Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 96, is co-founder of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and author of “Coney Island of the Mind” (1958). His most recent book is “Writing Across the Landscape: Travel Journals, 1960-2010” (Liveright). He spoke with Marc Myers.

My father died six months before I was born in 1919. He was in his 50s and suffered a heart attack on the stoop of his house in Yonkers, N.Y. Months after I was born, my mother was institutionalized for depression.

My Aunt Emilie from France and her husband took me in, and we soon moved to France, near Strasbourg. My first memory is being on a balcony watching a parade. Someone was waving my hand for me.

My aunt was beautiful, wearing cloche hats and the latest styles of the 1920s. But she wasn’t really a blood relative. She was married to my mother’s brother. Soon after we returned to the States in 1922, when I was 3, Emilie and her husband split up. We were living on Riverside Drive in Manhattan, and one day he wasn’t there anymore.

When the health department came by to check on me, they found I wasn’t getting enough milk. They put me in an orphanage in Chappaqua, N.Y., where I remained for a year until Aunt Emilie found a job as a French governess for Presley and Anna Bisland, who lived in a mansion in Bronxville, N.Y. They had a chauffeur, a butler and a cook. It was an upstairs-downstairs household, and I soon became aware of class-consciousness.