of it. So I worked there and I might tell you that I started at
ten o'clock in the morning and worked through ... lunch, worked straight through and at dinner time, if we weren't busy, I was
allowed ten or fifteen minutes to get something to eat and then worked till one o'clock in the morning. And at one we closed
down and then we had to clean the place up, sweep the floors, and so forth and so on. And for that length of time, the day--
my day, I got a dollar a day. And if I had ... any error in the amount of money that I handled, which were mostly pennies-- if I
were missing four cents, they'd deduct that from my ... dollar. But it was a lot of fun. And ... saw a lot of interesting people. Of
course, those were the Prohibition days and the gangsters were around. And when the gangsters would come, he would bring
his whole entourage and everybody had to make way for him. He was the king of the roost. So it was fun that way. And we
had a lot of interesting things in the park. It was Depression days. And they used to have dances where couples would get
together and marathon, marathon dances. They danced day and night. And then when the last one stood, which could be days
and days and days, they gave him maybe five dollars for that the whole time. That was the prize they got. So there were things
like that.

Then ... they put me on my own and ... I guessed weights. I handled a place there and people would gather around, you know I
had a spiel I developed and it would cost five cents. They'd give me a nickel and I'd guess their weight. And I had plus or minus
two pounds on either side. What they got if they won, if I didn't guess their weight, was a box of candies that used to cost a
penny. And I was getting five cents for this thing. So ... I'd love to have fun with it. And I'd have a young lady come to me you
know and I'd look at her and she was about 205 you know something like that. And the way I'd guess would be I had people
that were always around and I knew their weight so it was approximation. I'd get it that way, but an obvious thing like 205, so I
would say 130. And oh, she was the happiest person in the world, see. So I enjoyed that. For a penny, I made someone
happy. So those were the oddities of the job. And I worked there I think during my freshman, sophmore and junior year ... in
... high school. But otherwise, we had a great time in school, things like that.

And that, my first interest in chemistry arose while I was in Irvington High. I decided I wanted to be a chemist. And I had a
very good teacher there, Charlie King, I remember him very well. He encouraged me and we had lab assistants that took care
of the laboratory. This was a NYA, National Youth Administration. We got, I think it was 35 cents an hour. But ... I was
interested more in chemistry than in the amount of money that I made there. Because I learned a lot through King and he
encouraged me to go on with chemistry. So I got out of school and that's how I came to Rutgers, I picked Rutgers. ... We had
to take a mild test at those days, we didn't have all the SPAs and so forth and whatever they have nowadays. And anyway ... in
July of the year, I had already been accepted to Rutgers, in July, Dean Read called me in. ... There was a separate school of
chemistry here, in fact, it was in the building across the way where one of the administrative offices is now. And the whole
campus was just this. This was it. The only thing that was across the river, they just finished the stadium. What a beautiful,
magnificent, terrific stadium. So ... I came down and he wanted to have a chat with me. So he took me around and showed me
the building which would open my eyes. And he said, "You know these are hard times now." He said, "Jobs are very, very
scarce in the field of chemistry and especially among people like you." So I said, "Well what's your recommendation." He said,
"I would recommend that you do not take chemistry. Take some other course or go to some other school." So he made no
impression on me whatsoever. And I got up and I thanked him for the interview and then I turned around and I said, "Dr. Read
I'll be here in September." And I was here in September and I spent four wonderful, wonderful years here -- and became
encouraged even more and I graduated in January of '43. 'Cause the war had started and we went to school during the
summer, the summer of ... '42. And we had classes out here on the lawn in the summertime and the lectures were given outside.
 

KP: Because you had no air conditioning then.

EB: Yeah. So we graduated in '43, but prior to that a lot of us went to, wanted to enlist. And I applied for the navy. I wanted
to go to the navy. And I waited, and waited, and waited, then I got a letter, and they said that all the openings were filled, ...
and I'd have to go into the draft. Which I did. But anyway, coming back to school. They had started the Bureau of Biological
Research across the way here. ... I think the building is, is that Ross hall, or whatever?

TK: There's nothing like that.

KP: I think it has long since been demolished.

EB: That building was demolished. What's the one that the lecture hall is in?

EK: Scott?

KP: New Jersey Hall?

EB: Down the street, down the end here.

KP: I think New Jersey Hall.

EB: No, the one next to New Jersey Hall.

KP: Scott Hall.

EB: Scott Hall. That's the building. That replaced the building I worked in, and we started the Bureau of Biological Research.
And a lot of the work that we did was for the war. We worked on various projects and we had OSRD contracts, the Office of
Scientific Research and Development. So I worked there and I taught at the chemistry school, in the chemistry group. Handled
some classes for them there, and then I had a third job. And this even started ... before I even graduated. I went to work for
Squibb. They needed people on a big project that they were doing for the war. The project had to do with human blood. The
country was divided into three parts. There was East Coast and the middle area, and the West Coast. And a pharmaceutical
firm was assigned to each one and Squibb got the contract for the East Coast. And what we did was, the Red Cross got the
bleedings all up and down the East Coast. And we got approximately 10,000 bleedings a day. Then they would ship them to
us, they would arrive early in the morning about seven in the morning and we'd start working on them right away, the 10,000
bleedings. They came, they were [in] special cases that they developed. Huge cases, about four, three to four times the size of
this desk, and while they weren't refrigerated, they were insulated so they didn't get hot. But they didn't, it wasn't a cooling thing
anyway, just to keep them at room temperature. Plus, the system would work very rapidly. We were working on a method that
was called a Cohen method. We fractionated the blood. We took the human blood and divided it into the different parts, the
different proteins that it consisted of. But essentially we were after one protein, called serum albumen. And the reason for that
was, this was a navy contract. Everything we made went to the navy. And, of course, in confined space, you only have so much
space allocated to different things. You couldn't take thousands of pints of blood, didn't have the room for it. So essentially
what we did is we took serum albumen out of the blood, and then made it ... into solutions and put it in small bottles, 100 ml
bottles and that bottle was equivalent to five pints of blood. So we condensed it that much. And then they were in bottles that
could be given immediately. It was given intravenously. It was used in the case of shock. Shock was a great killer ... in battle.
What would happen would be, the blood would leave the veins; go into the body cavity, so you could cause death that way.
But this serum albumen kept it within the stricture of the vein, of the artery. So we worked and turned out millions of pints of
blood that way. And it was, I started to tell you, it was developed by a fellow named Cohen, Dr. Cohen up at Harvard
Medical School. He developed the method which was far different that were ordinarily used for the purpose. Otherwise it was
out of the question to use the method normally used. And what we used were two things that made the difference. One was,
we worked in the cold. We worked at five degrees below zero and some of our rooms were sixty below, the storage rooms
were 60 below. So we worked at five degrees below and we used alcohol, we fractionated by alcohol. Otherwise, they used
what is called the sulfate method which was terrible. And we grew and made modifications ... to the process so that we got
down to where we recovered practically everything that came. And we had all these other fractions, the globulins and the most
famous, of course, gamma globulin which you hear about now. We were the first ones to work with that in huge quantities. But
we really weren't ready for that. In fact, some of the fractions we didn't even know what they could be used for, so we stored
them at 60 degrees below zero to wait for the day when we could work with them. But along the way we worked with other
fractions that we knew we could utilize and that was fibrinogen and thrombin and so forth, having to do with the clotting, which
was important also. And that we managed to develop and utilize in the case.

... There were a lot of things that we accomplished that would never have been accomplished if the war hadn't taken place. It's
a hell of a thing to say, but just the way the NASA program, we got a lot of things out of that. One was methods of
centrification. Originally we started each individual bottle, was put in a centrifuge. And centrifuging it took 30-40 minutes to do
the centrification. And the red cells separated out. We had no use for the red cells, and that went down the drain. So it went
down ... through the New Brunswick sewer system. If anybody wanted to check it, they'd think there was mass murder going
on in the city. But we developed a continuous method of doing this seperation.

TK: I was going to ask, you mentioned that your work touched on clotting. In what ways did the war accelerate research and
why?

EB: Well, we made a product that ... was like a white foam, like styrofoam today. The material itself developed itself, and that
could be packed into wounds and stopped bleeding that way. It wasn't utilized to any great extent, but it was the beginning of
something. So fibrinogen, and we clotted it and made this foam type of material. And that could be utilized in ... extreme
situations. But once again we had the problem of storage of it and ... so it got use under extreme emergency situations.

So one of the things we developed was different methods of centrifuging. ... We went from individuals centrification ... to the
type of centrifuge that they use in milk. We worked with a company called De Lavall which made these centrifuges for
centrifuging milk. And we found a method where we poured the bottle in, and it immediately went through and it separated the
red cells from the plasma. And that was a huge difference, because what used to take us practically twenty hours to do, we
could do it in two hours. Now the other thing that was interesting, was ... the people that worked for us. We had all walks of
life come in, from kids, to people in their 70s, and so forth. But the most interesting group were the professors from Rutgers.
They wanted to help in the war effort and you know they were fellows in their 50s. And I had the most marvelous group of
guys you'd ever want to meet and they worked diligently and they ... were part timers. They would work three or four hours
during the day, mostly in the evening. And, I had guys like Dr. Daines from over in the Ag school. Davidson from the Ag
school, and many people from down here. And, as I said, I started working there before I graduated. So I still had Dr. Ellis
who was one of the professors here and then he'd see me on campus, he'd say, "Hi boss!" He called me the boss. Then the
kids would look around, what's going on? But he was a wonderful guy and ... we had ministers come in of various religions and
want to work. And the funniest thing, ... I would match up a minister with a guy who came from the other side of town, and
they became fast friends and helped each other. It was really a great sociological situation there.

TK: Was there a call into the community for volunteers?

EB: Well we really didn't, we tried to keep our operation quiet, you know, not to be known. So we sort of screened people
that came and wanted work. Up to this time it was mostly men who'd worked there and we brought women in. They worked
outfitted and ... wore heavy jackets and things like that, because it was five degrees below. But we learned later on. I worked
without my coat; I'd just gotten used to the temperature. The body can make adjustments. The big problem was ... when you
went from the cold to the normal [temperature], ... that ... would cause you to have headaches. So we carried on and that was
the work that I did during the war, the whole time.

But after I graduated I had a number of calls from various industries to get jobs. One of them, I remember, was RCA and this
was the beginning of television. They were starting to make television tubes and I was given an offer from RCA. They had
opened a plant out in Pennsylvania. But ... my interest was in the biological end and I became a biochemist. So I decided not to
stay, and I got an offer from them to run the place. So I remember when I was hired, my boss walked down the hallway with
me, put his arm around me, says, "You know, that's a lot of money you are making, young man." I was getting $26 a week,
twelve hours a day, six days a week. Actually I worked many time ... seven days a week, because we had three shifts. We
were 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But he said, "That was a lot of money," and believe me, he was right. Because I
could save five bucks a week from my 26 dollars. Something that later on in life, that proportion didn't exist any longer.
[laughter]

But I got married in '44 and I took a couple days off to go on my honeymoon, the only time I'd taken off in, in two years or so.
And we went to Maine for a honeymoon. It was in September. ... You know it was nice, a good temperature at that time, but I
felt I had to have the cold. ... My body had adjusted to working in the cold. So I couldn't wait to get back home, but meantime
when we came back from our honeymoon, we had a stop in Boston. We took the train down from ... Waterville, Maine to
Boston and I went to the Harvard Medical School to Dr. Cohen's laboratories and he had a cold room there. So ... when I
stepped in I ... ah! It was a pleasure.

EK: How did you meet your wife?

EB: I met my wife, well I'll tell you how I met her. While ... I was in school, I always had jobs and one of the jobs I had was, I
sold shoes down on Church Street as did a lot of the fellows in the school. In fact, Dr. Pane, you know Dr. Pane? He and I
worked together in the same store selling shoes. ... And I had a lot of women that came in. The J&J girls used to come in every
Saturday. The shoes were so good that they needed a new pair of shoes every month. They wore out. But one day my future
wife came in and I waited on her. ... And that's how I met her. And she was going to ... Hunter College. She went to Hunter
College in New York and she had a summer job at Kity Keep Well camp in Metuchen. There was a school, a camp for
indigent children, so she was working there. And it so happened that the fellow who owned the store was her cousin. That's
how she got to this particular store. And we dated and it wasn't long before we got married, September 10, 1944.

TK: Did you ask her to go out right when you sold her the shoes, or did she come back in?

