Retired Professor interview-George

all right george yes george where are you from originally where did you grow up i was born in brooklyn i lived in brooklyn until i was almost 14 and then my parents moved to this neighborhood in manhattan and i have had the same apartment since 1951. wow how would you describe your childhood you had mom and dad yes i'm an only child and my parents were very nice reasonable wonderful people and they had a machine shop where they made precision metal products for airplanes for propellers i guess they're no more propellers and they were hoping i'd go into their business and when i started college i studied engineering but i more or less hated it and i didn't know there was such a subject as linguistics so i eventually switched to majoring in french and then in graduate school i discovered the word linguistics and went into linguistics in utah and i taught i taught linguistics mostly at the college of staten island city university but they also had a faculty exchange agreement with her bay university in bao ding china neither of which i had ever heard of and i went there and taught two separate spring semesters 1984 and 1989. so you're teaching foreign students how to speak how to speak english but i was also teaching the english majors linguistics it was a requirement if you were an english major to take linguistics which was taught in chinese but since there was a faculty exchange agreement one of their teachers had come to staten island met me took two courses with me in staten island went back to uh bauding and suggested that they hire me and that the link was that the english majors rather than taking the regular english course which is taught in chinese should take it in english taught by a native speaker of english in particular by his former teacher you speak beautifully by the way oh thank you and uh what's your view on how americans are speaking english today well about lots has changed a lot of slang a lot of stuff has changed people always put in the word like which they never used to do and that's a change and then now some parts of the country made a distinction between the words cut and caught c-o-t and c-a-u-g-h-t and some didn't and this distinction is disappearing so my grandson who lives in an apartment in the same building where i live uh says things like i caught cold sleeping in the cot which is very different from what new yorkers ordinarily say yeah there's a lot of other slang things that have become part of the yeah but i really hear people saying like all the time and uh you know i remember once years and years ago before it was that common being sort of startled when there were passers-by and a woman was saying she was like oh my god and i was like and i thought what an interesting construction yeah i think a lot of that came from the california that's very likely yeah and then i've heard people doing it who were not speaking english or not speaking standard english so one day i was in washington square and there was a black woman and she began her sentence with like she said like ain't nobody don't do that one of it was one of the most interesting people i've ever met here in new york was a cab driver who picked me up at jfk wants to take me to the city and it was a chinese man who i expected didn't speak any english because he looked like he was right off the boat from china except he talked like this he was from he grew up in an all-italian neighborhood he spoke exactly like vinnie and joey from the neighborhood one finds these things out sure it's part of the variety of new york it's fascinating but then a few minutes after i heard that woman say that there was another woman passing by speaking on the telephone in italian and she said like and i thought that was really interesting what how has new york city changed in all your years you're you're old i am 84. 84 and you lived here for most of your life pretty much all my life except two half years in uh china and two years in philadelphia and also my parents had a farm upstate new york but i never lived there year round but we spend summers and weekends there how has new york city changed over the decades i think it has become it feels safer maybe not right away not right now but mostly i feel it has grown safer and more expensive and more luxurious and generally nicer yeah i've been coming here since like 1990 and i the variety of like the grocery stores have improved tremendously drug stores all that stuff it was it's come light years from where it was then yes i really think it's wonderful it's filled with variety although now because of the covid things have shut down we were talking about how it used to be a 24-hour city and now it's not less so yeah and uh you you were married i have been married for 59 years oh you're still married your wife is around yes my wife is around and i have two daughters one of whom gave me these pants those are unforgettable yes and uh and the other one and my grandson have an apartment in the same building where i live those are the families all yes and my older daughter who gave me the pants lives two blocks north of me that's nice so the frozen north family is a family is a great thing to keep intact it is wonderful it's really wonderful what what have you learned in your 84 years what's what's important to you what do people maybe miss out on in their lives uh that's important one thing i feel i learned is it's no fun being angry you should try very hard not to be angry and calm down and if somebody's done something wrong well so what exactly and another thing i feel i've learned is you never can entirely understand how another person feels we we sense the world differently uh for one peculiar example when i was younger i could hear very high pitches i could hear dog whistles and i can still hear high pitches but i can no longer hear dog whistles but i mean that's just one example of how people are different from each other we taste things differently some people are green blind or red-blind most are not but i mean it's part of the difference but there are all sorts of little differences that we don't know how to talk about yeah one person's childhood can be very very different from others and that changes your perception of it it certainly does yeah and your childhood was great sounds like it was pretty much great uh i was really very happy with my parents although i didn't like being an engineering major in college but that was not too long that was for about two years or two and a half years till uh i very