"Dr. F. C. Toy": Another Attempted Internet Resurrection of a Life (updated)

So are, this is a failure. Lots of little pieces, but no real biographical information. Not even what the initials stand for, leave alone birth or death dates.

In my mother's memoirs, she writes that she worked for the:

British Cotton Industry Research Association (Shirley Institute) as an Information Officer, doing mainly abstracts from the current literature for our own publication and they were also reprinted in The Journal of the Textile Institute. ... It was a job I really liked; my boss was Dr.Withers, an elderly man, a real teddy bear, his glasses halfway down his nose. ... We were what was known as “Scientific Civil Service”, i.e., we had the best of two worlds: the privileges of the Civil Service (good pension plan etc.) and of Academia (very generous leave time!). ... The Institute also encouraged further education: if you took courses that were approved, you could leave two hours before school started (all evening courses). At first I took just statistics and economics, but then they approved my finishing the degree course, that’s how I ended up with a BA in Public Administration (University of Manchester). In my reference the Director (Dr. Toy) wrote that I “contributed greatly to the textile information of this country”. 

She mentioned Dr. Toy again recently as the director of the Shirley Institute, so I decided some wandering was necessary to see who he was. Known as "F.C. Toy," it quickly became apparent that between "toy" (as in kids toys) and "F.C." (Football Club), searching was going to be a problem! My initial technique was to combine "F.C. Toy" with Shirley Institute and or Manchester. [I do find that there is a book Story of Shirley: History of Shirley Institute, Manchester, 1919-88 but not searchable or viewable online.]

Resurrecting a Life: The Bits and Bytes of Felicias Baumgarten-Campetti

This is a fool's errand, finding bits and bobs of a Great Aunt (familiarly "Aunt Fela"), about whom we know nothing... 

This is how I began this post several months ago. The family stories about her (a sister of my maternal grandmother) are scant, mainly because of a rift after a dispute between her and my grandmother about some money sent for my mother while she was in school in Geneva. So, basically, I knew she had married an Italian and that they were both very big in the Esperanto movement, and that they had not had children. In addition, she excelled in languages and had been a translator. 

So, the bits and bobs that I had been finding (and which I failed to store in the draft of this post at the time) largely were links here and there to translations she had published, often dealing with Scandinavian authors. While I will get back to that, the one real mystery that I came across was a hit in Google books from Trapped in Tuscany Liberated by the Buffalo Soliders: The True World War II Story of Tullio Bruno Bertini. According to the screenshot, on page 217 of the book is the following:

After the war, my uncle Nello was honored by the Italian government and given the title of Cavaliere. 

Israel also gave him the following proclamation:

A forest of 3,000 trees has been planted in Israel to honor the memory of Felicia Baumgarten-Campetti and to recognize the merits of the Reverend Don Mello Marcucci who has helped Jewish families in in the time of German persecution.

Well, I had to know more about that! Bertini describes what his uncle had done--he and three other priests helped shelter refugees in 1944 from both the Germans and the Fascists--but nothing about what my aunt had done. 

[1/9/2020. I had written to Yad Vashem to see if they had any knowledge of the recognition, but they have no records [CAS-238375: "thank you but I could not find any information about your relative in our database. "] I suspect that someone just bought trees through the Jewish National Fund.]

My Great Aunt Franka, Albert Einstein, and The New Fatherland League

I have been meaning for sometime to start collecting links on the Internet to my great aunt, but for now, I am deviating from my intentions, and wandering about something I just found during some random searching, which, of course, has set me both wondering again, and wandering some more.

My first "finding" was a "This Date in History" for November 14, from History.com about the launch of the Bund Neues Vaterland--"the New Fatherland League."  In particular, the second paragraph:

First and foremost, the league argued, World War I, which had begun the previous August, should end promptly in favor of “a just peace without annexations.” Secondly, an international organization should be established in order to prevent future wars. According to Dr. Franziska Baumgartner-Tramer, who attended some of the league’s meetings, Einstein spoke “with great pessimism about the future of human relations….I managed to get to him on one occasion, when I was depressed by the news of one German victory after another and the resultant intolerable arrogance and gloating of the people of Berlin. ‘What will happen, Herr Professor?’ I asked anxiously. Einstein looked at me, raised his right fist, and replied ‘This will govern!'”

Unsourced, unattributed, and my aunt's last name misspelled. Also, I had never heard any story that she had any connections with Albert Einstein. I asked my mother and while she could acknowledge remembering something about this, she had no more information.

6:3, 3:6, Winners, Losers, Connecting Sports into the Social Consciousness: England v Hungary, U.S. v U.S.S.R.

There, that is one pompous post title! All because of the chain that began last Sunday, January 18, when we were watching the first episode of "Grantchester," a British murder mystery series being broadcast on PBS as part of the Masterpiece: Mystery series.  Clearly taking place a few years after the end of World War II, I was curious to know exactly when (something that could easily be found from the synopsis if I had gone there first!). Since DI Keating was all mad about a football game that England lost to Hungary 6-3, I thought that might help me find out. Little did I know!

So, it turns out that this was not just a football match (soccer for us Yankees), but THE football match--a cataclysmic football match! Googling "6-3 england hungary" and you find the very first hit is its very own Wikipedia article: "1953 England v Hungary football match" answering not just my question--November 25, 1953--but all sorts of other questions, you didn't know you had: about how this match--"3-6" from the English side--fit into the psyche of English football fans, what this match--6-3 as far as Hungarians go--meant to the post-war, recently Communist Hungary. There is so much about this on the Internet, that my wandering could go on for ever, but where I started was with the tiny bit I had--its mention on the TV show I had just watched. While Wikipedia articles often mention how some historical event is picked up or treated in literature and film, this one had not been edited to add this little note. In fact, the only note was that there was a "popular 1998 Hungarian comedy film 6:3 Play It Again Tutti [based] on the match." (more on this later)

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.