EB: Oh, I was invited to attend a party in Plainfield. So that's what happened. So it was-- call it what you want, love at first
sight or otherwise, but someday I'll write a book on how I got my wife from selling her a pair of shoes. [laughter] And we lived
in Highland Park when we first got married. And there were no cars. ... I rode my bike from Highland Park to Squibb at the
time. ...

And Maine became a very important part of our life. I mean, we honeymooned there and then there was a long interim period
that we didn't go up there. And then when we got our kids, my youngest one wanted a big piece of property. So ... I started to
look around in Pennsylvania, and West Virginia. The prices were ridiculous and you didn't get a large piece of property out of
that. So a friend of mine said, "Why don't you go up to Maine? See what's happening there." So my daughter was going to this
University of Connecticut dance and her course was finishing for the year. So I said okay, we'll all hop in the car and drive up
to Maine. And ... the first piece of property that we saw we just fell in love with, all of us simultaneously. No questions about it
and we bought it. The most beautiful piece of property ... in that area. And that became like our second home. ...

I have to jump at this because I was working in Washington at the time and I would come home on Fridays. I lived down there
during ... the week, came home every weekend. I would drive up from Washington, pick my wife up, and then we'd drive all
through the night, to go to the property and we'd spend Saturday there and on Sunday I'd reverse the process. Come back
again, drop her off and I'd go on to Washington. I'd do 1,700 miles of driving in a weekend. I'd spend one day there, but it was
worth it. It was so magnificent.

KP: Where in Maine?

EB: Well, it's a town called Dixmont, Maine which is about twenty miles outside of Bangor. It's kind of far up, but our whole
family became oriented towards Maine. And my kids used to spend summers up there and then my son, my oldest son got a
job. And he got married and got a job in Acadia National Park, Bar Harbor. He taught at the Bar Harbor High School. He
taught special grades. And he raised his whole family there and today he is superintendent of schools in Old Orchard Beach. In
fact, that's where I was yesterday. I went up, see I still do these crazy things. I drove up on Friday, stayed Saturday and came
back Sunday. So, ... [his] three kids are raised there. His daughter now goes to Oberlin and they're all into music. And they
love Maine and I don't blame them. So the kids have the property. ... When the oldest one turned 21, we gave it to them. But
it's a magnificent-- and you're all welcome to go there if you want to. ...

KP: I actually, when I first started the project I did two interviews up in Maine, one not too far from Bar Harbor and one closer
to Augusta. There was someone I interviewed outside of Augusta and then someone not too far from Bar Harbor.

EB: So what did you do? Visit there?

KP: Visit there, yeah. Did the interviews there. And it was really wonderful. I understood why people went to Maine after all,
especially in July.

EB: Well, my son lives in Kennebunk. In fact, we were looking at Bush's house on Saturday. He's not too far from him. And
he's superintendent of schools in Old Orchard Beach. And he's doing a magnificent job, I must say. He just got a three and a
half million dollar federal grant. One that Clinton has been talking about, about putting computers in every school. Well he is
one of the ...

KP: Pilot ...

EB: ... pilot schools working in conjunction with the University of Maine. And the other day the governor came down and gave
Jay a check for 750,000 to start buying equipment and he's busy with that.

KP: So his students will be able to read your interview eventually when it is on the Internet.

EB: Yeah. So ... anyway I worked at Squibb for many years after the war. When the war finished I wanted to get into ... work
other than the war work. So I worked with a wonderful guy, name of Smith, who left Squibb. He wanted me to go with him
and I decided to stay there. He went out to Utah and he was one of the founders of University of Utah Medical School, and
then went on to UCLA and he became head of the department of biochemistry at UCLA.

But there was a big change that happened in the pharmaceutical industry right at the end of the war. And the big change was the
following: the introduction of so many new entities, for instance antibiotics, which never existed before, became one of the
priorities. And steroids and other things of that-- ... all new entities that had never been worked on before. And the method of
research at Squibb at that time was that every department had its own research group. Those that worked in the insulin
department, they had people who were interested in insulin ... and went to do research on that. And that's the way the division
was. But with the new entities, there was no experience. No one was experienced in it. You couldn't have a system like that.
So they wanted to put all of pharmaceutical research under one head and I became the head of it. I started from scratch. And
how I got my job was rather interesting. I didn't have my doctorate. I had advanced work, but I ... never got around to getting
my doctorate. And one of the reasons was, the fact that, we in industry were really telling the profs what to teach the kids. So I
was taking graduate courses here and my prof was trying to tell me what I was doing over there. And I was years ahead of
him. But that's besides the point. But we were the guys who were really making the headway. So when I walked in this room it
sort of reminded me of my first lab...

KP: Because this was the old physics building.

EB: ... I had at Squibb. ... There was a staircase that went up to the ... executive offices which were in the penthouse. My lab
was on the first floor and the staircase was right near the door going up to the ... penthouse.

KP: And this was in New Brunswick?

EB: Yeah, New Brunswick, over here. So anyway they hired a new guy who was Vice President of R&D for ... all of Squibb.
And he was an Englishman and he was an energetic guy. He didn't take the elevator up, he walked up the stairs. And every
morning he would come by and I'd say, "Good morning Dr. Gaunt." You know I was a kid at the time. And, one morning he
stopped me, he said, "What are you working on?" So I took him in my lab, it was just about as wide as this, but about three
times as long. It was a long narrow thing ... I had the lab there. I was working on seeds, extracting tryptophane from them. So I
explained everything I was doing. And then from then on he'd make it a point every morning to stop for a couple of minutes and
just talk to me. Told me what he did in England; what he was doing here; what he wanted to accomplish. And he was the one
who had the thought of taking R&D out of the individual departments and putting it under one head. And one day he said, "You
know I want to get that done very soon, and, I've been thinking about who I could get to head it up." And I said, "Well there
are a lot of brilliant men here at Squibb." We had the Squibb Institute for Medical Research which were the long-haired boys.
They're the ones that came up with the entities. New antibiotics, and new this and new that. So I made some recommendations
to him. And a couple of days later he came back and he said, "I've made my choice." I said, "Who's that?" and he said, "You!"
[laughter] ... But anyway he talked me into it. Plus it was a big change and a big responsibility and no budget. I had to start
from scratch. In 1947 we had a depression in the country. A lot of people were let go and we had a lot of empty labs. And he
didn't tell me that, but I knew what he was talking about. So I accepted the job and the challenge, and I had a lot of fun with it.
Twenty years of my life that were really magnificent.

KP: You were a part of a larger pattern. I mean a lot of companies really went into R&D after World War II. It was in some
ways it was the golden age of R&D.

EB: Right.

KP: You said you started out with zero, with no budget. How quickly did your department grow?

EB: Overnight.

KP: To what size, in the end?

EB: Well I had 65 people and I had them all the way from high school kids to Ph.Ds. And I had the most wonderful group you
ever met.

TK: How did the emphasis on antibiotics after the war, how did that affect your department and what you were doing?

EB: Well, that was the basis of our department to begin with. We were ... the initial production of penicillin. We'd grow it in
bottles, four liter bottles. There about that size, that around. And we had rooms filled with bottles. All our walls were lined with
bottles and they were fermenting penicillin in there. Of course, couldn't get a lot of production out of that. So then we
developed a method that was utilized by the beer people, what we called deep fermentation where we have tanks, instead of
bottles. ... My work came not in the discovery of the entity, not the discovery of new antibiotics, but they brought the product.

--------------------------END TAPE ONE, SIDE ONE --------------------------------------------------

KP: So you were saying that you would get the entity ...

EB: I would get the entity. I would get the active raw material. ... I mean, if you had it, you couldn't do anything with it. The
human couldn't utilize it. No, I had to put it in the form that could be utilized by the patient. And our forte, my group, what we
called ... we were in pareterals. We were in what I called the cadillac of pharmaceuticals. We worked with sterile products,
things that were going to be injected either intravenously or intramuscularly or whatever the case may be. Sterile products.
Which is a very important part, especially in antibiotics. And you had to, first of all, find out how to sterilize the product. You
know, 95% of them couldn't take heat which was the common form. And you had to devise methods of sterilizing the product.
And we became experts in that, my group. And we took it and put it into the form that ended up in the package which the
physician got, as such. So it was a whole new field. It had never been done before. And every time a new entity came, there
was joy with it. Because a week didn't go by that I didn't have a new entity, a new challenge to work with. And everyone
presented a different story. I used to get material which was like that. [makes a banging noise] Couldn't inject that.

KP: Literally like a hard substance.

EB: Hard stuff. It was like the top of this table. I mean, you couldn't get it into solution and so forth and so on. And we had to
find ways of solubilizing it. Making it so it would go into solution and we could use it. We had to learn how to sterilize it. We
had to learn how to stabilize it. And by stability I mean, there were some products that were only good, would only last two
days. We had to find out how to stabilize it so it could sit on a druggist's shelf for months, a year, big problem. We had to
protect [and] find what was sensitive to light, and to air, and to moisture, and things like that. There was huge studies that we
carried on. I had people ... there that examined products every day, that was their job. To see if there were any changes in
them, things like that.

TK: What were some of the drugs that you were involved in?

EB: Well, our initial work to a great extent was penicillin, because that was a new antibiotic and we had to turn out many
different forms of it. And penicillin was one of the drugs which was unstable in solution. In fact, at the beginning when penicillin
was so scarce, what they did, was they took the urine and extracted the penicillin from the urine, and gave it back again. Just
the way we do with paper and so forth and so on today, we did that with penicillin, because it was so scarce. So we had to
find a way of ... stabilizing it. And the initial method was to take and sterilize the powder, penicillin powder, sodium, potassium
penicillin and sterilize it. That was the big problem. And then the physician would have to add the sterile water to it, dissolve it
and gave it to the patient. That was the initial step, but the problem was, it went through the body too fast. You had to give an
injection every three hours to keep up the blood level cause it went through the body that fast. So, the big job was to take it
and let it stay in the body for a longer period of time. Instead of injections every three hours, every twelve hours, every 24
hours, something like that. And we developed a product called POW, actually we worked with the navy on that. There was a
fellow named Romanski. He's an M.D. and he was down at Walter Reed. And he worked on it and we worked with him and
developed what we called POW, or the Romanski formula. It was an interesting thing. What he did was, he took the penicillin
and suspended it in POW, penicillin, oil and wax. ... And the guy would get a shot of that in his rear end and it stayed there. In
fact, I think some of them still have it there. [laughter] That was, that was too retentive. But it was the only thing that was
available. And we were manufacturing that day and night. We couldn't turn out enough of it. Oh by the way, when shipments
were made of penicillin, it was so scarce that the shipments that went out of the plant were guarded by police from the time it
went into the truck, or if it went to Newark Airport to be sent to Alaska.

But anyway to give you an idea of how things changed so rapidly, as I said we were manufacturing this day and night and ... a
curious thing happened. In penicillin when they injected it, it hurt, so, many of the physicians were adding what we call procaine,
which the dentist gives you an injection of procaine so it doesn't hurt. They were injecting it and it cut subsided the pain and that
was sort of common. And then we started to get complaints that they would have this mixture and there was crystallization.
Things started to crystallize out of the solution. Well, I got the first ones and God almighty-- ... just alarmed us. We thought that
something was wrong in the filling machines. But that wasn't the case. We had a chemical reaction occurring between the
procaine and the penicillin. And the reaction gave an insoluble form of penicillin, procaine penicillin.

TK: In what year did this occur?

EB: What?

TK: In what year did the supply finally meet up with the demand for penicillin? When were you able to produce enough
penicillin that it was not such a guarded item?

EB: Oh well, then we learned how to make it in large quantities. Initially, when we were just making it in the bottles. We got
enough to maybe give it to 50 people a day or so. But when we went into tanks, when we were making it in 40,000 gallon
tanks, then it just flowed. Then it became very common. So ... we immediately saw a use for this product called procaine
penicillin. And that is, it was water insoluble and it could be injected and we could give an injection every 24 hours now. And
not with POW, not with penicillin, oil and wax. But there were a lot of problems connected with it. It grew large crystals, and it
wouldn't go through the needle and we had to find means of cutting down the size. But to use ... the normal equipment that we
had for grinding materials, we couldn't do that, because the machines became hot. It melted it. And we had to find new
methods of grinding penicillin so we could keep it cool and still get the right-- what we call the particle size, correct. And we
found that. It was one of the oil companies down in Texas that invented a machine that grinds sulphur, which was similar to
penicillin in that it would melt when it was hot. Invented this machine whereby there were no moving parts. It worked by air
pressure. And I won't go through the details of it, because they're lengthy. And we could grind the powder of the penicillin
down to the correct size that we wanted. And it did it by attrition, by one particle [makes clapping sounds] hitting each other
until it reached a certain size, and then we could separate it out. So ... we then found a method of grinding it, but then we ran
into another problem in that area, the different sizes that we got. It wasn't a uniform size. The smaller the particle, the longer it
was retained by the body. And we got different gradations. Instead of saying this product would give you 24 hour blood levels,
we were getting some that were giving seven, and some giving 48, and some giving 96 hour blood levels. So then we had to
find a method of separating out the various sizes. So one thing led to another, on and on and on. ... Finally we worked all those
things out, and the initial product that was sold was a vial that contained the powder, and the physician would add a (diluent?)
to it. He'd shake it up and inject it. But that was acceptable, but not the ultimate. And I kept thinking, I've got to make one
where I could make this thing that keeps in suspension all the time and still have the water medium to it and keeps the stability
of the product. And I did that. I got the patent for it and ... that was procaine penicillin aqueous suspension which we call
Crystacillen. And ... that's another type ... I could talk all day about that about. But anyway that's the product that's used today.
And that was done 40 years ago. Still being sold and will be for many, many years to come.

