Ted Gold - Early Years and Education

Early Years and Education

Gold was a red diaper baby. He was the son of Hyman Gold, a prominent Jewish physician and a mathematics instructor at Columbia University who had both been part of the Old Left. His mother was a statistician who taught at Columbia. His parents lived in an upper-middle-class high-rise apartment on Manhattan's Upper West Side. While Gold's father had gone to medical school, Gold's parents had experienced economic hardship. But Gold considered his parents affluent and upper-middle-class, although certainly not part of the Establishment or ruling class.

In 1958, before he reached the age of 11, Gold had attended his first civil rights demonstration in Washington, D.C. As a boy, he had gone to summer camp with other red diaper babies at Camp Kinderland, Yiddish for Children's Land in upstate New York. From 1959-1961 Gold attended Joan of Arc Junior High School (JHS 118) on 92nd street between Amsterdam Avenue and Columbus Avenue.

Gold attended Stuyvesant High School, an elite public high school in Manhattan, where he was a member of the school's cross-country track team, the Stamp Club, and the History and Folklore Society. Arriving at Columbia University in Fall 1964, Gold immediately became involved in campus Civil Rights Movement activity. He organized fund-raising activities for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Columbia as one of the campus's Friends of SNCC coordinators. Gold identified more with SNCC activists than with the activists of any other Civil Rights Movement groups.

During his freshman year at Columbia College, Gold had lived at home with his parents. At the beginning of his sophomore year, however, he had moved into an 8th floor single dormitory room in Columbia University's Furnald Hall. Initially Gold had planned to major in mathematics at Columbia, but by his junior year in Fall 1966 Gold had decided that sociology was a more relevant field for him.

By the Fall of 1966, Gold had rejected many Old Left cultural and lifestyle values which he had come to regard as too "bourgeois", but he considered himself a Marxist and a communist who sought to establish "decentralized socialism" in the United States. If some other campus leftist would argue against a political position of his by stating that "Lenin wrote" or "Marx said" or "Mao says" however, Gold would generally reply by reminding the other leftist that "Marxism is a method and a tool, not a dogma". In November 1966, Gold became very active in helping to build a mass-based chapter of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) at Columbia, saw himself as a Marxist-Leninist and seemed to be, among like-minded activists, one of the most dedicated, intellectual, and politically experienced and knowledgeable activists on Columbia's campus.