Pioneers of the Blues Revival

Phil Spiro

Phil Spiro Interview I was born in New York City in 1940. My mother, a housewife, was also born in New York, although her parents came from Russia. My father was born in Mława, Russian Poland (yes, there is a stroke through the letter L; it’s pronounced like a W in English), where the family name was written as “Szpiro.” The judge who naturalized my father’s brother as a US citizen advised that nobody would ever pronounce it right or spell it right, the Z got dropped, and it became “Spiro” for those who ended up in the US. All but one of the family who stayed in Poland died in the Holocaust. In Poland my father had been apprenticed as a watchmaker to an older brother who had made the town clock, an important undertaking at that time and place. His parents sent my father to the US to avoid his being conscripted into the tsar’s army. WhenhelandedinNewYorkCityin1911atagesixteen,hewasalreadyaskilledwatchmaker and jeweler, and he spoke Polish, German, and Yiddish, but no English. By the time I knew him, he claimed to have forgotten his Polish andGerman,andhespokeEnglishwithnodiscernible accent. During the 1920s he started a successfulclock-importingcompanyandmade many trips to Europe, but was wiped out by the Depression, and went back to retail watch repair, engraving, and jewelry; along the way he picked up optometry. By the time I was old enough to be aware of such things, he had an office in Manhattan, three stories up looking out over Lower Broadway—a great place for a kid to view the many parades after the end of the war. When I was ten my father had a heart attack, and we followed the conventional wisdom of the time and moved to a warmer climate—in our case, Miami. Miami was a shock. It took us a long time to get used to the overt signs of segregation— “White” and “Colored” drinking fountains, restrooms , waiting rooms, schools, bus seating, Phil Spiro at the Waldorf Cafeteria, Cambridge, Massachusetts , winter 1963–64. Photo Dick Waterman. 254 phil spiro et cetera. It would be years before the Cuban revolution made Miami into a Latin American city, and while I lived there it was a Southern city that also had a lot of people who came from the North. I’d gone to unsegregated public schools in New York, and I went to segregated public schools in Miami. At school most of the kids were native Floridians with Southern accents and attitudes, or immigrants from the North like me, with just a very few who had Hispanic surnames, from Venezuela or Cuba. Many kids hunted snakes in the Everglades, or hopped up cars that sometimes sported Confederate flags, and in that regard Miami and its people were little different from other Southern cities—Robert E. Lee’s birthday was a school holiday. I spent weekends and vacations at my father’s store, running errands for him, going to wholesale parts suppliers for watch parts—“material,” in the trade—or to plating companies and engravers for specialty work. He was a master watchmaker, but my father was not particularly dexterous, and it would sometimes take him three or four tries to get a part seated properly. And it is exactly the same for me when I build a computer. I learned patience from my father. I was admitted to MIT in 1957, but I could not afford to go, so I spent my freshman year at the University of Miami. The next year I got a loan and transferred to MIT as a sophomore in aeronautical engineering. I took a co-op plan that had five months of work in the real world, which I spent at North American Aviation in L.A. I did trivial data analysis and graphing, including some small work on the X-15, now in the Smithsonian, and fifty-odd years later, still the fastest airplane ever piloted by a man, 6.7 times the speed of sound. Because I was on a co-op plan, I had to take courses every summer thereafter. If I had been taking a regular course schedule with the usual vacations, I would not have developed an interest in music or a later, oddly connected interest in computers. Had music not been the bright, shiny distraction that it became for me, I’d have stayed in school, and I would not have become a computer programmer. And because I met my wife...