Arthur grew up in Philadelphia and attended Temple University right after WWII, graduating in 1950 with a bachelor of arts in radio and theater. There, he met 17-year-old Judith Goodman, a talented pianist.
“I had a wonderful education and was very active in school,” he said. “I did all kinds of stuff, like acting.” Arthur was an on-air personality in South Carolina during college, did summer stock on Cape Cod, toured with a children’s theater, and was on a soap opera. He was also assistant director at WCAU-TV after college.
“But it was sporadic,” he said. “It wasn’t enough. And one day I came home and my wife, who was 19 at the time, looked at me and said in Yiddish ‘we are not making a living.’ She was working, and teaching and times were a little tough.”
Twenty-two-year-old Arthur returned to school, and like his father before him, graduated from Temple’s Beasley School of Law.
“I went through law school in two-and-a-half years by going summers, as well as during the week, and worked weekends and nights in radio spinning records,” he said.
Right after passing the bar, Arthur was drafted into the Korean War. Thanks to his law background, Arthur was assigned a detailed research and investigations role in the United States Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps as a plainclothes agent. Son, Claude, arrived in 1954.
After the war, Arthur said he “got restless” and moved to Washington, D.C., obtaining a job as an administrative lawyer in the United States Department of Labor in the Office of the Solicitor interpreting labor laws for five years.
“I worked on workers’ compensation cases, defending the government against insurance claims,” he said. Son, Ian, was born in 1959.