munger

Wednesday Apr 9

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Home

Presented sister Clara
with a beautiful cradle
for baby.

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Matt’s Notes

Clara, as we know, was one of Papa’s sisters who lived in his neighborhood. She got home from the hospital with her new son, Julius, the previous day. I’m trying to figure out what the cradle Papa bought might have looked like, but no luck so far. (If anyone knows where I might find an image of an early 1920’s cradle, please write to the address below.)

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A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the efforts people like my grandfather made to challenge the image of Jews as bookish and physically inept. In this post I mentioned the documentary film Watermarks, which tells the story of an all-Jewish Viennese swim team called Hakoah (“The Strength”) Vienna that enjoyed tremendous success until its members were forced to flee Austria in 1938. My wife and I saw the movie over the weekend and enjoyed it immensely. It consists mostly of interviews with the surviving members of Hahoah Vienna, all of whom are articulate and full of interesting stories.

In one scene, a woman named Hanni and her sister Judith (a national champion who was stripped of her records for refusing to participate in the 1936 Olympics) get together for their daily poetry reading, and the poem they choose to recite is Heinrich Heine’s “Ein Jüngling liebt ein Mädchen (A Young Man Loves a Maiden).” This is an interesting coincidence, since Papa quoted the same poem back on February 4th while he was in the midst of a particularly difficult romantic episode. I knew the poem was well-known (Schumann set it to music in his Dichterliebe song cycle, and the song appears on the Watermarks soundtrack) but seeing other Austrians recite it from memory reinforces how popular it must have been.

The film’s subtitles don’t make an effort to translate the poem to rhyming verse, but I’ve transcribed it below, along with the version I quoted on February 4th, just for laughs:

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A Boy (Watermarks version)

A boy loves a girl
She has chosen another
That other loves another
and it is this one he has wed.

The girl in anger takes
the next best fellow
who comes her way
The boy takes it badly

It is an old tale
But it always stays fresh
and to whom it actually happens,
it breaks his heart asunder.

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A Young Man Loves a Maiden (Papa’s Diary Project version, adapted from Henrich-Heine.net)

A young man loves a maiden
But another she prefers,
The other one loves another,
And ties the knot with her.

From spite, the maiden marries
The first who comes along,
And happens `cross her path;
The youth must rue it long.

It is an old, old story,
Yet still forever new;
And every time it happens,
It breaks the heart in two.

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Update 4/11

Reader Carol sent this link to a picture of a cradle from the late 1800’s. It might give us some idea of what Papa’s gift to Clara looked like:

Thursday Apr 10

by


Maccabean Meeting
Paid 2nd installment of $5.00
on my pledge for the K.H.

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Matt’s Notes

Papa was Master of Ceremonies of the “Maccabeans,” his local chapter of the Jewish fraternal organization B’nai Zion, so he frequently attended their meetings and reported them in an offhand way. “K.H” refers to Keren Hayesod, the Zionist fundraising organization to which Papa had pledged a donation several weeks earlier.

Interestingly, while I was searching the Library of Congress Web site for a picture of a baby’s cradle to use on yesterday’s post, I stumbled across a photo of a nursery in a 1920’s Jewish settlement in Palestine labeled “The Keren Hayesod. Agricultural colonies on Plain of Esdraelon…A baby in a crib.”

There are other Keren Hayesod images there, too:



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A family standing outside a house, a communal dining room, a spare, dusty settlement. Had Papa seen slides of such photos at the lectures he attended, passed them around at “Maccabean” meetings, or clipped them out of the Yiddish dailies he read? Were these the images in his mind when he sent $5 he couldn’t afford to Keren Hayesod?

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Image sources:

The Keren Hayesod. Agricultural colonies on Plain of Esdraelon. “The Emek.” Ein Harod. The baby creche. A baby in a crib.: Library of Congress # LC-M32- 3220

The Keren Hayesod. Agricultural colonies on Plain of Esdraelon. “The Emek.” Kafr Yeladim. Formerly “the childrens’ colony.”: Library of Congress # LC-M32- 3205

The Keren Hayesod. Agricultural colonies on Plain of Esdraelon. “The Emek.” Ein Harod. Communal dining room: Library of Congress # LC-M32- 3217

The Keren Hayesod. Agricultural colonies on Plain of Esdraelon. “The Emek.” Afouleh. One of the earlier colonies: Library of Congress # LC-M32- 3202

Friday Apr 11

by

Sisters night.

