My Life and Times, part 3: Me and Science Fiction

Books have been an important part of my life for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Cliffside Park, a small urban town on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River, which had a marvelous view of New York City on the other side. Our house was on the main street Palisade Avenue, which was packed with traffic every Saturday during the summer as cars crawled along towards Palisades Amusement Park a few blocks away. Fortunately, we did not have to take our car out of the driveway for most needs, since a block from our house was a long line of stores, including a grocery store, deli, barber shop, shoemaker, druggist, tailor, and several liquor stores (whose only use to me and my friends was during the World Series when we would peek in each one on the way home from school to see who was winning, since the games were all afternoon games back then).

Also among those stores was Sal’s Stationery, which was our source for comic books (DC, of course, never Marvel!) and science fiction magazines. On Christmas morning, 1962, I discovered Worlds of IF in my stocking, and over the next three years–before we moved away to a suburban town without anything in walking distance–I bought all my copies of IF and its stablemates Galaxy and Worlds of Tomorrow there.

My other source of reading material was in the opposite direction along Palisades Avenue where lay the town library. I walked there many times during the summer with my brother Stephen, where I almost exclusively took out books with little rockets on their spine, the indication they were science fiction books. Several years before I ever discovered those wondrous magazines, I was reading books such as all of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, and The Light at the End of the Tunnel, which I recall as being one of my favorites, but whose author has totally vanished from my mind.

Sometime between discovering the library and discovering the magazines, I started reading Tom Swift, Jr. books, which were also wonderful until the adult-level reading in the magazines exposed them as somewhat watered-down for youngsters. But they were an important step in my discovering and growing to love science fiction, a love which has not faded even yet these nearly 50 years later!