My grandfather, as I said, was industrious. He'd had a variety of jobs and decided sometime in the 1940s that he would never work for anyone. He was also a very independent man.
I love that sort of 1930s and 1940s; I love that period - the thought of it. And I like war movies and all that kind of stuff as well.
I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.
When do you suppose the electric guitar was invented? If you thought the 1950s, you'd be wrong. If you can muster a recollection of hearing electric guitar in Lionel Hampton's big band in the 1940s and date it to that decade, you'd still be off - by more than 30 years.
A few of Ellison's short stories from the 1940s and 1950s were widely anthologized over the years. After a while, it became generally known that he was at work on another novel. Though he remained aware ever afterward of the authority 'Invisible Man' gave to him, no second novel followed his brilliant debut in 1952.
When you start out with goals - mine were to play polytonally and polyrhythmically - you never exhaust that. I started doing that in the 1940s. It's still a challenge to discover what can be done with just those two elements.
I made a penny for each paper delivered every day, plus 2 cents for Sunday papers. I had 120 customers. For a 10-year-old kid in the 1940s, that was a lot of money.
I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.
It's an institution that was born with my brother Chetan and me. I did it for him. I was becoming a big star in the late 1940s, and he needed a company to make films. So when he left Navketan, I brought in Goldie, and when Goldie left, I carried on alone. No book on Indian cinema is complete without mention of Navketan.
I quite fancy the 1940s. I like the trams and the trousers.
