This was not an unusual ambiguity for emigrant Jews who had been born in the Russo-Polish Pale of Settlement. In a 1977 interview with a United Press International reporter, Brickman said he had been born in "Lornza, Poland [probably Łomża] and raised in Germany, where his family operated a grocery. He came to the U.S. in 1920 and became a wholesale grocer in New York." He told the reporter he was fluent in Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, Russian and German as well as English. Frank Brickman arrived in the United States in 1920 or 1921 and married Lillian Bernstein in 1928. Their first child, Jeremiah Brickman (1930-1950), earned a baccalaureate at New York University in 1949, then attended Harvard Law School, where he died in October 1950 after receiving what the "Harvard Crimson" called "a mysterious head injury" in the university's Hillel House. Conflicting police and autopsy reports, and a suggestion of murder by journalist Walter Winchell, kept the case in the news for several weeks, but no arrests were made, and the death was ruled accidental. A younger sibling, Gloria Brickman, was born in March 1945; she married Michael Kenneth Supran in 1967 and resides in Florida. Frank and Lillian Brickman's second child, Lester, was reportedly what is known in Yiddish as a "yeshiva bocher," receiving his education in Hebrew schools until he reached high school age. Lester Brickman was a high-achieving student, one of Miami Beach Senior High School's student chemistry laboratory assistants, member of the French Club (1956), National Speech and Debate Association, National Forensic League, and National Honor Society (1957), and president of the school's Junior Optimist Club in 1957, his senior year. Brickman won a four-year national scholarship from the Food Fair Foundation to what was then the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh (now Carnegie Mellon University), earning a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from the Mellon College of Science in 1961. In his freshman year at Carnegie Tech, in April 1958, Brickman published an article sharply criticizing his own public-school secondary education in "Carnegie Technical", an undergraduate opinion magazine, thinly disguising the name of the high school as "Marlin Boom." His and other student views were quoted in the local newspapers, one of which noted that "Brickman ... hurls ... brickbats at what he calls American anti-intellectualism."