This tenuous grasp of American culture might have been owing to the fact 
that his parents home-schooled him up to the age of fourteen. A typical school 
day for Finkle-McGraw consisted of walking down to a river to study tadpoles or
going to the public library to check out a book on ancient Greece or Rome. The 
family had little spare money, and vacations consisted of driving to the 
Rockies for some backpacking, or up to northern Minnesota for canoeing. He 
probably learned more on his summer vacations than most of his peers did during 
their school years. Social contact
with other children happened mostly through 
Boy Scouts or church—the Finkle-McGraws belonged to a
Methodist church, 
a Roman Catholic church, and a tiny synagogue that met in a rented room in 
Sioux City.