KP: We trust that you must feel incredibly proud to have something that has been used for 40 years. That is a long time in
pharmaceuticals.

EB: ... Absolutely, because the average life of a new product in the pharmaceutical game is ten years. Ten years is a long time,
and here we have something that's been better than 40 years. I remember one time my dad was in the hospital and he had a
roommate, and I came to visit my dad. And being the proud father, he told his roommate that I was the guy who turned out this
product and the guy says, "Come here, come over here." And I went over to him. He took me and gave me a big kiss and said,
"Thanks for saving my life."

TK: Why you got the patent is that you were able to put it in a more soluble form?

EB: That we put it in a form that was all ready to use. The physician ... didn't have to do a thing with it.

TK: Right.

EB: We sold it, and that was the beginning of a whole new field of disposable syringes ... prefilled disposable syringes. Where
everything was right there. All he had to do was open the thing, -- it's sterile, and ready for use. And that was the patent, that
we learned to stabilize it. And it would last two, three years.

TK: Right.

EB: That was shelf life.

TK: And you did not have the problems about having different concentrations before and after ...

EB: Oh well, ... he could give different ... amounts. We could sell it so he could give half. Supposing you had 300,000 units,
you wanted to give 150,000. He'd give half the quantity that was in there. We had that. And on and on and on it went with a lot
of magnificent, wonderful products and all aimed towards saving people's lives. We had one thing an antibiotic called
amphotericin which was an antifungal antibiotic. Most of the antibiotics that were discovered were for bacterial. This was
antifungal. There were only a few of those. But the problem with amphotericin was ...

KP: It was alive.

EB: ... and you couldn't utilize it. So we learned how to put it-- we didn't put it in solution, but we made what we call a colloidal
suspension. Which was the next best thing. And ... that's called Fungizone and to this day, it's another product been out about
30-40 years. And the only ... one of its kind. There was an outfit down the road here called Liposome who thought they had
made a terrific discovery by adding something to it, called Liposome and it so happened that we had discovered that 30 years
ago. It was already in the product. So we had all these exciting things. But then there came a day when new entities were
getting scarcer, coming down the road at a much slower rate. And we were providing Squibb with new products at the rate of
about twenty to 25 new products a year. And there were very few and we couldn't provide them as much as the sales people
were accustomed to. So then things started-- something that really turned things around, and that is making combinations.
Adding product X with product Y, putting them together and no rhymes and reasons-- just to get new products. And I
objected to that. Because I felt that ... it wasn't right to send products out that ... weren't doing what they were supposed to do.
So I not only disturbed myself with it, and it came to a point where one day they sent down a suggestion for something that was
just absolutely ridiculous. I called the guy upstairs in the penthouse and said, ... "I'm not coming in on Monday." He said,
"What's the matter? Want to go someplace? Are you ill?" I said, "No, I'm quitting." And I, I left.

KP: When you said there was not a need for these compounds, in what way were they ... I would not say they are necessarily
harmful, but they were just simply useless. Or ...

EB: They were making them, just to say there was a new product. I mean you didn't do anything for the product. And then you
had the matter of compatibility. Things weren't reacting in a manner that guaranteed their longevity. Just was against my
principle.

TK: Did other people leave your company at that time for the same reasons? Any of your coworkers felt the same way and
objected to the way that they were running the company?

EB: Oh yeah. Quite a few of us that were against it. And then we won out in the long run. Because later on the FDA stopped
all of that. If you wanted to have a mixture of some sort, you really had to work at it and prove that it was doing the job. What
we call bioequivalents.

KP: It sounds like you were also afraid of risk, that in fact something harmful could happen from these combinations.

EB: That's another thing. Sure. So anyway, ... I had been working on another thing, talking about the defense department. After
World War II, we found the American troops found deposits of poison gases in Germany. A new entity, not the old ones that
they used in World War I-- mustard gas and things like that. A thing called nerve gasses. Maybe you've heard of them. Very,
very treacherous things. They could kill a person in a matter of minutes. And they had a different method of killing. So ... the
Russians ... took the plants that they found in Germany and took them home. We brought the knowledge here and then we
found an antidote for them. A simple antidote called (atropine?). It wasn't really an antidote that wiped out the effect. It just
held it back so that the fellows could be treated in other manners. It gave them extra time, instead of the three or four minutes
that it takes. You could outlive it fifteen minutes or half hour, or whatever the case may be. And we were about to go into the
Korean affair, so the defense department was very concerned that there might be chemical warfare in Korea. The problem with
atropine was, the antidote, was that there was no time. You see, during World War II, ... we made morphine. You know
morphine was used to reduce pain. It was utilized to a great extent in the war, and corpsmen would come along and he'd give
the soldier a shot of morphine. He controlled it. And we had developed a means of application of morphine for the soldier in
single doses. Prior to that the physician went through a whole manipulation to get it ready to be injected. So, we turned up a
thing called the syrette which was like a miniature toothpaste tube that contained the morphine. And it had, instead of
unscrewing a top like you do on a toothpaste tube, it had what we called a blind end, it was sealed. And we had a needle
attached to the syrette and a means of opening the seal. ... And the corpsmen would come along, break the seal and inject the
man. The man never saw the needle and things like that. But in nerve gas, we didn't have the time for the corpsmen to go
around. The man had to inject himself. So the war was coming, Korea, and we needed something in a hurry. And we had to
learn how to get atropine in this syrette and sterilize it with a solution. And we had to sterilize the thing. During World War II
we had a sort of a Mickey Mouse method of sterilizing it, which couldn't be used with the atropine. But we found a method of
sterilizing the syrette and ... we turned out millions of them for the Korean affair.

KP: You mentioned, no go ahead ...

EB: But there was a problem with it, a psychological problem. A soldier, even with a threat of death, looked at that needle, an
inch and a half needle, and he wouldn't give himself an injection. ... We had training periods in Edwood Arsenal when we told
the guys, you know, you take the shot and you get three day leave. Even that didn't entice them to take the training. So we had
a real problem. But as I said, ... the syrette I developed in Squibb, so that when I left ... Oh, I know before that, a friend of
mine had been down to Edgewood and he came back one day and he said, "You know, I saw something that's just fantastic
down in Edgewood." I said, "What's that?" He said, "There is a guy down there that says he has a gadget that you can give an
injection and you never see the needle." I said, "Bring me one." So the next time he went down to Edgewood, he managed to
get one for me. And I said, "That's the answer to a maiden's prayer." And I ... was still working at Squibb. So I started to look
at these things myself.

One day the phone rings, and it's a guy named Stan Sarnoff, Dr. Stanley Sarnoff calling me from Bethesda, Maryland. He was
at the NIH. And he said, "I understand you're an expert on nerve gas antidotes." I said, "Well I work with them." He said, "I
have a thing here I think you'd be interested in seeing." He says, "Come on down and I'll show it to you." Well when I got there
I knew what it was. It was the same thing I had in my office. Well anyway, Stan ... worked at the NIH and he wanted to start a
company that [would] make these things. He had no knowledge of how to do it, what's to be done. So he heard about me and
he offered me a job. He come in as the head [of] the company. Well I told him, "No, I don't want to come to Washington. I'll
be a consultant for you." And meantime I left Squibb. I'll be a consultant. He said, "I need someone down there all the time."
He's a very persuasive guy and so I went with him. And there were three of us. Stan who was at the NIH, and there was a guy
Bernie who had been working there, but he was an engineer. He was mostly on the mechanical end of it. And myself on the
pharmaceutical end. And I headed the group. By the way, both of them were Princeton men and I was a Rutgers [man].
[laughter] ... [I had] fun with them on that.
 
 

The army was about to release the contract to make this item, and it was due ... in October and I went down there in February.
And we had two competitors. One was an American firm, and one was in Sweden. They had their own individual item. They
had sent all the specs for the thing. They all bid. We ... three of us bid on the thing. And the Swedish one didn't pass the test.
The American one wasn't capable of manufacturing it. The contract was for 3,800,000 pieces and it was the largest contract
ever awarded, up to that date, for pharmaceutical[s] ... by the Defense Department. Well, ... we negotiated with them and we
were working in tenths of a cent with the item and negotiations would be on that basis-- a change in price. ... We had no
manufacturing facilities and the thing had never been made before. And here we were, three guys with a thing that was utilizable
and no place to manufacture it. So I went around to a number of pharmaceutical firms and one of them was here in New
Brunswick and most of them ... never made anything like that before. Most of them turned us down. Weren't capable of
making it; and those that were, the price was ridiculous: six, seven, eight dollars a piece. We were dealing with millions of things
and we had to be in the low end of the scale, below a dollar. Well, to make a long story short, we went to Wyeth Laboratories
which is one of the large ones, pharmaceutical firms and they had a plant in Marietta, Pennsylvania. And ... they accepted the
challenge. They became our subcontractors. Three guys, not fifteen cents among the three of us. Here's a company making,
selling hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stuff, went in with us as our subcontractor. Never been done before, but we had
a wonderful relationship. And we got the contract and we went to work. And ... my routine was, I lived here in Piscataway and
I'd leave my house early Monday morning and go to Marietta, and review things with them. Set up everything there, then go
down to Washington. And to make a long story short, we made 3,800,000 of these things. On time and in spec. We're the only
people in the world making it.

KP: And for how many years did you make this product?

EB: How many?

KP: Yes.

EB: Well, we started our first contract was in 1962, and we're still making it to this day. We're the sole provider of it.

KP: So you have a number of products that lasted in an industry where that is very infrequent.

EB: That's what it's all about. But from that we've made many modifications and we now have a product called the Epipen,
where we went from the war business to civilian business. Initially our work was 95 percent military, 5 percent civilian. Now it's
turned around, the other way around, because the threat of poison gases has been lessened ... even barring what's going on in
the Middle East and the crazy character there. And we've taken the item and put in things that civilians would use. And the
biggest item we have today is something called the Epipen. ... It's an automatic injector, by the way, I didn't describe the item--
it's an automatic injector in which you do not see the needle. The needle is inside and to use it, all you do is-- we've got a safety
cap. You take the safety cap off, go like that and inject yourself. It's painless. Never see the needle. It does the job.

KP: People I have interviewed describe guys in the infantry fainting in the military after getting their shots.

EB: Were you in [the service?] ...

KP: No. I never was in the military,

EB: All the guys that have been in service know it.

KP: That is a frequent story I've heard about.

EB: But today we have the Epipen which contains epinephrine or adrenaline. And it's saved hundreds and hundreds of lives.
Because what it does, it's for people who have anaphylactic shock. Bee stings. We first came out ... for bee stings. Got
approval from the FDA. ... There are people who are very sensitive to bee stings.

KP: Yes some people are killed instantly.

EB: Yeah killed instantly...

KP: ... if they don't have an antidote.

EB: Right. So we started off with that and now we broadened that. It's for all types of shock due to anything new we might be
sensitive to. Mostly foods. Our initial sales were $22,000 a year. And the last one, ... we're doing about 14,000,000 and
growing.

KP: It sounds like your company made a successful conversion from a defense contract to the of post cold war period.

EB: Another thing that we did was, we had the contract to provide all the medication on all the astronaut flights. Mercury,
Gemini, Apollo and the ones seated today. We made a little miniature drug store for them. Each astronaut was checked out for
what he may need in the way of emergency medication, and we provided it. And our automatic injector was of course the basis
of it. Where he could give himself an injection through his suit.

KP: Which must have been very exciting in the 1960s and 1970s working with ...

EB: I knew all the astronauts. I have material that's been to the moon and back, because all the items that went up, came back
and we had to test them to see what happened to them.