fortunately flunked physics i was happy that that happened do you have any regrets in your in your life well there were times when i said things to people that weren't kind and i'm sorry i did that one peculiar example i was a child and didn't quite know better but uh i had an and much older than my uh parents and she took care of her in-laws who were very very very old and it was a real task for her it was very it was hard work and they died within about a month of each other at the ages of i think 99 and 97 and my parents and i went to make a condolence call and i said to her oh you must be very happy and my parents said no no she's not happy and i said oh i know but i guess i wasn't aware of the fact that i was saying the wrong thing yeah you seem very happy mostly has most of your life been it's been mostly pretty good pretty good i've had some difficult experiences i left china the day after the tiananmen massacre the massacre was june 4th 1989 um the university where i was teaching drove me and my daughter to the beijing airport the next day june 5th and then we flew to tokyo where we had not made any plans to visit and so i discovered that tokyo has the best pizza in the world really well yes maybe i thought so because i had just run away from china but i think it really did that's funny do you believe in uh in luck well there's all sorts of things that are lucky and unexpected some people just have seemed to escape death over and over and over and then other ones tragically die yes these things really do happen and sometimes something happens and you think it's bad luck but it turns out to be good life absolutely that's what i've seen i very briefly had a job teaching at nyu my immediate superior was an extraordinarily nasty guy and i knew i wouldn't be rehired and at the end of the fall semester i quit the job and decided to spend the whole spring semester full time working on my dissertation although this was economically a problem but anyway i i made that decision and i finished my dissertation my advisor approved it set a date for defense of the dissertation and died ten days before my defense and you know if if if he hadn't already set a date i'd have had a new advisor who would have looked at it and said well maybe we can salvage it and so i was so lucky that i had gotten had this miserable guy at nyu who made me want to quit the job and it made me finish my dissertation while my advisor was still alive he died at the age of 41. well older generations always seem to disapprove of how the younger generations are just operating and functioning in the world what what do you think of younger kids now you see a lot of them at washington square park where we met well i feel mostly they're very pleasant and nice and interesting and on the other hand i think a lot of kids don't appreciate the fact that the united states is a democratic country and that there's freedom of speech and of course i've lived in china and very much became aware of the fact that there was no freedom of speech in china but uh i i am a little surprised that there is not much feeling of respect for democracy yeah yeah a lot of people just seem unhappy with everything about the united states well and then now we have all sorts of extremists running around so that's i mean i think they have the right to run around because i believe in freedom but they seem to be coming they are becoming increasingly dominant yeah a lot of these extremist groups voicing opinions right well once there was a guy giving a talk in washington square standing on a soapbox and saying there is no freedom of speech in the united states and i said to him you won't believe me but if you lived in the united states you could say that and nothing would happen to you and he said i don't understand i do live in the united states and i said and you just said that and you weren't afraid to say it and you haven't been arrested and he said america is racist so that was his way of changing the subject do you feel like the older generations like your generation understood hard work and delayed gratification more than these younger kids do that's a hard question i'm not sure i didn't oh yeah you told me on the way here that you like to be lazy yes yes no i never really liked hard work that much and uh and when uh well when i was a child i didn't eat potatoes and some of my aunts and uncles said to my parents if you don't make me him eat potatoes he'll grow up to be a bum and then when i became a professor one of my uncles said see so he felt being a professor was being a bum and of course you don't quite do any hard work once on our farm my mother and i were trying to shovel out a cesspool for some reason to make some repair i can't remember what the situation was and it was too much for us and we saw the grandson of the neighboring farmer his name was arnold and we asked if he could do it and arnold could dig much much better than my mother and me put together and after the job was finished then we paid arnold my mother said what a wonderful young man if only you could be like arnold and i said if you dig you get paid the minimum wage and my mother said what's money if you can dig like that and sometimes my mother was very witty what was your favorite your favorite decade of your life oh such a hard question um possibly the 80s when i which included my living in china even though it included some scary experiences but it's hard to know a lot of people were making good money in the 80s i was always i always made sufficient money i mean you know you don't get rich if you're a professor but but i always had a reasonably satisfactory salary and i did have tenure which is very wonderful that's great what was what's your favorite thing and least favorite thing about new york city uh my favorite thing is the variety and the openness and my least favorite thing i think is the noise at night excellent but it's okay i i've gotten to deal with it yeah it's part of new york city right what would you say is the most important lesson you've learned in your life um possibly to be tolerant of other people and to feel you'll never fully understand them and somehow i taught myself not to get angry and i think that's i don't know how that happened but it did happen it's a great one all right george thank you so much for sharing your story oh thank you thank you i wish you the best of luck and you too you

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Length: 16min 11sec (971 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 01 2021