Spiro was born in Hamburg , Germany to Jewish parents . His family name is a corruption of Speyer , a town in the Rhineland which once had a significant Jewish community , but he reminisced that in the U.S. it often led people to mistake him for a Greek American . His father worked for a distribution firm . He attended the Wilhelm-Gymnasium . Despite the increasing Nazification of Germany , he states that in liberal Hamburg he experienced no discrimination whatsoever until after Kristallnacht . His family emigrated from Germany just a month later , in December 1938 ; they passed through New York where their relatives had earlier fled , before settling in San Antonio , Texas . There , Spiro attended Brackenridge High School , and went on to San Antonio Junior College . In a news interview a few years after his arrival , he expressed his disappointment at the relative absence of " wild west heroes " and American Indians in Texas , contrary to the image of the state that he had formed from the Western fiction popular in his native Germany
Kristallnacht
Kristallnacht
Herbert Spiro