KP: How interesting.

TK: So your work continued in the shuttle period? Do you discover any interesting effects of space flights on pharmaceuticals?

EB: Actually nothing happened.

TK: It would be interesting if something had.

EB: ... You can go to the Smithsonian and you'll see the device in there.

KP: In the National Air and Space Museum. Your medical kits are displayed there.

EB: Yeah.

TK: That's really neat.

KP: I want to pick up pharmacy later, but I want to go way back actually and ask some questions actually beginning with your
parents. And one of the things you mentioned early, when you talked about your parents, was that there was a very strong,
Klan in the 1920s, p particularly in the South, but even in the Midwest and in New Jersey. And it sounds like your father had
some run-ins with the Klan or at least he was very aware of their presence

EB: Yeah.

KP: ... growing up. What did he say about the Klan presence? Does he remember parades? Does he remember threats of
intimidation or did he speak much of it?

EB: Well, the only thing I remember my dad telling me-- two things. Number one, when he first came, as I said they wanted to
get him out of there. One day he got a little package, a little box, and in it was the thumb of a black man. Somebody that had
been strung up. They sent him that as a warning. So he figured that he had to help himself and he put a gun under the counter.
But he never used it, he never had to use it. And ... he got along with the people. They left him alone. They saw he was no
danger to them.

KP: You mentioned there was a second incident, what was it? Was it the gun that was his response or was there something
else he mentioned?

EB: Oh, I don't think the gun played any part in it. He just had it there, just in case. But as I said, he never used it. I don't think
he would have, but anyway.

TK: From what they told you really, it was mostly your mother's allergy or problems with the water that caused them to move
and not any sort of cultural problems you had in that area?

EB: Well, they decided it would be best instead of having to work the thing out, to move. Which they did. And most of their
friends were up North. So they went there. But my mother tells me, the house that we had down there had a porch that went all
around. ... Four parts of the house and I would run around in there and so forth and so on. But people, when my mother
became pregnant with me, took such good care of her. There was a woman there, one of the neighbors or somebody in the
town, that always was there to help her, so they became friends. So it was possible to live together and it becomes sometimes
the function of individuals.

KP: But as Jews they were very isolated in Georgia.

EB: Extremely isolated.

KP: I mean, especially compared to New York, New Jersey.

EB: Oh yeah.

KP: Did they ever talk about that?

EB: Oh, sure. Well ... there was a small town called Statesboro which was about ten miles away that was the county seat. They
would go there for their entertainment. Or for big occasions they'd go to Savannah which was about 30 miles. But they had to
have certain types of food, and it was only available in Savannah. So they made friends with the trainman-- there was a train
every afternoon. And they'd give him the list of things that they needed, he would buy it. When he came by, he dropped it.
They'd wait at the station for him.

KP: Did your parents keep a Kosher household?

EB: Yeah.

KP: So even in Georgia, they still maintained a ...

EB: Exactly. Where there's a will, there's a way.

KP: What about for services. I mean, did they go to Savannah?

EB: Savannah ... or they went to New York. One of the two. But I was always interested in going back to ... see if I could find
the house where I was born.

KP: And have you ever been back?

EB: Well, I never had the occasion to. But when I retired, the first thing I did was go on an Elder hostel. You know you can live
in an Elder hostel. They're fantastic things. And we took one that was down in Savannah. Very difficult to get into the Elder
hostel because everybody wanted to go. And I'm-- there were three places. And two of them you couldn't get in, they had a
waiting list for God knows when, and one was open. So of course, I jumped at it and ... my wife and I drove down. ... We
soon found why that one was open. It was a black college. And they had a token white or two, but the other Elder hostel was
mainly white. And we had a wonderful, wonderful time with those kids. They were interested in us; we were interested in them.
And we all ate at the same dining room. But all the Elder hostel people were together and the students were-- not a matter of
black and white, it was a matter of the students versus the Elder hostel.

KP: Yes.

EB: We intermixed; we talked to each other. Take them out to lunch ... or whatever they wanted. You know, get a change of
venue ... from college food. We had a wonderful time. And I made that my home base to find out about my home. I went to ...
Savannah and searched through their records. And I didn't really have enough time, but I didn't find my parents names in the
Savannah records. And I went to some of the local stores and ... started to inquire what they knew about Brooklet. There was
one guy, interesting enough, he sold items to the drug stores. And I told him I was interested and he said, "There's a drug store
there, they know everything about Brooklet. If you go there, here's my card and tell them." So I went there and I approached
and there was a woman, must have been in her sixties. And she said, no, she doesn't remember. But, of course, ... she wasn't
even born at the time. I was there in the '20s. So then I started to go to the different little stores there. I went to the post office
next, and I sort of described the house to them. And he says, "Oh, I remember that house, that was torn down a number of
years ago. There's a Methodist church in there." So I figured that's that. Then I went to the barber. He's the oldest guy in town
and he said, "Yeah, I remember your father." And I said, "Where is the house?" He said, "It was over there. That was torn
down a long time ago." So number two, I was thrown for a loop. Finally, I went to a place which was called their town hall.
This room is bigger than their town hall. And I walked in and there were three or four people there and I started to inquire of
them. They didn't know a thing about it. We were ready to leave and this elderly gentlemen came in. And one of them said,
"Hey John, do you know so and so and so and so? He said, "Yeah, I know it." He said, "Where was it?" He said, "Come over
here and I'll show you." And he went to the window, lifted up the blind and he said, "There it is." It was across the street. Still
standing. Only they had the porch on two sides, not on four sides. And I had found my house.

KP: Where you had run around as a small child?

EB: Yeah.

TK: Did you ask for a tour?

EB: I knocked on the door. And it was a curious thing inside. There was an elderly gentleman. And a boy in a rocking chair.
The boy looked and he made every appearance of being ill. I did not want to bother them. I took some photos of the house
and left.

----------------------------------END OF TAPE ONE, SIDE TWO----------------------------------
 
 

KP: This continues an interview with Elliot Bartner on November 4, 1996 at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New
Jersey with Kurt Piehler ...

EK: Elise Krotiuk ...

TK: and Tara Kraenzlin.

KP: I didn't mean to interrupt you, but the tape ran out.

EB: Yeah, other incidents that had happened that added on to my search for my parents in the South. I was in a meeting in
Louisville, Kentucky, ... where by the way I saw, what was the prize fighter that came from there Louisville?

KP: I can't remember.

EB: You know he has Parkinsonism now.

KP: Not Muhammad Ali.

EB: Huh? Muhammad Ali.

KP: Okay.

EB: He put on a demonstration fight. I attended that. And I met him and I had a chat with him. And so anyway there was
another meeting going on simultaneously and this was of a southern sheriff's ... group. There was a guy walking around and he
had a name tag sheriff so and so, Brooklet, Georgia. Oh God, almighty and this was before I had found my house or anything.
So I went over to him, ... I gave him my name. And he said, "You know there was a guy by the name of Bartner that I knew
years and years ago." Of course, it was my father. So we had a nice chat about that. And from time to time I'd meet people
who ... sort of gave me a little further insight into it.

KP: Your father, what type of business did he have?

EB: He had a small, general store.

KP: So he sold a little of everything, it sounds like.

EB: Yeah, if you want to call it that.

KP: Food items?

EB: No, no food.

KP: No food, but ...

EB: No, mostly dry goods.

KP: And when he came to Irvington, first Newark and then Irvington, did he still have a general store type operation?

EB: General store, but it was larger and carried many more items and things like that. So it had the same general characteristics
in his business. He was a successful businessman. Worked very hard and ... I always worked in the store and I enjoyed it. I
had a job and in fact I was telling people the other day, I gave a talk at Zimmerli the other day, and my first occasion to
become interested in art was through my father's store. I was five or six years old and I had a job already. And my job, ... you
know the thread, the little spools of thread? Since he sold thread in those days, people used a lot of thread. And there was
Clark's ONT thread which stands for, ONT is "our new thread." And there were spools with hundreds of different colors and it
was my job to separate the colors and put them in rows-- there were little boxes that they went in. And that was my first
introduction to art. Also, when I attended high school, it was my job to keep the place clean. I had the job of sweeping the
floors and washing the windows. Before I went to school every morning.

KP: What about your brothers and sisters?

EB: I have one sister who's three years younger than I am.

KP: And she also worked in the store?

EB: Oh yeah. She had her own little job. Yep.

KP: What about your mother? I assume your mother worked in the store, too.

EB: Absolutely.

KP: Did your father have any employees in the store?

EB: Yes. I'll tell you about the employees and the war. We lived in Irvington which was the hotbed of the Nazis in the United
States. They had what they called the "Bund." Where ... initially the Bund was an area for sports and things like that. Of course,
when Hitler came into power, it rapidly turned into an arm of Hitler here in the United States. So their headquarters were in
Irvington, and they had training fields where they trained youngsters just the way they did the SS troops in Germany. Up in
North Jersey. And, of course, the papers found out about it, and played it up and every once in awhile the people from
Newark came up and they made raids on ... the Bund.

KP: Was this the Minutemen organization?

EB: Well, they called themselves different names. One of them was the Minutemen.

KP: But this had happened on several different occasions.

EB: Yeah. There were riots among them. But personally what happened was, my dad had a number of people who worked in
the store. Most of them young people, his sales people, and all of them German. Young German girls. And they just loved to
work there, and everything was fine until Hitler came along. Then the girls were quitting. Every day some would come in and
say, "I have to leave." And my dad said, "What's the problem?" They said, "Well, my mother or father said I can't work here
anymore." Obvious why. And they all left and then we started to have trouble. Breaking windows, throwing refuse into the
store, things like that.

KP: What years was this? Was this as early as 1933 or was it a few years later?

EB: Oh it was later. This was about '36, '37, '38, '39.

TK: But you said there were confrontations sometimes between the Bund members and the police in Newark? Is that what you
said?

EB: Oh yes. But it wasn't so much the police, it was private citizens.

KP: Did you ever witness any of these confrontations between these Jewish organizations like the Minutemen and the Bund?
Do any stick out in your mind?

EB: No. I actually, truthfully I never saw one, because it was down on another side of town with what we call the Chancellor
Avenue section which was nearer to Newark. ... Where we lived was a more residential section. But all my neighbors were
German.

KP: What was that like to have German neighbors? Especially as the 1930s are unfurling.

EB: Well ...

KP: I mean, were they all Nazi sympathizers or were some ...

EB: Not all of them. There were a few that retained their friendship with us all through the conflicts. But others just wouldn't
show, wouldn't come near us.

KP: And they had come near you before?

EB: Oh yeah, no problem. My friends, my kid friends were Germans and then they wouldn't have anything to do with me.

TK: Since you were in a German area, did that affect your father's business at all as far as who would come there?

EB: Oh sure, it affected his business, right. ... We had problems, but then fortunately we were near Maplewood, on the
borderline of Maplewood, which ... didn't have such a heavy German population. And people came to us from there.

KP: Did you ever get into any fights growing up? Did you ever like have a fight with a Bund member or with one of your former
friends?

EB: Verbally.

KP: Verbally. So it sounds like you took a lot of taunting growing up, particularly in the late 1930s.

EB: Oh yeah. Very much so. And then you mustn't forget that also I was down here at Rutgers. I was away from home during
a lot of it, so I missed out on a lot of those things. My parents took the brunt of it.

KP: But also, what strikes me, we end up fighting Germany. And that must have been a great deal of awkwardness and fright
among the Germans, because now the United States is at war. Or maybe not. I don't know. How did Pearl Harbor change
your old neighborhood? Admittedly you are now at Rutgers.

EB: Well then they ... quieted down, because then they were illegal.

KP: Yes.

EB: Then it was a different story. Once the war started, they were treated as enemies.

KP: Yeah.

EB: So the Bund toned down quite a bit. Most of ... these things I describe were prior to our entry into the war.

TK: Of the Germans that you said remained your friends, had any of them just recently come specifically to the United States
because of the coming of the Nazis?

EB: I don't think so. But I remember we had large immigration that occurred in, let's see, ... I was in about the sixth or seventh
or eighth grade when there was a flock that came over. And what we did was-- ... the kids taught them. We would have on the
average of maybe ... two or three new kids a week come ... from German families. And this teacher would assign one of the
German children to one of us. And we became friends and that's the way they learned to talk English.

KP: So you were teaching these German immigrants in the late 1920s, early 1930s?

EB: Right. Essentially, we were doing that. We were teaching them how to speak.

KP: And then they were turning against you basically. I mean, which must have been really hard. I mean, especially as a kid,
not fully understanding it.

