'My father worked in the front of the store, doing all the schmoozing and hiring,' Mitchell said. His parents were partners in the clothing business, and the family lived a comfortable middle class life on Idaho Street in Passaic. He was the youngest of three children born to Mel and Carol Bierman - Anne being the oldest, followed by Louis. Mitchell was born in 1962, 17 years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Mel Bierman came home to Passaic to the family business, selling clothes - and became quite successful, opening Stage III shops in Passaic and Upper Montclair, and later buying Ginsburg's, a high-end ladies' store downtown on Main Avenue. The war effectively ended five days after the bombing of Nagasaki, when Japan surrendered. 'We just got out of the way in time - otherwise we would have been roasted.' 'Picture I took as we were getting out of the way when the 'mushroom' came up higher than was anticipated,' Bierman wrote. He produced some of the first images of the mushroom cloud, pictures that Bierman's son, Mitchell, has hanging in his home in Randolph, with a handwritten note from his father. Bierman, who served as a tail-gunner aboard on both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki missions, was one of the crew members charged with taking pictures after the explosions.
