(3 of 8)
When David was four, the dispute over his future ended; his father departed alone for America. His mother, a strong-willed woman,' promptly packed David off to her uncle, a rabbi who lived in a hermitage in Korma, about 150 miles east of Minsk. For about five years David stayed there, the only boy in the hermitage, up at 6 to begin his studies of the Talmud that lasted until 9 at night. He was lonely and he remembers those strange years with bitterness. The grey beards in the hermitage did not teach him to count. But those years trained his memory (2,000 words of the Talmud a day) and his reasoning powers. He was set simple ethical problems to work out. Sample: "If you saw an article lying in the street, what rights would you have to it?"
This tutelage ended when David was 9½. His father in America sent for his family. David, his mother and a brother took a ship at Libau, Latvia. "I had never even seen a picture of a ship," says David. His mother, afraid of forbidden food on the ship, had cooked, according to strict orthodox rules, a great hamper of bread, cakes and pickled meats. She explained that these were to be their only food on the voyage. David saw the food hamper being lowered into the hold. Afraid that it would be lost and he would starve, he dived after it into the hold, dropped 50 feet, scrambled about until he found the hamper and was rescued by a seaman. A sailor who spoke Russian told him: "You'll do all right in America."
He had to. When the Sarnoffs arrived in New York, they found the father broken in health. Ten-year-old David, who could not speak English, became the chief breadwinner for the family, which soon included two more babies. At 4 in the morning, he left the family room on the lower East Side to deliver the Jewish Morning Journal, ran errands for a butcher before going to school. He saved enough money to buy a newsstand, sold papers after school until late at night. David, who had a fine soprano voice, also earned $1.50 a week singing in the synagogue. At 15, on the day before he was to get $100 for singing during the Jewish holy days, his voice began to change. It was a disaster. He had to quit grammar school to look for a full-time job.
"Incidentally Me." He found one (at $5 a week) as an office boy, saved $1.50 to buy a telegraph key, and taught himself the Morse code. Soon he talked himself into an office job with American Marconi, the U.S. subsidiary of Marconi's British-owned company. The magic of wireless captured the boy's imagination; so did the personality of Marconi. "I carried his bag, delivered candy and flowers to his girl friends. I admired the simplicity of his approach to problems."
Up to this point, David had merely reacted with extraordinary energy to the responsibilities thrust upon him. Luck put him into the communications business, but had nothing to do with his next step. What he did next may have stemmed from the training in the lonely years in the hermitage at Korma: he sat down and thought out the path to his future. He noted that the company's wireless operators knew nothing about the office and that the office staff knew nothing about wireless. He decided that, as the business grew, it would need a man who knew both.