EB: Yeah. So then they learned rapidly. They're very bright. And we had no problem with them when I was in the younger
classes. It was when the Bund started that the problems occurred.

KP: What about your teachers?

EB: Oh, there were some teachers that were pro.

KP: You had a number of German-American teachers.

EB: Oh yeah. They were pro and ... you could feel the problems with them. So it ... wasn't a very good time, I'll tell you.

KP: So it sounds like you felt the coming of the war, far sooner than a lot of people. A lot of people I've interviewed, World
War II started for them on December 7th.

EB: Well, I'll tell you why. There was a particular person, there was a friend of mine, whose parents were very, very bright and
worldly. Knew what was going on in the world. And his mother, when it first started, was aware of what was going on in
Germany. And she alerted us to it and she talked to us about it. So I really think I was ahead of the average ... kid, and
especially with my dad in the store, because he started to feel it early. Was sort of the forefront of it. See, initially when they
started, they didn't go after neighbors or anything like that. Their thought was to take their ... youngsters and take them to the
camps up in North Jersey, and teach them how to become SS men, essentially. So that if there was an invasion, they would
have people ready to go. ... That's what it was all about.

KP: But then turned to harassment.

EB: Oh yeah. ... It was a mess. But once the war started, it subsided. And, of course, then it became an item of-- whether
there was spies among them.

KP: Because there were a number of FBI raids. Did you know anyone?

EB: Oh sure.

KP: When you read the list of names, you recognized names of people from Irvington?

EB: That's right, yeah.

KP: What about the other Jews in Irvington? In terms of the response of others. Did you know their thoughts of how they react
to this Bund?

EB: Well, unless you were definitely tied in with them, ... as I once again point out with my father. He had an intimate
relationship [with them], because they were employees of his. But the average family, they weren't bothered to any great extent,
unless they were vocal themselves.

KP: During the 1930s Franklin Roosevelt is sort of taking the United States to war, admittedly by fits and starts. You and your
parents must have followed this much more closely than a lot of people. What were your thoughts on what American foreign
policy should be in the late 1930s and early 1940s? Had you sort of made that leap to accepting the need to confront the Nazis
early? Because you were confronting them in Irvington.

EB: Yeah, well, you know ... prior to the war there were great numbers of people who wanted to stop immigration. And you
stay on your side of the ocean; we'll stay on our side. And that was it. And that was the main influence of that particular time.
That was that. And I was just talking with some people the other day about Japan. Look at ... what they've done with the
automobile industry. They didn't manufacture a car prior to the war. We supplied them all the cars. The only thing they ... gave
us were pieces of junk sold in the five and dime ... stores. They bought our used metal, took and stamped them out, and sent
them back to us and they were just junk. Junk and Japan were synonymous.

But then, things turned around after the war. And you know the interesting thing is, that we in the states built Japan. There was
a fellow who was an industrial engineer and had developed a method of increasing production. Increasing it and also bettering
it. And we wouldn't listen to him. So he went to Japan and they listened to him. And he's really the guy that turned Japan
around. Their methods of manufacturing, methods of ... quality control which was the most important thing. You know when we
bought a car here in the states, we'd close the door. It wouldn't close. And when you had problems with it, took it to the dealer
and he'd work on it, to make the adjustments. But when the Japanese came out with a product. Close the door ... without any
noise, it's closed. 'Cause they watched the quality control. It's a simple thing. And we didn't. We were our worst enemy. And
... it was a standing thing. It sort of became a joke. An unfortunate joke about the door. And it was the truth. But thank God, ...
we've opened our eyes and seen that we have to make a better car. Now we're competitive again.

And I remember ... my daughter was out in St. Louis, by the way our plant was in St. Louis, that's a whole different story. She
lived in one of these complexes and ... [in the] morning[s] I like to walk around. And one morning for the hell of it, I started to
count Japan cars versus American cars. The ratio was 10:1. Here in the United States, where just a few years prior to that, you
never saw a Japanese car. Never heard of one.

KP: You mention you had a very good education at Irvington and it sounds like you did very well in school.

EB: Well, I did.

KP: Why Rutgers? Why did you come to Rutgers? Had you thought of other schools?

EB: Well, the question ... of Ivy League schools was out of the question. I could never get in.

KP: Not at that time with the quotas.

EB: Yeah, the quota system. Couldn't get in, that was an impossibility.

KP: And you were aware of it. You didn't even try to get in?

EB: Oh yeah. That was common knowledge. So ... I applied: Lafayette, Lehigh, Rutgers, Muhlenberg, you know.

KP: The schools that Rutgers used to play.

EB: Right. That was it. So that's how I got into Rutgers.

KP: Well, why not Lehigh? Was there a particular reason why you chose Rutgers?

EB: Well ...

KP: At the time. It's hard to think back.

EB: It was easier for my parents if they wanted to come down and see me, so they'd come down to Rutgers. We didn't have a
car in our family until 1939. First car we had was an Oldsmobile. Cost $739, new. And a further story ... on the war. I got the
car. My dad gave up driving during the war and ... we had friends in New York. And I drove to New York and one of my
wife's classmates in school, her brother was going to medical school up in Boston. And he needed a car in the worst way. You
know during the war we didn't make cars. And he wanted to buy my car. And I was having problems with it. It was eating oil
like mad, things like that. And he came to me and he said, I need a car desperately. He said, "I'll give you $2,000 for the car." I
paid $739. So I told him, I said, "It's not for sale. First of all, I need it. Second of all, it's not in good shape. Eats oil like mad,"
so forth and so on. And that didn't seem to bother him. Every time he saw me, wants to buy the car. Finally one day I said,
"Look I'll sell you the car. But two conditions. Number 1, I won't take 2,000 for it. I want 1,500 and second, if I sell you this
car, I don't want to see or hear about it ever again. It doesn't exist." And he jumped at it. So we made an arrangement. And I
was working at Squibb and he was coming down by train to pick it up. And I drove the car to work in the morning and he
came down and called me from the station. And it was about a quarter to twelve. I go out to the lot and low and behold, my
keys are in the car and the car was locked. Never did it. I guess it was a subconscious thing, I was losing this car. And he's
waiting for me. So I took a rock and I broke the window. Side-- we had side view, side, little side windows. And I drove it
down to him and we made the deal, ... and gee and it was all cash. And I took 50 bucks and I gave it back to him. He said,
"What's that all about?" And I said, "Don't you see the window's busted? I busted it this morning." I said, "That's to take care of
the window." So then ... he went to medical school, and ... I saw him one day and the curiosity just killed me. And I finally
asked him, "Well, when did you get rid of the car?" "What do you mean rid of it? I'm still driving it." About three years later. I
said, "What about the oil?" "I never had any problem with the oil." I don't know what he did. But anyway, that was that.

KP: The war basically doubled the value of a car, because of shortages.

EB: Oh yes, but then the problem was to get another one.

KP: Yeah, you'd ...

EB: Then we moved from Highland Park. I didn't want to stay in Highland Park. We moved out into so-called country. And it
was an isolated area. I needed a car desperately. My wife was pregnant and I couldn't get a car no how. This was 1946. And
then I heard about a guy in Union that was one of the lucky guys that got one of the Chevys that came off the line, they started
operating again. And I had to pay him a premium. I had to pay him $2,000 more than what he paid for the car in order to get it.
And that was ... common. Everybody was paying under the table to get cars. A real problem. So it extended quite a bit.

KP: You mentioned earlier that when you came to Rutgers, it almost sounded like the dean was not trying to welcome you. Yet
you still came to Rutgers. Did you ever experience any overt or any hints of anti-Semitism beside that one incident at Rutgers?

EB: No, I don't, I didn't have any problems. I think that a lot of it becomes an individual matter. We did have some problems
here.

KP: The chapel?

EB: No, I loved chapel.

KP: Really, you didn't mind chapel?

EB: Absolutely.

KP: Even with the overt Christian ...

EB: I learned more in chapel than in many of my classes here. I loved to go to chapel on Sundays. We had some of the most
interesting guys come speak. William Lyons Phelps, you know, he was an author and he wrote such wonderful pieces, he's
from Yale. He would come down and speak to us. And the governor came and spoke to us. Things like that. I looked forward
to chapel. Most of the guys wanted to duck it, but I looked forward to it. That didn't bother me. I'll tell you that I was in SAM.
Which was a-- you know there were three fraternities at that time: Tau Delt, Phi Ep and SAM. We had a tragedy happen to us.
We had a nice house on the corner of Hamilton and Easton, 78 Easton Avenue. And we had to give it up. We didn't own the
house, we rented it. And during the war, a lot of the houses closed, because our student population decreased. And the Phi
Gams, they lost their house. So, they took over our place and we went to a house over here on the corner of ... where is the
clinic now?

KP: Hurtado ...

TK: On Bishop Place.

EB: ... Bishop Place. On the corner of George Street and Bishop Place. There was a house there. I forget which fraternity it
was. This was after the war, just very slightly after the war. I was ... one of few guys that ... from past classes ... that was in the
area and I was sort ... I watched over the guys, the fellows. I wasn't in school at the time. We had a terrible fire. Two of the
fellows had just come back from the war, and the third one was a lame fellow and they had an illegal party in the house. See in
those days there, no women were allowed in the house. And two of the girls stayed over, but they were in separate rooms by
themselves, upstairs. Apparently ... it was a quiet thing. They ... had a little party among themselves and the fireplace was going
and they all went to bed and the fire kept going in the fireplace. A spark came and the house caught on fire and we lost three
kids. Two of them were two kids that had just come back from the war. It was a terrible tragedy, I'll never forget it. So that
wasn't very nice. And, of course, we were barred from the campus, but later on we returned.

But as far as the ethnic groups on campus, there were very few Jews and there was a Jewish student league run by the reform
group here in town, Anshe Emeth, Dr. Keller who was a marvelous guy. So we had that, and I was president of the group in
this particular year when they decided ... that they wanted a Hillel group in Rutgers and Keller and I went around the state and
we ... talked it up and so forth and so on. And eventually we got the Hillel group in here. And we met in different places.
Downtown there was an old Y in New Brunswick and we made the switch from the Jewish Student League to Hillel. It was
done in December of ... '42. I graduated in January of '43. And the speaker was Dr. Clothier, who was president of the
university at that time. And he probably was never in a temple in his life.

KP: From what I have read and people have told me, I could believe that easily.

EB: But anyway, he was a hell of a nice guy, a very quiet man, and he delivered a nice speech and we made the change. And
as I said, I was only there December, then I graduated in January so I was there for the transition, but then somebody else took
it over. I think one of the other fellows, and you know about Hillel since. Now, they are going through their own problems see,
with the new group.

KP: Yes, with the Chabad. In fact, it has led to a migration of ...

EB: What?

KP: It's led to a migration of part of Hillel to this campus, because they were often ...

EB: ... Well the building is an exact duplicate of the guy that started that group-- quite a building.

KP: Yes, yes.

EB: Now Hillel, you know, they're way back, and practically off campus. And they've got to show their face down at this end.

KP: Yes, yes.

EB: They've rented the place over here ...

KP: Yes ...

EB: ... on College Avenue. So that was that experience. Dr. Clothier, nice guy.

KP: What about Dean Metzger? Almost everyone has at least a memory of Dean Metzger and often stories connected to him.
What do you remember about him?

EB: Well, I liked Metzger. I never had any problems with him. But there was a problem. There was an assistant dean, and I
can't recall his name. He was a young guy and he really got himself into a mess of trouble. Some kid was apparently caught
cheating on a test and they hauled him before the ... assistant dean and he made some very bad remarks. And the community ...
rose up against him. But the solution was that he was told to go to classes and learn more about the group.

KP: Did this assistant dean made an anti-Semitic remark?

EB: Yeah.

KP: This was while you were a student ...

EB: No, it was after I left.

TK: I think another person we interviewed made mention of that incident.

EB: Somebody else told you about it?

KP: I think so. It was after the G.I. people come back.

EB: ... But they kept him on, and then he left. He died at an early age. But that was, you know, probably the only incident that
stood out. But fraternities didn't mix.

EK: What prompted you to first join your fraternity?

EB: What's that?

EK: What prompted you to join your fraternity?

EB: Well, ... when I came to school here I was at Pell Hall which was one of the new dorms and I had a roommate. He was a
hell of a nice guy, but he caused me problems.

KP: What kind of problems did he cause? You don't have to name the name, but ...