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Looks like an uneventful day for Papa. The temperature as he strolled from his sister Nettie’s apartment to his sister Clara’s was in the mid 50’s. (Or did he have dinner with Nettie and Clara at the same time? They didn’t get along later in life, but they might have seen more of each other when they all lived on the Lower East Side; perhaps Papa made sure of it).

News of the day they might have discussed over dinner included the new plans for a Roosevelt Hall at the museum of Natural History; the fate of 26 Ku Klux Klan members after their Pennsylvania rally resulted in a riot and the deaths of three men; or the upcoming baseball season. Then again, they may have ignored these subjects and discussed instead the health of their father, who was convalescing back in the old country after a bad fall earlier in the year. Most likely, though, they spent the evening ogling Clara’s new son, Julius, who had been home from hospital for less than a week and, perhaps, passed the evening in the new cradle Papa bought him two days earlier.

Saturday Apr 12

by


Attend first Baseball game
this spring, an exhibition
between the Yankees and Dodgers

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Matt’s Notes

Baseball!

The season was a little shorter and started a little later back then, but Yankee Stadium looked familiar:


The above photo is from 1923 and shows the Stadium surrounded by what appears to be a country road, but as the New York Times noted in its account of the game Papa saw,

By the Yanks’ opening day, April 23, the paving of the streets around the arena will have been finished and motorists will find it an easier task to drive up to the gates. [It’s hard to imagine this ever being the case – ed.] The new subway station at 161st Street was in service yesterday, and the Yanks will soon be all set for the season.

Since the subway was running, Papa likely took the IRT from Canal Street to 161st to the Stadium, where defending champion Yankees fell to the Brooklyn Robins, 10-8, before a crowd of 12,000. (The nickname of the Brooklyn club changed from “Trolley Dodgers” to “Robins” and then back to “Dodgers” over the years; 1924 must have been a transition period, since the Times used both names interchangeably.)

Papa was a big baseball fan (I’ve inherited his baseball-loving gene in the same way I’ve inherited his movie-loving gene) and, with all he’d had on his mind for the previous few weeks, a day at the ball park would have been a welcome diversion (even if it was a bit chilly at 54 degrees and Babe Ruth “fanned lugubriously twice,” as the Times put it).

Here’s who was on the field that day:

Brooklyn

Dick Loftus, cf
Jimmy Johnston, 3b
Zack Wheat, lf
Jack Fournier, 1b
Tommy Griffith, rf
Joe Klugman, 2b
Johnny Jones, ss
Hank DeBerry c
Dutch Ruether, p
Dazzy Vance, p
Andy High
Leo Dickerman, p

New York

Whitey Witt, cf
Joe Dugan, 3b
Babe Ruth, rf
Wally Pipp, fb
Bob Meusel, lf
Aaron Ward, 2b
Everett Scott, ss
Fred Hofmann, c
Chick Autrey, c
Oscar Roettger,p
Earle Combs
Harvey Hendrick

Head over to baseball-reference.com for more on the 1924 Brooklyn Robins and 1924 New York Yankees.

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Image source: Yankee Stadium, 4/3/23. Library of Congress # LC-B2- 5958-11. No known restrictions on publication.

Sunday Apr 13

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Another Baseball games
Yanks & Robins

Visited
Freidas Children

Berta Tannesoff’s family
and attended lecture by
Lipsky at the Pennsylvania

Met Cousin Sam Scheurman
of Long Branch after not
having seen him for years

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Matt’s Notes

Two days, two exhibition games, and not one home run from Babe Ruth. Still, Babe’s future Murderers Row mate, left fielder Bob Meusel (called “Bustin’ Bob” by the Times, though his “official” nickname was “Long Bob”) hit a 7th-inning homer and a walk-off single to score Whitey Witt in the 10th.

I would imagine Papa saw all this action from the cheap seats, so his view might have looked a little like this:

It’s hard to imagine, in this era of designated hitters, TV timeouts, and multiple pitching changes (I love Willie Randolph, but why does he pull his pitchers so much?) that Papa was able to make a three o’clock Yankee game and still manage to visit two friends (maybe Frieda and Berta, whoever they were, lived in the Bronx so Papa caught them on the way back from the Stadium) and also catch Louis Lipsky at the Hotel Pennsylvania in the West 30’s. But the numbers don’t lie: both games Papa saw that weekend, including Sunday’s extra-inning drama, were over in under two hours. (As I write this, the Mets have been playing for two-and-a-half and they’re only in the 7th. David Wright just hit an RBI triple, though, so I’ll take it.)

