Oberholzer’s Rorschach I. Why the FBI has my fingerprint cards

Dr. Morris H. Philipson, Director Emeritus 

University of Chicago Press, 1966-2000

Let me tell you why the experience I had when still a child gave me great satisfaction. Being fingerprinted by the FBI is not the kind of Christmas present that my relatives or friends my age could expect—which only made the satisfaction more valuable for being thoroughly unlikely. It happened that when I was 12 or 13, my family had the chance to celebrate between Christmas and New Year’s in Washington, D.C. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that I was feeling what people call something that sets one “on top of the world.”

During the week between holidays, school was closed, and since my father was a doctor he was self-employed, which makes it sound as if he paid his own salary, but it means he was free to make appointments to see patients at his convenience. And then there was his new car, well, family car. He had become an expert driver out of necessity, for in those days, doctors made house calls.

My father’s brother Robert was an accountant who had settled in Washington some five years previously. Accounting led to investing in the stock market in the early 1930’s, when, I learned later, people who had money after the Crash of 1929 made money hand over fist buying up properties at bargain prices. My uncle was successful as an investor at the right time, and he invited our family to visit with his family as a winter vacation. My brother and I would be out of school, our parents made their own schedule, and my father reveled in his new car.