I did not meet Paul until I the 3rd grade. He was good in art and so was I. (You can see my drawings from that time in the "Early Years" section of this web site) Other classmates would come to us to ask us to draw outlines for them so they could color them in during art period in the class. We became good friends. He would come over to my house and we would trace comic book characters onto tracing paper to make up our own scenes, which we would then color in with crayons. Then I would go over to his house sometimes and we would mold "Creepy Crawler" bugs and play with them. Paul was not only good in art but he also had an extraordinary ability with Mathematics. He would get 100 points on every test without even trying. This amazed me because I always found math so hard to learn. Paul moved away after the 3rd grade, and I was very sad because I had no other friends as smart as he was.

The next time I saw Paul was on the front page of the NY Times in 1973. The article announced that he was selected to go to Erfurt Germany to reperesent the USA in the World Mathematics Olympiad. The article was written by Lee Dembart. Paul went on to accomplish much more but let me finish telling you about Joe.