Papa’s mood seemed to rise and fall in relation to how busy he was (when he was alone, his mind turned toward his romantic struggles, his longing for home, his father’s continuing illness) so I’d say this was a good day for him. He spent time with friends, ran into a cousin from distant Long Branch, N.J., enjoyed a gorgeous 66-degree day at the ballpark, and attended a lecture by one of the era’s most influential Zionists (this was actually his third Lipsky lecture of the year). Despite his worries, he must have felt lucky to live in New York, where it was easy to cover so many bases on a Sunday in April, 1924.

Bob Meusel

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Here’s who was on the field that day:

Brooklyn:

Dick Loftus, cf
Jimmy Johnston, 3b
Zack Wheat, lf
Jack Fournier, 1b
Tommy Griffith, rf
Joe Klugman, 2b
Johnny Jones, ss
(?) Gonzales, c
Burleigh Grimes, p
Andy High
Art Decatur, p

New York:

Whitey Witt, cf
Joe Dugan, 3b
Babe Ruth, rf
Wally Pipp, fb
Bob Meusel, lf
Aaron Ward, 2b
Everett Scott, ss
Wally Schang, c
Waite Hoyt, p
Earle Combs
Joe Bush, p

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Additional References:

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Image sources:

  • Yankee Stadium, 4/3/23. Library of Congress # LC-B2- 5958-12. No known restrictions on publication.
  • Bob Meusel, Library of Congress # LC-B2- 5252-11. No known restrictions on publication.

Monday Apr 14

by

Home attended to some
correspondence, listened
in on the radio. The opening of
the congress of Daughters
of the American Revolution,
Adresses by Pres. Coolidge
French ambassador Jusserand,
British Amb. Howard,
Gen. Pershing.

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Matt’s Notes

When Papa sat down at 8:00 PM and tuned in to WEAF, he listened to President Coolidge urge the Daughters of the American Revolution to get out and vote in the next election. It seems like an offhand moment by today’s standards, but Papa found it novel enough, as he did with many radio broadcasts, to record it in his diary.

As with its February 6 coverage of President Wilson’s funeral, AT&T distributed Coolidge’s speech by telephone line to three of its East coast radio stations: WCAP in Washington, WJAR in Providence, R.I., and WEAF in New York. The previous day’s New York Times saw fit to devote a column to the complexities and expense involved — the “remote control” technology it described had only been commercially practical for a year, and even so “the actual work necessary to prepare long-distance telephone lines for use in connection with radio broadcasting sometimes requires as many as sixty-five engineers.”

(A related article also excitedly reported on how “Hertzian waves” helped farmers research prices in multiple markets and figure out where to sell their goods. Said one Ohio farmer: “It is not difficult to make a radio pay dividends when rightly handled, and scarcely a week passes without my outfit yielding me something of value.”)

Coolidge had only been on the radio a few times since he took the reigns after President Harding’s death in 1923, but his voice resonated particularly well and helped make him an early broadcast celebrity. Coolidge quickly caught on to the medium’s potential as a campaign tool and broadcast a number of speeches, including the one mentioned above, in the run-up to the 1924 Republican Convention.

Since the audience consisted of women descended from America’s founders, the speech was appropriately full of patriotic rhetoric and historical references. Its central theme, though, concerned a more recent historical development, the effects of which had not, it seems, entirely permeated American life: the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote in federal elections. As Coolidge noted:

We have not yet been able to frame a very definite judgment of the changes that will be wrought in our public life, or our private life, because of this remarkable development. It has come so suddenly upon the world, chiefly within this first quarter of the twentieth century, that we have not had time to appraise its full meaning.

And:

I suppose that even among the Daughters of the America Revolution there are some women who sincerely feel that it is unbecoming of their sex to take an active part in politics. It is a little difficult to comprehend how such an attitude could be maintained by any women eligible to such a society as this…

Nevertheless, there are such, and to them I want especially to direct an appeal for a different attitude toward the obligations of the voter…

What must Papa have thought of such a speech? It’s hard to imagine a group more removed from his world of Zionist fundraisers and immigrant support societies than the Daughters of the American Revolution, and it’s hard to imagine an issue more baffling to him than the need to convince well-established, entirely assimilated Americans to accept their enfranchisement (still a baffling problem today, of course). Perhaps the mere thrill of listening to the President through his headphones distracted Papa from contemplating such things.

Tuesday Apr 15

by

[No entry today]

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Matt’s Notes

Here’s what might have intrigued Papa in the papers on this day: