 letters are somehow like friends. Each one has a personality. If you have one person all alone or one person talking to another person, it's a different relationship. And of course that fascinated me. Typography, as I went on with design, became more and more important to me. The Z was hard, the V was hard, the Q, that was easy. The prints in front of me are from an alphabet I designed called Euclid. The reason it's called Euclid was when Alvin had his print shop in the late 30s and early 40s, he worked with geometric forms from the type case. I kept looking at that word and saying I can do a whole alphabet based on that. I certainly never thought about being an artist because in my generation and in my parents, the milieu that came from, I was going to be a nice Jewish art teacher. The thing about not being a famous artist, you can do whatever you want. The little money I could make, you know, by painting for friends on blouses or on walls, wasn't very much. So my mother said to me, well, there's this new museum opening in Beverly Hills, why don't you go offer your services for the summer? And that's what I did. It was called the Institute of Modern Art. The first opening, I was asked to help at the punch table. At the punch table, two men came up to me. One was Alvin Lustig. He came up to me and said, it's very hot in here. And I said it must be the lights. That was the end of our conversation. Another man came up to me, very suave, handsome Hungarian who worked for, who was a painter and worked for Disney. And he got my number and called me up. And the first place he took me was a party. And there was Alvin Lustig. And from that moment on, Alvin Lustig never let me allow it. He called every day. He had a few students working for him. And the first year we were married, I had committed myself to teaching in a junior high school, which I did, which I hated because I would leave this interesting office every day because we lived and worked in these three rooms. But I wasn't a designer, so I couldn't say to Alvin, well, you can use me. But I decided after that first year that I couldn't go on teaching. So I ended up hanging around the office doing odd little jobs, typing Alvin's letters, but absorbing everything that was going on. That's where I got my training. I got it by observing. Finally, Alvin did permit me to do pastes, which I was a disaster with at the beginning. The room tent, which most people don't know what it is anymore, is one of my favorite tools. There's a kind of intimacy when you draw a line in ink. Here, there are lots of them because when I heard someone said they were going to stop making them, I got hysterical and went out and bought as many as I could. That would give you a very wide line, but you can do really very, very thin lines. When you first start to use this, you make the biggest mess in the world. It took me a long time. Alvin finally died in 1956 from all the complications. At that point, I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. I mean, I knew I wanted to continue design. And luckily, two people called me on the phone, Philip Johnson and Arthur Cohen, and said, we're waiting for the designs. Never asking me what I wanted to do, just presuming I was going to do this. And I just did it. I mean, I just said, you know enough, you have enough experience, you can do it. And so that's what I did.