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F o u O F J O C K S " BY SOME IRONIC JUSTICE, THOSE WHO HAVE HAD A DIFFICULT CHILDHOOD ARE OFTEN BETTER EQUIPPED TO ENTER ADULT LIFE THAN THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN VERY SHELTERED, VERY LOVED; IT IS A KIND OF LAW OF COMPENSATION. — THE S C H O O L T E A C H E R IN F R A N C O I S T R U F F A U T ' S SMAL O K I N G back on his childhood, Spielberg always has thought of Arizona as "my real home. For a kid, home is where you have your best friends and your first car,and your firstkiss; it'swhere you do your worst stuff and get your best grades." Arizona was also the place where Steven's family ties grew increasingly strained, almost to the breaking point, turning him more and more inward for emotional sustenance. And, most important, Arizona was the place where he set his sights on becoming a filmmaker. One of his boyhood friends in Phoenix, Jim Sollenberger, recalls Spielberg saying "he could envision himself going to the Academy Awards and accepting an Oscar and thanking the Academy. He was twelve or thirteen at the time." "I've been really serious about [filmmaking] as a career since I was twelve years old," Spielberg said in a 1989 interview. "I don't excuse those early years as a hobby, do you know what I'm saying? I really did start then." S T E V E N ' S mother later admitted that the very idea of moving to Phoenix made her "hysterical" with culture shock: "I mean, in [1957] what nice Jewish girl moved to Arizona? I looked in an encyclopedia—it was A WIMP IN WORLD O L "A WIMP IN A WORLD OF JOCKS" 6 7 published in 1920, but I didn't notice at the time—and it said: 'Arizona is a barren wasteland/ I went there kicking and screaming. I had to promise Steve a horse, because he didn't want to go either. I never made good on that promise, and he still reminds me of it today." When they arrived in February 1957, the Spielbergs spent four months in a cramped two-bedroom apartment on the west side of Phoenix before moving into their newly built ranch house at 3443 North Forty-ninth Street, in the city's Arcadia neighborhood.* As a newcomer living in a suburban development carved out of citrus groves near the winter resorts at the foot of Camelback Mountain,Steven felt more like an "alien" than ever before. In that conservative western community on the fringe of the Arizona desert, Gila monsters still roamed, men wore string ties, some streets were unpaved, new commercial buildings on some streets had to have hitching rails out front, and his neighbors included Senator Barry Goldwater and a golf-playing youngster named J. Danforth (Dan) Quayle. The ten-year-old Jewish kid from back east could not help sticking out, like the ears protruding from under his baseball cap. "He was the first person I knew who came with an accent," recalls Spielberg's grade school classmate Susan Smith LeSueur, a Mormon who is an Arizona native. "He talked a lot and gestured a lot. He was very funnylooking , and I guess very Jewish. I didn't know many Jews. I didn't know anybody who talked that way or looked that way. He was so different." "I guess we were a pretty intolerant bunch of people back in the fifties and sixties," says Steven's Boy Scout counselor Richard (Dick) Hoffman Jr. "It was like being back in the thirties, practically. Phoenix didn't have a lot of Jews. With the kids I didn't see much anti-Semitic stuff, but I did see it among the parents. Wehave a lot of jackasses out here. People out here are small-minded. Being a liberal is almost like being a Communist." Entering Ingleside Elementary School during the second semester of fourth grade, Steven reacted to his culture shock by withdrawing into himself . "He was very quiet," says his sixth-grade teacher, Eleanor Wolf. "I felt sorry for him because he didn't have any friends. You see, he was different from everybody else. Nerdy. He looked kind of prim and proper, he wore a little button-down collar; he looked kind of sissy. He was living in a dream world. He was rather...

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