EB: He ... first of all he had a clock. [laughter] The loudest clock that was ever made and it disturbed me not so much in my
sleep, but in my work. It was tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. One day I got mad, and I opened the window and threw the clock
[out]. And he's a very quiet guy, wouldn't get into the run of things and so forth and so on. And we had, we had pledge day or
whatever it was, and I was invited to them, the three of them there. And I went over there and it looked like a good gang and
so I joined. And ... I wasn't too active initially. I mean, I'd go there. I still remained ... at the dorm. And I'd go there for lunch
and dinner whatever the case may be-- a meeting. And also to get beat with my pals. You know that we had the gym over here
and all of us would go down. We swam in the nude. And boy, you could tell everybody that had to have a session.

KP: Because you could see the welts.

EB: Oh my God, yes! I don't know how we kids lived through it. ... A couple of them that were on the football team, 220
pounders, they'd take that paddle and "wango!"

KP: Because my students have commented in reading a semester's worth of Targum's about about the strength of fraternity life
and how the hazing was very rigorous. Now hazing is officially prohibited. But in your day, they commented how there was a
picture in the Targum showing two students hogtied in public. And one said, a game was moved because of hell week,
because there was a conflict the administration wanted to accommodate.

EB: It was horrible. Well, they cut that out. Although, let's see my son, by the way, ... two of my three kids attended school
here. My son was a Rutgers grad and my daughter is a Douglass grad. Although they didn't do the graduate work here. They
did it in other places-- Purdue, Columbia, the University of Washington. They're spread all over, my three kids. ... By the way,
my son was a fraternity man. He was a DU, but he didn't-- after a year he dropped it. By the way, I didn't-- I lived at the
house only one year. I lived ... off campus across the street from Old Queens. There was a place next to the Church. When
(Nellie?) Rosenfeld had it, it was called the Zoo house. It was really a wonderful place. We had about twenty kids in there and
(Nellie?). (Nellie?) was a woman; she was in her eighties. Loved to play bridge, smoked like a fish and snored like a (------?),
the house shook. But I got to know (Nellie?) very, very well and she had a ... granddaughter who was a beautiful gal and I
introduced her to a friend of mine from Syracuse who came down here as a graduate student. That's when we were graduate
students. Introduced her and [him] ... and they eventually got married. So I became part of the family, see. But that place was
fantastic. My roommate there was Charlie (Obersetti?) who later on worked for DuPont. He was a ... genius, he was also a ...
chem student. I haven't seen Charlie in awhile. Well, I speak to him on the phone. But that was a wonderful thing. It doesn't
exist anymore. They tore the house down.

KP: What is there now? Do you know what is there now?

EB: What?

KP: Do you know what building is there?

EB: It's nothing.

KP: Just a lot.

EB: Just a lot, yeah.

EK: What kind of hazing did they have for the freshman when you first came in? Did they have any freshman hazing?

EB: Freshman hazing? Oh yes, but that was really nothing.

EK: Comparatively it was nothing?

EB: You wear this little dink and that was about the main thing. And most of the time they forgot about it. Every once in awhile
somebody wanted to have some fun. If you were on a date, they'd line you up and blast away. There wasn't that much hazing.
Later on some of them really did things that were atrocious. I remember one time, there were very few ... students that had cars
on campus, just the wealthy kids that had them. But we had one fellow, he was from Freehold and he had this car that was his
pride and joy. ... So one day a gang of us, we didn't have the key, we pushed it up George Street all the way to Douglass and
we hid it back there. It took him a week to find it. [laughter] He had a fit. Yeah.

EK: Did you have much interaction with the students from Douglass?

EB: Oh yes, we had that. You know, we had dances and a lot of dating. A lot of my fraternity brothers dated and eventually
married girls from Douglass. So it was an active thing. We used to call it ...

KP: The coop.

EB: "The coop." You know what that was. It was an eating hall up there, was Cooper Hall.

KP: Cooper Hall.

EB: My very good friend and a classmate of mine, Lou Lasagna, his father was a chef at Cooper Hall. Lou eventually went on
and he became an M.D. and he's the dean at, oh what do you call it, medical schools up in New England now, Tuft. ... My
class, we were a small class, but we turned out some top notch people ... and we lost a lot of guys in the war. ... We were the
first war class.

EK: Did you see a difference in the atmosphere of the campus between say your freshman year and a couple of years later
when the war was in full swing, and a lot of the guys had left to go fight the war? Was there a difference in the atmosphere, can
you describe that?

EB: Well, it was the first indication that Rutgers was growing, see. When I first came here it was a quiet little college, ... the
average class was about four or five hundred and you had fifteen to sixteen hundred people on campus, all men. Of course,
during the war we were just filled with people coming here, and we also had the influence of Camp Kilmer. A lot of the fellows
came and dated women from Douglass and ... I think the word spread that there was a place called Rutgers through Camp
Kilmer. That was it.

KP: What was the impact of Camp Kilmer on the area because you were in the area?

EB: Oh, it was unbelievable. I mean, you get 100 to 150,000 men in there all the time.

KP: To put a 150,000 men in there overnight would be a lot even now, but then there was nothing in this area built up, except
for New Brunswick and Highland Park.

EB: That's right, there was nothing. I remember when ... the first building went up. ... The land that they bought, it used to be
what they called the poor farm, Piscataway township poor farm.

---------------------END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE ONE--------------------------------------

KP: You were saying that part of the land for Camp Kilmer was the Piscataway poor farm.

EB: Yeah.

KP: And you just remember this round-the clock operation to build it.

EB: Oh yeah. And we'd drive out there once in awhile to see what was going on. And they just, before your eyes ... buildings
were going up right and left. And you see, they would bring the train in ... and it was secret, and they'd take them out at night to
go to the ships in New York Harbor. And then they'd have reveille in the morning. When I left Highland Park, we bought a
house, we live at Lake Nelson which is just-- I walked to Camp Kilmer from there. But then I had something to do with Kilmer
later on. A number of my relatives went through there, and then we had the Hungarian situation, I don't know if you're familiar
with that. Someone must have told you about that.

KP: I actually heard about it for the first time from a very odd source. When I was courting my wife in Massachusetts, the local
florist where I always used to buy flowers when I'd visit-- one day we got to talking. Literally our last time up there, before we
moved down after we'd just gotten married. And she said she had come through as a young refugee to Camp Kilmer and that
was the first time I learned of the role of Camp Kilmer's as a refugee site.

EB: Yeah. Well, you know why. There were two reasons why they brought the Hungarians here. Number one, the camp was
available. That side of the Kilmer was really an Italian prisoner of war camp. They'd bring all the Italian prisoners here, kept
them in there. But the other thing was that Johnson and Johnson, their main source of labor, they'd import people from
Hungary. So there was a whole community of Hungarians here and they adopted them. So that worked out well.

But I wanted to tell you what happened with Kilmer. ... I was president of the Board of Education in Piscataway, when I first
moved in, there were six thousand people. We grew like Topsy. And we needed new schools, so we built a number of them,
but we couldn't keep up with it and there came a time when we needed classrooms in a hurry. So somebody ... down in
Baltimore was attempting to build these motor homes, not motor homes, but ...

KP: ... modular ...

EB: ... modular homes, mobile homes that convert into a classroom. But the state Department of Education wouldn't okay
them. Didn't meet their specs. So one day, ... I'd been driving past Kilmer, and all these buildings were standing there empty. I
said, we've got to do something about that. So we went to the Defense Department. ... We obtained ten buildings, and, of
course, they were nothing, just a shell. Our maintenance department, and the board and some volunteers, and we started to
build classrooms. And they met state specifications and we opened ... ten classrooms and eventually we got more and we had
the Kilmer school. It's still in operation. We don't use them any longer, but there's a church school now. St. Timothy's Church
School.

KP: They're using your classrooms?

EB: It's whole little campus there. Take a ride over there and see. And we started it.

KP: I think that is interesting.

EB: And then we bought a building across the way. It was an officer's club and we made that the administration building for the
board. And that's still there, but no longer belongs to us. A kindergarten school is there now. So we utilized those things and
people came from all over the country to see what we had done.

KP: What year did you convert these buildings?

EB: That was about '53,'54.

KP: So it was before 1956.

EB: Yeah.

KP: And Kilmer remained a base until ...

EB: Oh yeah.

KP: ... I mean for awhile afterwards.

EB: It still is a base.

KP: Yeah, there is still a small one there.

EB: Well, there's the Nike base there. The first rocket, when the United States was at Kilmer, they had the first ones there and
then they built this building to repair the rockets. That one is still utilized. And the national guard operates out of there. There's a
lot of history in that place.

KP: Oh, I know. We did a lecture/documentary and filmed it in the old paymaster's building that is now used by the Office of
Television and Radio. The building is complete with the old safe.

TK: Yeah, the building is up to standard, but you can very much tell it was used by the military.

EB: Yeah, right. Yeah, I've been in that building. ... When Clinton spoke here, they made a video of it.

KP: Okay.

EB: ... and I went over there to collect it.

KP: Oh, yes. It's there.

EB: So that's when I was in the thing. So that's good. ... A lot of the things [from Kilmer] were utilized.

KP: You came to Rutgers in 1939 and one of the things we found in reading Targum, President Clothier initially said, "This is
Europe's war." He greeted the freshman in 1939 and said, "This is Europe's war. No need to get involved." He later would
become more interventionist minded. But what did most of your friends and your acquaintances and students in general think
about the coming of war, say in 1939,1940, and 1941? There's a lot of people have said there wasn't a great awareness, that
the war really came out of bolt of nowhere. But others said that there was, in fact, a lot of activity and a lot thought about the
war.

EB: Well, you know what, frankly, the war didn't impress us fellows until Pearl Harbor. That made the change, of course, but
we had ROTC. I was in ROTC, and we continued on as we always did. ... I don't recall any extra changes that occurred there.
But I don't think it made that much of an impression on us.

KP: Really, even though you had come out of Irvington from this background where ...

EB: Nah.

KP: It didn't ...

EB: Played no part in it. ... We didn't get angry or say we're going to fight them and so forth and so on. This was something that
came with time. In fact, what occurred as far as the Nazis were concerned and the Holocaust. At the beginning of the war, very
few people knew about it. There was only this wonderful woman I was telling you about. My friend's mother who made us
knowledgeable about it, because she took a tremendous interest in it. The average person wasn't aware of it. They were aware
of the Bund, because it was played up in the papers and the camps that they had there. But there wasn't that much. It took
Pearl Harbor to do it, and you know, Roosevelt was a smart guy. He knew that he needed something boom, to startle us.

TK: What was the atmosphere on campus as you were in your senior year seeing how they put you in school over the summer
in order to get you out by January?

EB: Oh, we didn't mind it.

KP: Even as science majors you did not mind?

EB: No, ... I think many of us were pleased. First of all it got us out six months in advance. And then some of the fellows were
really enthused about going into the service. In fact, some of them went up to Canada ... and joined the armed force[s] through
there. But there were no rallies that I recalled or anything like that. Patriotic rallies. Things just flowed. But when the draft
started, that's when things got hot.

KP: You mentioned on your survey that you dislocated a shoulder. How did that happen?

EB: Well, interesting enough, it happened in Olympic Park. They had a terrific pool there, and I used to love to swim and I
dove in one time and almost went to the bottom. But this shoulder of mine dislocated itself. And the doctor got it back in place
and he didn't operate on it. He just said, "It will take care of itself." But then it would start to come out. In fact, it got to such a
point where I could sneeze and it would come out. And I learned how to put it back myself. I could roll it in. He showed me
how to do it. It'd roll back in. But there were times when I couldn't get it back in, because there was a stress on it so then I'd
have to go to the hospital. And they'd put me under anesthesia and they'd get it back in. But I had that at Squibb and I taught
my guys ... how to throw it back in, if it came out. And it would come out maybe once every month, or twice a month.

KP: It sounds like something very, I mean, you were very conscious of it this could happen.

