Steven Spielberg (140 page)

“Scouting gave me my start,” Steven Spielberg once said. He began making story films as a Boy Scout in Phoenix, Arizona. Filmmaking allowed him to express his feelings in “a place where I felt safer: in front of my camera.” He is shown outside Ingleside Elementary School in July 1961 with fellow Scouts Ray Chenhall and Bill Hoffman as their troop prepares to leave for its annual summer camping trip.
(Photo by Richard Y. Hoffman Jr.)

For years, Spielberg claimed he was born on December 18, 1947, but his birth certificate shows the date to be one year earlier. (
Cincinnati Board of Health, Office of Vital Statistics
)

Spielberg’s childhood home at 817 Lexington Avenue in the Avondale section of Cincinnati (a 1994 photograph). During the late 1940s, Steven and his parents occupied the lower-right-hand apartment in what was then a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. (
Joseph McBride
)

Steven’s parents, Leah and Arnold, were delighted and somewhat bewildered by the unusual creature they had brought into the world. “When he was growing up, I didn’t know he was a genius,” his mother later admitted. “Frankly, I didn’t know what the hell he was.”

When Spielberg received his Life Achievement Award from the American Film Institute on March 2, 1995, his divorced parents were reunited. Paying tribute to them in his acceptance speech, he said, “Growing up was frustrating for me…. But I thank you for letting me own that experience. Thanks for giving me the chance to answer some of my own questions, for not panicking and trying to spoon-feed me all the answers.” (
American Film Institute/NBC-TV
)

“Just as I’d become accustomed to a school and a teacher and a best friend, the
FOR SALE
sign would dig into the front lawn”—as it did in front of the Spielberg home at 267 Crystal Terrace in Haddon Township, New Jersey, on December 16, 1956, shortly before the family left for Arizona. (
Loretta Knoblach
)

On the rare occasions when his “
workaholic
” father accompanied him on Boy Scout camping trips near Phoenix, “we became our closest,” Steve remembered. This was November 1958, shortly before his twelfth birthday. Bill Hoffman is at right. (
Photo by Richard Y. Hoffman Jr.
)

Steve holding the Flaming Arrow Patrol Flag of Ingleside’s Troop 294 in the fall of 1960. He thought of the Boy Scouts as being “like a surrogate dad.” (
Photo by Richard Y. Hoffman Jr.
)

Infatuated with the sixteen-year-old Spielberg, high school classmate Sue Roper, while
babysitting
for his sisters, sketched this soulful pose as Steve watched television on the couch of his home in Phoenix. (
Susan Roper Arndt,
1963
)

This handmade credit emblazoned Spielberg’s 1960 World War II flying movie,
Fighter Squad
.

Spielberg already had visions of becoming another David Lean when he re-created World War II in
Escape to Nowhere
(1959–62), his 8mm epic set in North Africa. This battle scene was shot on Camelback Mountain, Steve’s all-purpose location near his home in Phoenix. (
Barry Sollenberger
)