Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-2
BALTIMORE: The family was just very poor. He actually did start some classes at one point—I
never understood that. He’s long gone, so I never will.
LIPPINCOTT: Were they in Manhattan
BALTIMORE: They were in Manhattan or in Brooklyn—they moved around. They didn’t have a
stable place.
LIPPINCOTT: What did he do for a living
BALTIMORE: He went into the garment business, and I don’t know how he got into the garment
business. At the beginning of the Depression, he actually had his own firm and worked in that
all through the Depression. My parents married in, I think, 1930, and my mother also worked in
the garment business. At one point, they told me that we were never wealthier than we were
during the Depression.
LIPPINCOTT: How interesting!
BALTIMORE: Yes. Women’s wear. He was in women’s coats and suits—or cloaks and suits, as
they called it then—so he did very well, because women continued to buy coats even through the
Depression. Women in those days needed a new coat every spring and every fall, and people
spent what we would consider a disproportionate part of their income on clothes. There wasn’t
much else to spend it on—there were no dish washers and all of those things in those days. So
they did well.
LIPPINCOTT: Did you have siblings
BALTIMORE: I have a brother [Robert S. Baltimore], who is now a physician-scientist at Yale
University. He’s been there, actually, for a long time. He’s a little younger than I am.
LIPPINCOTT: When did you move to Great Neck