EB: There was no question that it could happen. Then what happened was, about seven or eight years afterwards, it stopped
and I didn't have it for a long time. And I remember I drove down to Raleigh, North Carolina one time in March, and we had a
freakish storm. And I went down the night before my appointment. And ... the ground was frozen and ice. I was going to dinner
and it was downhill and there were steps. And I slipped on the step and went back and I put my arm out like that to save
myself -- and the thing came out and it hadn't been out in over five years. And I could not get it to go back in and it was very,
very painful, I can assure you of that. And I went to dinner and the waiter looked at me; said, "What's the matter with you?
You're as white as a sheet." I said, "Oh, nothing." So the next morning I went to my appointment. And the fellow looked at me,
he said, "Hey, you look terrible. What's the matter?" And I told him what had happened. He said, "Oh, you've to get to the
hospital right away." And there were no hospitals in that immediate area. There were sort of satellite hospitals, and he took me
over there and the first thing the doctor asked me, he said, "When did this happen? Fifteen, twenty minutes ago?" I said, "No,
last night." He said that's impossible. You couldn't stand the pain. I said, "Here I am." And he tried. He couldn't get it in. Then
he put me under anesthesia and ... relaxed me and he rolled it back in. And here I was and it was Friday. Friday was my day to
go home and I never missed a Friday to go home. So he said, "You've got to spend a couple days here." And I said, "Like hell.
I'm rolling out." He said, "You've got to stay." "No, I've got to go." So I called my wife. Oh, I didn't have my hospitalization
number or anything like that. So I called my wife and it was about two o'clock in the afternoon. She said, "Where are you?"
and I told her, "I'm in Raleigh." She said, "What's happened?" and I told her. The doctor gets on the phone. He said, "He's got
to stay here." And she says, "Sure keep him there." And I said, "No." To make a long story short, I drove home that night with
one arm. He had taken it and bandaged it up. ... I drove home the 450 miles to Jersey.

EK: How did your shoulder injury affect your time in ROTC? Did it make it more difficult?

EB: My work?

EK: ROTC.

EB: ... I was out of ROTC. ... So that didn't affect me there. But it kept me from swimming thereafter.

KP: Did this injury happen when you were in college or did this happen before?

EB: It happened in college.

KP: Because you had fenced and you had participated in track.

EB: Yeah. It happened in my junior year, I think it was.

KP: How did it feel to be a civilian during the war, because there were not many people your age that were around. Even
though you were doing very important work, but still you were ...

EB: Well, let's put it this way. I was, I might as well have been overseas, because my work kept me going almost twenty hours
a day. So it was from my house to work and from work to the house. I didn't go anyplace. Couldn't go anyplace. And my wife
was going to graduate school in New York. There were many times when I had the midnight shift. Started at eleven till six in the
morning. And I'd get home and she'd be leaving the house to go to New York to school. And I'd be going up to get some
sleep. But we had hell of a lot of great guys. I told you about some of them. And what we did was, in the summertime there
was the Lawrenceville Country Club in East Brunswick. It doesn't exist any longer. There are houses there. So we'd get done
work at six in the morning and we'd go play golf. Just five or six of us. And we spent a lot of time on the golf course. And then
we'd go home and go to bed. Or in the wintertime, we'd go skiing. And that's how we kept occupied. But that was the extent
of my travelling. Let's put it that way.

KP: So your memories of the war are working a lot, occasionally playing golf or skiing. But playing golf and skiing happened in
rare instances.

EB: Yes it was.

EB: ... and really sleeping.

EB: Right, sure. We were too busy.

TK: Did you keep in touch with any of your classmates who were overseas?

EB: Oh yes, many of them. Yeah.

TK: And what did you think as you received their letters was it an odd feeling to be home while they were all away?

EB: Well, they had these letters that they had. I wrote them, they wrote me. ... When they came home, we saw each other.
And I'm still friends with them. In fact, one guy, Joe Fantl, was a very good friend of mine. He went into the army and then he
moved down to South Carolina and I lost track of him. And I was determined to find him. So about three years ago I started to
make inquiries about him. His parents were dead and most of the members of his family were gone. ... And I was at the home
... of a friend of mine one day and his sister was there. So ... we got to talking. She lives in Maplewood and I lived in Irvington.
And we started to compare notes. And I said, "Do you know a family, Fantl?" She said, "Oh yes, I know them. My husband
was related to one of the Fantls in Maplewood." So she told me who, and I knew him. He was my friend's cousin. And from
there I tracked him back, and I located him in Rehoboth Beach in Delaware. I called him and had a reunion. I'm going to stop
down and see him. I haven't seen him in years.

KP: You have been very active over the years in Rutgers. I mean, partly from the fact that you lives so close in Piscataway, but
that does not fully explain it. Any reasons for the involvement? I mean when people ask you, why are you so involved as an
alum?

EB: Well I'll tell you. First of all, I was president of the local chapter of the American Chemical Society. That was a lot of years
ago. So I kept in touch with the chemistry fellows that way. But I had to let a lot of these things go, when I went to Washington.
I was down there 27 years. So I lost track of that aspect of it. But when I came home again-- I became interested in art when I
was down in Washington. I became very interested in art and I became a collector. I went to Catholic U to take some courses
in art down there, and after I took them I decided, an artist I'm not. So I'll become a collector.

KP: What type of art do you collect?

EB: Contemporary American art. So, of course, I became interested in the Zimmerli and joined the Friends. And I'm now
president of the Friends and very, very active. Talking about keeping busy, that's a full time job plus.

KP: Well the Zimmerli has really become a national museum. In the last twenty years, it's really grown.

EB: ... Oh yeah. It's a marvelous place and we're making a name for ourselves and we all work hard at it. And, of course, the
other thing was that I lived close to the university. See, I could walk to the university from my home. So when May came and
we had our class reunions, I was always there. And then my kids would join me for the parade ... and that kept me going. But
once again, when I went to Washington, I ... had to let that go. But when I came home again, I became active in it. And the
other reason was that I had some very close friends who were also active. Stew Kahn and Frankie Travisano ... kids like that.
So we'd always march. Sometimes there was three of us that marched. We three.

KP: You were fairly tied to this area, because you could have easily moved your family down to Washington, D.C. I am
making an assumption on your wife, but your family did not move to Washington. Instead you had a long commute.

EB: Yeah, well, I'll tell you why. I get that question asked of me all the time. Number one, ... we had three kids and they were
all in school up here. And every time we wanted to make a move, one of the kids was about to graduate and I didn't want to
disturb them then. So that was one thing. That's a good excuse, let's put it that way. The other thing was that we took an AFS
student in. We were the first ones to have one in Piscataway. She was from New Zealand and I didn't want to throw her out. In
fact, Rosemary is a member of our family now. We sort of adopted her and she was at our home just two weeks ago. She lives
in New Zealand.

KP: How many years has it been since came over?

EB: Almost 30 years. We've kept up with her. We've been to New Zealand and she has a key to the house and everything. So
...

KP: So she really is part of the family; giving someone a key to the house makes ...

EB: I used that ... the doors are always open for her anytime. She is one of the great women of New Zealand. At one time, the
Prime Minister of New Zealand, the first person he saw every morning was Rosemary.

KP: What did she do?

EB: She was in the Parliament. I mean, not a member of Parliament. She ran all the communications and information sources for
the Parliament, the whole Parliament. And the prime minister would come in the morning. "Rose what's happened during the
night?" She had to feed him all the information. Then she became, like the head of the whole county and at the present time
she's head of the whole county. She's written a number of books. And everyone in New Zealand knows her. Two weeks ago I
think the whole center of New Zealand was in our house. My fax was working back and forth to New Zealand. She's married
and her husband is a professor at Victoria University. And she has two kids. ... And they, the New Zealanders, are great at ...
getting grants. They travel all over the world. So, when they go travelling, the kids stay with us, the two children. But now
they're not kids any more. The oldest one is 23; the youngest one is 21-- two girls. ... So anyway, that was part of the deal. But
the most important thing was, being a young firm and the type of work that we did with the Defense Department. We had one
product and, as I say, we ate when we had a contract and when we didn't have a contract, we starved.

KP: So it was always feast or famine.

EB: That's right. It was feast or famine. And I didn't want to bring the family down there and then ... we had that many times.
You know the Defense Department is not a faultless place, they make mistakes. For instance, let me tell you what happened. ...
In between, we worked like hell to get a contract. And I'm down at the Pentagon one day and this colonel is telling me. He
said, "You know Elliot, the best thing you can do, is to go up to your office, close the door and throw the key away. There are
no more contracts coming up." So I didn't say anything to the other two guys about it. Because I know that in Lancaster
Pennsylvania, where the guy has charge of all the supplies, and he is the first guy to say we need a contract. We need material.
He was working on a contract and a week later, we had a three million dollar contract. So the guy, the colonel at the Pentagon,
he wasn't up with the times. So we had that ambiguity-- that yes and no, yes and no, yes and no. And then my wife was a
school social worker tied in with Edison over here. And we decided, let the status quo be. And the other thing was that it really
didn't matter where I lived. I did so much travelling that I don't know where the hell I was from one day to the other.

KP: So while a lot of your work was based in Washington, you also went west to St. Louis.

EB: Our offices were in Bethesda, because the chief honcho lived there and he was at the NIH. That's the case in many
companies. You take Squibb. They built new research centers and so forth and so on. They didn't build them here. They built
them down in Princeton, because the chief honcho lived down there. He didn't want to travel seventeen miles to work. He
wanted to walk there. So that's what happens. But anyway. And then the other thing was, as I said, we started with (Wyeth?)
Laboratories doing our manufacturing. They were in Marietta, Pennsylvania, but we had-- You know I have a problem with my
voice.

KP: Do you need a drink of water?

EB: No, I'll take [break].

KP: You have given a great explanation of why you did not move to Washington.

EB: Yeah, why I didn't [move to Washington]. ... Again to give you an idea, a quickie idea [of] my travels in one week. One of
our best customers was Israel, because they're always under constant threat of warfare there. So we had to have a meeting
with them. ... It was an emergency meeting. I was in Washington on Saturday and we flew from Washington to Paris on the
Concorde [in] three hours and fifteen minutes. And from there we grabbed a plane and we flew from Paris to Tel Aviv. My
cousin who lives in Israel traveled a number of miles to come down. He'd heard I was going to be there. And he came down.
And they had the fence around it ... and the army was there with cars waiting for us and all I could do was wave to him. ... I
didn't see him again. But we had our meetings. It was a two day meeting. And I was running back and forth between Jerusalem
and Tel Aviv.

Then we had ... our next meeting was in London, so we flew directly from Tel Aviv to London, and we had a meeting at the
airport. I and one of the top notch people from the pharmaceutical game from Italy. He met us at the airport ... and some of our
associates from Holland. We had ... our manufacturer for us ... was in Holland. Then we flew back to Washington on the
Concorde. My next meeting, ... a day later was in Florida. So I told Thel, I said, "Meet me at Dulles." I had a plane picked out
that I was going to board ... at Dulles and we'll go down to Florida. My son was in Florida at the time and the meeting was at
Tampa. Then we landed and I drove a car, picked my son up. He was about a hundred miles south. ... We were together at
the meeting in Tampa. Got done at that meeting. I flew back to Washington, my wife went back home, my son went back to
Florida. My next meeting was in Denver. ... I flew to Denver, took care of that meeting, flew to Calgary, Canada. My next
meeting was in Medicine Hat, up in Canada. ... The Canadians were ... good customers and friends, friends of ours. And they
have a secret camp up in that area, a couple hundred miles north of Medicine Hat where the Brits bring their tanks to do
maneuvers there, see how they are. And also their chemical warfare department is up there. So we got to Calgary, and drove
to Medicine Hat, which is about 200 miles. We had a meeting there and then we went up to this, the other camp of theirs, had
the meeting there, came back and went to Calgary. In Calgary, well the next meeting was in Toronto. Had the meeting there
and then we flew back to Washington. All in one week.

KP: So you racked up a lot of frequent flyer miles it sounds like.

EB: A lot of miles.

KP: You had alluded to the Pentagon, the military sometimes did screwy things in just the way, it is a big bureaucracy. In terms
of your relationship with the Pentagon, which was a longstanding one, what were the strong points and what were some of the
problems? You mentioned when the colonel said there were no contracts and you knew better, it sounds like. What were the
strengths of the relationships and what were the weaknesses? What did you think needed to be improved?

EB: Well, I had a lot of good personal relationships with the people in the Defense Department. All the way from the privates to
the generals and, on the whole, I found them to be a wonderful group of people. You know they're no different than we are.
Some of them try to pull some fast acts and others take life easy, and things like that, but on the whole I made very good
friends with many of them. And I've entertained them in my home. I've been in their homes. One guy in particular, I'm a stamp
collector and I happen to collect New Zealand stamps. One day I'm at a meeting with the commandant of one of the posts.
And he is talking to some guy and ... what's he talking about? He's talking about New Zealand stamps. So, of course, that's a
buddy of mine and it turns he is a very important cog in the wheel. So we still maintain our relationship. But the army wasn't out
to cause us harm. We needed them and they needed us. So most of the time we worked together very well. But once in awhile
you got a guy, ... you know, he just wanted things his way and that was it. He wouldn't lean on either side. So we had to work
with him in that manner, his manner.

KP: It almost sounds like your account is that a lot of it is personality driven. Not completely, because you have to have a
product, but still ...

