Henry Kurt Silberman: The Centenary of His Birth

This is a different kind of post. Today my father would have been 100 years old. Born on December 19, 1914, in Breslau, Germany, he died 11 years ago, December 3, 2003, in Richmond, Virginia. For some time I have made a few starts and stops at trying to put together photos, history, etc., but have not managed to produce a complete product. There is a Googlepages site I worked on some time ago--this includes transcriptions of some of his own memories, some documents, some WWII VMail to his parents--and on which I hope to continue to add.

Today, however, I don't have the time to add extensively to that record, but I thought I would do something more in keeping with this blog and do a little more wandering to honor Dad on this day. So while I, too, can add to the Internet, for other wanderers, one great thing about the Internet is that there is stuff all over the place, but as random as can be.

Death of Angela Banner

Given my earlier posts about Angela Banner and the Ant and Bee books, it is only right that I should also memorialize her (belatedly) with links to articles about her death on May 30, 2014.

First, as befitting of the paucity of information about her, my first hit of "new" material in my periodic internet wandering is an expression of exasperation from alt.obituaries:

"I can't believe I can't find a more formal obit!" 

Second, that is it. I could find nothing more than the same piece from FindaGrave.com written by her niece, so check it out and may Angela Banner rest in peace.

Memory Lane: The Times Square Hotel or The Times Square Motor Hotel or "The Times Square"

I hadn't gone wandering/wondering for a while, but I was put on the path again—this time memory lane—after reading a piece in Granta issue 126: Do You Remember? In "The Memory Box, Olivia Laing writes about her time in New York researching David Wojnarowicz. While working in his archives at NYU's Fales Library, she was staying at a place where her "room was on the corner of West 43rd Street and 8th Avenue, on the tenth floor of what once had been the Times Square Hotel."

Well that got my own remembering going, since on my only childhood real visit to New York (not counting seeing my grandmother prior to embarking to Germany in 1956 and just after disembarking in 1959), we had stayed at the Times Square Motor Hotel, which I assumed to be the same building. In her article, Laing goes on to write some more about how this building went from "glamour to a faded gentility."

Among other things, she says that the "Times Square Hotel was at the time in the third of its incarnations, and its history encapsulated the neighbourhood's uneasy accommodations between capital and enterprise, poverty and need." I had not been acquainted with any of the history a building which had been "[b]uilt like an art deco liner, with fifteen storeys and a marble ballroom," so it seemed only appropriate after reading about memory and persistence of objects to make my own wandering again—first to the basement to find the faded stationery shown above, and then to the Internet.