Autobiography of David Chandler.

I was born the younger of my parents’ two children, on October 15, 1944, at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital, in New York. Except for two years when I was five and six years old, I spent my formative years in Great Neck, a north shore Long Island suburb of New York City, where I benefited from material comforts, excellent schools, and abundant opportunities for cultural and recreational activities. My father, Herbert S. Chandler, was trained as a toolmaker. He became a labor union leader in the 1930s, and then, near the end of the Great Depression, created H. S. Chandler & Co, a tool and dye firm that developed and held a valuable patent during World War II. Later, after surviving a heart attack in 1948, he sold the company and began another career as the East coast sales representative for a few small midwestern manufacturing firms. My father was the youngest of seven children in a poor Austrian Jewish immigrant family. His father died when my father was six years old. The oldest brother, Willy, supported the family, first on what seemed to be substantial earnings as a prizefighter and then on meager earnings as a janitor. The aftermath of prizefighting left Willy with life-long injuries that made most employment impossible. My father, like his older brother, was an excellent athlete and a local hero. He played semi-pro baseball. His older brother would not permit him to become a prizefighter. My mother, Sylvia, was the second youngest in a middleclass Russian Jewish immigrant family with four children. She had a college degree and sophisticated tastes in clothing, art, and literature. Around the time she met my father in the late 1930s, she worked as a comparison shopper and then as a buyer for Macy’s Department Store. My mother always enjoyed shopping. She also had very high expectations for my father, my sister, and me. As a young boy, I was not a good student. My sister Elsie was our family’s good student. I spent my time with music and athletics. My first entrée into music was playing drums. My mother convinced me that I would be a better drummer if I would also learn to play the piano, and piano became one of my great loves. I had a wonderful teacher that would reward me with a small lesson in jazz for every classical piece I would master. My repertoire of jazz became sufficiently broad that I could perform as the pianist in a dance band. This bandsthe “Blue Notes”splayed at functions throughout Long Island. Later in college, I used my piano-playing skills to introduce myself to young women, showing up at women’s dormitories throughout the Boston area, playing the piano. One woman, later to be my wife Elaine, found these performances annoying, but even she, my toughest critic, would eventually succumb. I loved almost all sports. For a child, I was a good baseball and basketball player. But by my middle teens, my small size had become a handicap that I could not surmount to my satisfaction. Trying to be “best” was important to me, so I decided to focus on tennis, believing that small size was not a significant handicap in tennis. The Australian tennis stars of that era, Ken Roswall and Rod Laver, were both small men, about my size. I was a good competitor, not a star, but good enough to obtain high rankings in collegiate tennis and a notable mention in a later United States Tennis Association listing. What I lacked in power I could often compensate for with determination. Until my 40s, when injuries and then cancer would limit my playing, tennis would be one of my greatest sources of enjoyment.