EB: Absolutely. That's very important, very important.

KP: Did you ever see competitors who just did not realize that?

EB: Oh sure, some of them couldn't handle it. You know, the interesting thing is that our dealer, ... the one that we worked with
in Europe was Phillips, you know Phillips Electronics. It's the largest, it's the GE of Europe.

KP: It's a Dutch firm.

EB: Dutch firm. They were in pharmaceuticals, so we gave them, allowed them to use our patents and they sold the product to
all the European countries. And as long as our patent was ours, during a seventeen year period, everything went fine. As soon
as the patent ran out, they became our competitors here in the states. ... So what they did was, they established an office, and
they bid against us at a much lower price, because labor is cheaper in Europe and they won one of the contracts. Well that was
a disturbing situation. But we had it figured out how to work this deal. So what we did was, we convinced the United States
Defense Department that this was a very, very, very important item and that the item had to be made in the states, because if a
war occurred, we had to produce them here. And they were convinced. And they wrote in the specs, that the item had to be
produced in the United States. And once it was produced in the United States, we were on the same territory as they were.
They had to use American labor.

KP: That was more expensive.

EB: Sure. Up went the price and they couldn't produce it anywhere near our price with using American labor.

KP: It sounds like some of your initial jobs growing up as a kid, being a shoe salesman, being at Olympic Park, some of those
skills even though you were doing more sophisticated stuff, it was some of the same principles.

EB: ... That's right. ... We had, from the very first day, when we started to produce, we owned all the molds for the plastic and
so forth and so on. They were ours, but we hadn't paid for them yet. We had a deal where the firm said, "We'll make them for
you when you get a contract and then you'll pay us for it." So when the contract arrived, they wanted to be paid immediately.
And as I said, we were poor as [a] church mice. So we had to get a nice sum of money to pay for the molds before they'd let
them use it. Where in the hell to get it? Banks wouldn't give you any money. You didn't have any credit for things like that. I
worked there for nothing at the time. So I researched the thing, and this was after the war, and found an old law that they had
failed to remove from the books. And it was ... Navy Department thing which says [that] when there's a situation like that,
when your supplier can not meet certain things due to money, we'll make them what they called a V loan. Everyone else
removed it, ... except the navy. And I found it and I brought it to him one day and I said, "Give me a loan." And he gave it to
us.

KP: This was a bank that ...

EB: ... We took it to the bank with a statement, that the navy guaranteed it. So, you have to do these things.

KP: You mentioned, in terms of the development of nerve gas, that the Russians got the physical plants, but the Americans got
the know-how. I assume some of that know-how is the German scientists.

EB: Well, they knew how to make the gas. We weren't really interested in making the gas. My company wasn't.

KP: But the Americans had the know-how of how it was made.

EB: Oh yeah. They knew how to make it. There was no problem there. But they, the Russians, picked up the plant physically
and moved it to Russia. So we had it up here and we'd just build a plant, that's all.

KP: So you did not have any contact with the German scientists who made nerve gas?

EB: Oh, at that time we couldn't. We couldn't.

KP: You just got the specs for the antidote?

EB: Well, I'll tell you that there were certain of the Russian empire that we were in contact with and Yugoslavia was one of
them. And I'm talking about antidotes. That's the thing that we were interested in. See there are four types of nerve gas. Three
of them we had antidotes for. The fourth one was a different type, and there was no antidote known for it. And that's where the
big push was, to find the antidote for the fourth type called Soman. And that's the thing I was interested in and I constantly
searched the literature and I met people. And the Yugoslavs had some crazy things, but they had some of them that seemed to
work. So ... we tried them all out, anything that came along. We couldn't dismiss anything. So we had contacts like that.
Yugoslavia was one.

KP: While the cold war is raging.

EB: Right.

---------------------END OF TAPE TWO, SIDE TWO--------------------------------------------

Kurt Piehler: This continues an interview with Mr. Elliot Bartner on November 4, 1996 at Rutgers University in New
Brunswick, New Jersey with Kurt Piehler and

EK: Elise Krotiuk.

KP: Elise, did you have any other questions?

EK: I'm thinking.

KP: Before you moved to Washington, you were very active in Piscataway. I mean you were active at Rutgers, but you were
also president and member of the board of education. It sounds like you took an active role in a lot of organizations. How did it
come that you were in the school board?

EB: How did I get to be on the school board?

KP: Yes, were you asked to run? Did you think you should run?

EB: Well, actually. It was a group of people who came to me and asked me to run. And we had an interesting group at that
time. We had a number of Rutgers profs who were very interested in doing something about the Piscataway school system.
They didn't want to be 100% Rutgers, and I knew them and they asked if I would be the outsider, their outsider in the thing. So
I ran and ... I was elected to the board. And the worst job you could possibly get ... that was the head of the committee on
transportation. Well, you know what school bus-- every mamma and papa wants their kid picked up in front of their door and
taken to school. So anyway, I went through the hassle of that. But in my second year, I was elected president and we had the
biggest growth of any system around here cause Piscataway was growing like mad and we ... didn't have a high school prior.
And we sent our school ... [children] to adjoining [towns], we went to New Brunswick, and Metuchen, Bound Brook and so
forth. ... And we went to five different schools and it separated the township as a result. One kid at one end of the town wasn't
aware of the other kid at the other end of the town. They went to different high schools, things like that. And we were anxious
to bring our kids together. So we finally came around, decided we'd build a high school. We bought 60 acres of land on Old
Hoes Lane and when we had the ground breaking, we expected about 200 people and only about ten showed up. What was
the problem? They couldn't locate the place. It was so hidden in the fields there. It was all farmland. But anyway, we built this
marvelous school. We had labor problems, ... we were about three weeks into school before we opened the high school. So
we had to get this kid to school and I put up two great big tents and we had a school in tents for a couple of weeks. Then the
schools opened. And ... that business with Kilmer; we had that. And we built, I think we built seven schools in my
administration.

KP: Which is a lot of building.

EB: A hell of a lot of building. Yeah. So, then, of course, when I left to go to work in Washington, I couldn't do that and I just
subsided with ... all the things I was doing in the town and at Rutgers. But when I came back, ... the phone was ringing
constantly. Do this, do that, do that, do this, you know. And unfortunately, ... I'm an easy guy-- ... I don't like to say no. ... I'm
on nine different committee things right now.

KP: So what are involved in? It sounds like you resumed your level of activities. Besides the Zimmerli, what else are you
actively involved in both at Rutgers and at Piscataway?

EB: Well, I'm on library board. I'm on the Lake Nelson Board. ... I was president of the Jewish Historical Society which takes
an awful lot of time. And the Zimmerli. And a ... couple of other things. Oh, the Cultural Arts Committee of the township and ...
 

KP: That sounds like quite a schedule.

EB: If you look at my calendar, it's tough to shove another thing into it. And then I'd like to see my kids once in awhile.

KP: Your children. Now that you mention children. None of your children served in the military.

EB: No. That's interesting isn't it? My son, my oldest son, was in the draft to go to Vietnam and fortunately he ... his number
wasn't called. He and his boyfriend were in the same situation. ... So ... he didn't go. My daughter obviously didn't go and my
youngest one was too young. So that's the way it went. I've got five grandchildren and who knows what happens with them. I
hope to hell they never have to go. One of my grandchildren is ... adopted from Thailand. I have a Thai granddaughter. She's
down in North Carolina.

KP: And this is going way back. I meant to ask it earlier, I interviewed someone whose father also had a store in Irvington and
they had enormous problems with the Sunday blue laws.

EB: Sunday blue laws?

KP: Yeah. Did your father have any problems with them?

EB: I don't think we had blue laws in Irvington. I don't recall them.

KP: Yeah, it might have been another town and I'm mixing the towns up.

EB: Seems to me my father had his store open. But on Sundays, he was only open a half a day. That I remember, but
otherwise he was open. ... He didn't open the store on a religious holiday.

KP: But he was open on the Sabbath?

EB: Yeah.

KP: How active were they in the synagogue, growing up?

EB: ... My family wasn't too active, because they were tied up all the time. I was. When I was in high school I was in AZA and
all those groups, because my friends were. I came to Rutgers, I belonged to the league there. I had to persuade a lot of my
fraters, from not doing things that they shouldn't do. I helped them out on that. ... By the way, my wife's going to Israel
tomorrow. I'm not too happy about that, but she ... wants to go.

KP: What is she going for? Just for a visit or to see?

EB: Well, visit. Yeah. This is her fifth time. She's going over. So, we'll see hopefully there's no messes occurr[ing] there while
she's there. It's too bad what's going on there. I'm not happy with the guy that's running the place now.

KP: You're not a Net ... I always ...

EB: No. Bibi.

KP: Yeah. Just an observation, but I'd be curious in your response. You have remained a Democrat even though you were
very dependent upon the Defense Department. And usually, while it's something of a stereotype, usually those types become
Republican. Any thoughts on that observation?

EB: I voted for ... one Republican for senator and that was Senator Case. He was a wonderful, wonderful guy. I knew him and
I'll tell you, I think in the long run, that I vote for the man rather than the party, but it so happens that the Democrats were the
right guy. [laughter] ... But Case was a terrific guy. ... In Washington, ... in Congress they had the clubs, the state clubs for
people who were in Washington and I was active in the New Jersey group. So ... the congressmen would come and the
senators would come and we'd schmooze and things like that. I remember taking my young son down one time with me. He
came to visit me. And Thel used to give him a haircut. You know, she'd put one of those round ones. So Case, I was standing
there with him ... and talking with one of the guys. Case came over and we greeted each other. And he said to my young son,
he said, "You see that haircut you have. That's the way my mother used to give me a haircut." He was a senator. Did you ever
hear of Senator Case?

EK: No.

EB: You go to the library downstairs where Special Collections is and there's a room, Senator Case's room.

KP: There is Case's old furniture there.

EB: They brought his furniture in there. Things like that.

KP: Senator Case was actually my first vote. I specifically registered in the Republican primary to vote for Senator Case.

EB: You did?

KP: In 1978, because I had a feeling he was going to run into trouble.

EB: What year were you in? Were you a Rutgers grad?

KP: I didn't graduate from Rutgers. I graduated actually from Drew in 1982.

EB: From where?

KP: Drew, as an undergraduate. But I got my doctorate here.

EB: Drew? In Madison? ...

KP: Yes. But I got my doctorate here. My master's in 1985 and my doctorate in 1990.

EB: What did you get it in. In history?

KP: In history.

EB: Did you know Dick?

KP: The senior McCormick, I've only met a few times. I T.A.'d for his son one semester. I was his grader for a semester.

EB: Where are you from?

KP: I'm from the Lake Hopatcong area.

EB: ... River Styx.

KP: Yes, I didn't live close to it, but I know where it is.

EB: ... We almost got lost, three of us, in there one night. We used to go up to Hopatcong and go boating. We once went too
far and it became pitch black on the way back.

KP: Yeah, I can imagine.

EB: We almost landed up in the River Styx.

KP: Your son and daughter who have gone to Douglass and Rutgers, are they active at all in alumni affairs?

EB: No. ... I tried to get them a little active, but no. ... They're so busy; both of them are. Terribly busy and they're a long
distance away.

KP: And my research assistant who is doing a project on coeducation would love this question: how did you feel about Rutgers
becoming coeducational?

EB: I'm all for it.

KP: You didn't think that old traditions were being sacrificed?

EB: No. ... My granddaughter is a graduate of Phillips Exeter and that was an all male situation for what 200 years or so. ...
She went there and everybody got along beautifully. And have you ever been to Phillips Exeter?

KP: No.

EK: My cousin graduated from there.

EB: Have you?

EK: Yeah.

EB: You know, I think about 95 percent of the colleges in the United States would love to have that as a campus.

KP: Oh, I've heard about it and I have seen pictures of it.

EB: Can you imagine. A ten story building for a library for high school kids and designed by Kahn? Terrific. Wonderful
campus. ... No, I'm all for it.

KP: Is there anything we have forgot to ask you?

EB: I think we've covered the waterfront. There are a lot of things, but I ... wouldn't talk into the black box ... on them.

KP: No that's fine. We understand.

EB: ... Well it's been a real pleasure.

KP: No, thank you very much. We've enjoyed it a great deal.

----------------------------END OF INTERVIEW-------------------------------------------------------

Reviewed: 7/31/97 by G. Kurt Piehler

Edited: 8/6/97 by Tara Kraenzlin

Edited: 10/8/97 by Elliot Bartner

Entered: 10/13/97 by Eve Snyder

Reviewed: 10/15/97 by G. Kurt Piehler