Photo 36-32K: With mother suffering a nervous breakdown and father in jail Tita has no camera so she uses a photo booth to take this, the only photo from 1936 in the album.	Photo 37d-32K: As usual, grandma Hoffman comes to the rescue and takes charge of Tita's young life. This photo is simply labeled "1937", Tita's fifth year.

Photo 37a-36K: A professionally posed photograph, probably taken on Tita's birthday, 16 January 1937.	Photo 37c-40K: Wonder how many photos were shot of children on the back of this pony... Tita 1937.

Photo 37b-44K: Though merely labeled "5 years 1937", this and the following three photos (37e, 37f, 37g) were taken in summer at Kushner's Resort, owned by Abraham Kushner's parents, in Edwardsburg, Michigan.	Photo 37e-40K: Tita with two friends under the electrified sign "Kushner's Resort". The woman at the right is again Sylvia Kushner Bonner, Tita's aunt, though she is not named in the photos. The girl on the left may be Frieda Kushner, Tita's cousin.

Photo 37f-32K: Tita with her two friends: the wrestler (cousin Frieda?) and the model. The structure behind them is an outbuilding or barrier of some kind at Kushner's Resort.	Photo 37g-28K: Tita again with Abe's sister, aunt Sylvia. With Abe in jail and Ann away someplace in recovery, grandma Rachel Mary Hoffman allowed Tita to stay connected with the Kushners.

Photo 38a-28K: 9 February 1938. Uncle Reuben wearing his work cap and shop coat, Tita with doll, Jimmy and Helen Kolhler. Posed in front of grandma Rachel's house.	Photo 38b-36K: Afternoon 11 March 1938. Mano (Marilyn Metzlaar, born 1936; daughter of Morris & Elsie Hoffman, second grandchild of Nathan & Rachel Hoffman), Helen and her brother Jimmy, and Tita missing her two front teeth, in front of grandma's house.

Photo 38d-40K: First Grade 1938 in South Bend; Tita wearing her trademark ribbon in back, right (under the arrow). Tita attended only two schools in twelve years: this one through ninth grade (Thomas Jefferson) and then high school (John Adams), both just blocks from home -- a measure of the remarkable stability brought into her life by Rachel Mary after her parents' divorce in 1935.

Photo 38c-32K: Morning11 March 1938. First grader Tita, missing two teeth, ready for the walk to school.	Photo 38f-28K: Tita loved the smell of gasoline and oil; so spent many hours hanging around Hoffman Brothers, Inc.

So you were with your mother the entire time?

Excepting for a year when she had a nervous breakdown, and I was with my grandmother. They didn't know what to do about that. They sent her away... So she left me with my grandmother which of course was totally safe. I became bulimic that year and never got over that. When you lose your father and your mother and your nanny within a year, it doesn't matter how loving your grandmother is. She's someone that I had seen that I remembered. In those days therapy wasn't available. I was just told that I was supposed to be strong and help my poor mother. These are the kinds of things we don't do anymore. But, that's life!

Yes, and at three, that's an awfully big load. From that point on, from the age of three, you lived with your grandmother.

Yes, and my mother came back -- she left when I was four, she got so bad, and came back when I was about five, five and a half. I stayed with my grandmother until my mother married again when I was nine and a half. Those are the really important, I mean some of the most important years. I also realize that the first few years where I was with a loving mother and my natural father, even though it was a very neurotic household, was helpful. I mean the fact that my father was a nice man to me -- he was fun. I remember when he stole a phonograph to start my musical career [laughs] -- for which he went to jail in L.A.
[OH-7] 

I had started studying music at four after I'd started originally with dance -- but nobody was crazy enough to teach me dance. I flunked somersault, I was too roly-poly to get around. So there was a piano in the house that my grandmother had gotten for her second child who wasn't interested in it, and I was banging away on that. My mother paid the lady across the alley a dollar a lesson, one-twelfth of her income, for piano lessons.

And this was the age of three or four?

Four. By that time I had already retired from the ballet scene... I ran that woman ragged.

The dance teacher?

No, the piano teacher. I was so hungry to know what she had to teach. She wasn't equipped to deal with a precocious, passionate little girl. She was very kind, but of course she didn't teach me all that much. She couldn't teach me good disciplinary things because she couldn't handle me. She wanted me to play what it said in the music, and I couldn't see that she was anybody I should respect in that regard. I remember when I was five and my mother was gone. It was Memorial Day because it was the Indy 500 in Indianapolis. I was plowing through these books. She gave me a book with sixty pieces and I'd plow through them... one way or another.

There was one piece that sounded totally wrong to me. I made my grandfather leave the house at nine o'clock at night and take me to the teacher because there was a mistake in the music, and I couldn't go to sleep with that knowledge. Well, of course she chuckled and pointed out that there were two sharps in that piece, not one, and the music wasn't wrong, I was wrong. And I was so relieved when she told me that. I was so happy that I could count on the music to be true. That affected me very powerfully. So I thanked her and went home. She was a good woman you understand... I went back in 1975 to apologize to her... She, of course, was the root of all my subsequent efforts... she was probably seventy five when I went back to see her.

When I went back I apologized to her for being such a difficult child. She said, "Oh that's all right." She didn't say, "Oh, you weren't a difficult child." She couldn't say that... I always, for years and years, I always treasured the memory of her kindness. She wasn't up to -- when I was eight and a half, that's when my mother took me to St. Mary's.
[OH-12,13,14]

So my mother considered that it [music instruction] was the single most important thing that was being provided for me in my life, because she considered the culture would answer all the problems in life. She loved everything: dance, opera, music, reading -- my mother was a culture freak and always felt inadequate that she didn't have a fancy education... she went to night school most of her life. I was the first person in my family to get a degree because a degree was the the same as being the Pope as far as my mother was concerned.
[OH-15]