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When I was twelve, I’d taken an interest in tropical fish, working
my way up from a ten-gallon tank to a forty-gallon show tank. Eventually my father had a
wall of cases built into my bedroom, floor to ceiling, and I started breeding fish. There
were a few large retail/wholesale tropical fish aquariums downtown around Canal Street and
one near the Battery (at the lower tip of Manhattan). The choices in fish weren’t as
great then as now, limited to perhaps twenty species. I bred fantailed guppies (something
new on the market), black mollies, green heleri (commonly called swordtails), red
platties, and angel fish. I crossbred heleri with black mollies and got black swordtails;
I bred heleri with platties and got red swordtails. In two years, I had twenty-five tanks
on the shelves, each with its own filter pump, chugging away (they ran on belt drives
then). My mother would come into my room and say, "How can you sleep with all this
noise?"
What did I do with all the baby fish? I sold them, of course. I bought
empty cardboard coffee containers at a White Castle for about two cents each and used them
over and over. On Saturday mornings, I’d take the subway downtown to one of several
aquariums where I’d sell
 a few hundred of my very young fish, maybe five weeks old,
for a penny each, and buy some new equipment and supplies. After a while, my hobby
supported itself with a little left over for extra movies.
It always seemed natural to me to work with animals. I’d spent
the summer when I was 10 on a dairy farm in New Jersey, and I’m probably one of the
few "city boys" who knows how to milk a cow. Later I joined the Boy Scouts and
worked my way up to Heart Scout with a sash of merit badges. I went to Scout camp for two
weeks each summer, where I learned to swim and ride horseback. I remained a scout until I
was sixteen.
Boy Scout Brand Citrus Label Poster
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