Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-6
BALTIMORE: Suburban, sidewalks, walking the dog. It was a nice community, and because my
parents did have this group of people they were close to, many of whom lived within a short
walk of us, we’d meet them in the evenings on the street. So it was a comfortable, very placid
upbringing. There was a pool—Great Neck is broken up into little villages, and there was the
local pool and tennis court and whatever, so you really didn’t even have to go to camp.
Although I did go to camp, for many years.
LIPPINCOTT: Just for the record, what camp did you go to
BALTIMORE: I went to Camp Turkey Point.
LIPPINCOTT: Where was that
BALTIMORE: Camp Turkey Point was on the Hudson River between Saugerties and Kingston.
It was run by a wonderful couple, Henry and Celia Paley, who were great believers in
progressive education and ran a camp that didn’t have those—what are they—color wars, they
used to call them. Camps used to be very macho places, where people were taught to compete.
That wasn’t the style of the Paleys at all; it was cooperativity and the arts. So this was really a
very nice place. I don’t know how my parents found it, but, you know, many of the camps were
run by the Jewish organizations that believed in— The Zionist organizations and the socialist
organizations and camps that were really bright red, this was not. This was more in the tradition
of, I guess, [John] Dewey and other thinkers about education—not about politics so much.
LIPPINCOTT: Well, tell me about your parents’ politics. Were they just liberal, or were they over
toward the socialist end of the spectrum
BALTIMORE: They were sympathetic to socialism. My father, after all, was a capitalist, and he
made no apologies about that, but they were believers in equality and what was in the socialist
movements. They were proud later, they told me, that they had never joined the Communist
Party, that they had seen it for the totalitarian wing that it was.
LIPPINCOTT: Were they religious people