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My grandmother's house - she ran it just like her grandmother and her great-grandmother. They didn't have electricity. They had wood stoves that never got cold.

Until I was six years old we lived in the projects, then my two brothers and three sisters and I moved to a three-bed that my mother's father built.

I was raising seven kids. I lived in the bedrooms, in the laundry room, in the kitchen, in the car - car pooling all over. I just didn't have time to sit down and watch a lot of TV. So I really didn't.

When I was nine years old, my family lost our home, and the six of us moved into my grandparents' converted garage.

When I was very small, the electricity was turned off because we didn't pay the bill. I remember sitting by the oil lamp listening to my mother playing 'Careless Love' on the piano.

If I close my eyes, I can remember the first apartment where I lived with my family in Newark, N.J., in the late 1930s. The rooms were lined up like train cars - you had to go through one to get to another - and there wasn't any heat or hot water.

I grew up during the war years in a tiny cottage with no electricity. Water for washing was pumped from a pond. My brother and I had to fetch drinking water from a tap at the end of the lane, and light was from candles, paraffin lamps, and our nightly log fire.

I was a quiet, nerdy kid living in the Bronx. I spent most of my teens in my room, taking apart electrical items to figure out how they worked before putting them back together, and listening to the music my four older sisters and parents played.