Mrs. Einstein, whom I later found out was the professor’s second wife, was not much in our conversation, doubtless because she spoke no English. Occasionally her husband brought her in by translating for her things that had just been said into German, as if they were of import deserving of being translated. She might as well have not been there.
While all of this was going on in the suite, LVA was downstairs in the ballroom supervising things and greeting arriving dignitaries from every walk of life. There were governors, senators, key industrialists, clergy, celebrities from the field of entertainment etc. among the 500 people invited to attend what was considered a major event.
Back in the suite, during our conversation with the professor, a minor upset of our plans occurred. Professor Einstein pulled out his pipe and my father jumped up to order some cans of choice pipe tobacco. Much to our surprise, the professor politely told us he only smoked cigarette tobacco in his pipe. He would crumble a few cigarettes, preferably Camels, and smoke them and there were no cigarettes there!
My father, in panic, handed my younger brother, Richard, a couple of dollars and sent him down to the lobby to purchase a carton of Camels at the newsstand and to hurry back up. Richard still vividly remembers what happened.
Richard (at the newsstand): A carton of Camels, please.
Newsstand proprietor: How old are you, kid? You gotta be eighteen to buy cigarettes. It’s the law!
Richard: But they’re for Professor Albert Einstein. He’s upstairs and he only smokes cigarettes in his pipe.
Proprietor: Get outa here kid. If you want cigarettes, an adult has to buy them Go get your ‘father’.
Poor Richard had to run up eight floors of stairs to the suite, because the elevators were jammed with people. My father had to rundown and up the stairs to buy the professor’s Camels and thought he would drop dead doing so. I often wonder why this could not have been one of those times when Einstein smoked his occasional cigar.
After about an hour, my grandfather came up to the suite to escort the Einsteins to the ballroom where the festivities were to take place. This was not before I asked the professor to autograph a program prepared for the event. He graciously inscribed, “To Buddy with all good wishes, Albert Einstein”.
I treasured this autograph and kept it in my drawer for many, many years though many family moves from residence to residence in the belief it might someday be worth a lot of money because of Einstein’s eminence. He died in 1955 in Princeton at the age of 76 and I continued to hold on to the program for another twenty years. Finally I decided to test the waters to see how much an Einstein autograph would be worth and was shocked and disappointed to be offered only fifty dollars for it from a reliable autograph dealer in New York.
I was suspicious the dealer was trying to cheat me. “Only fifty dollars for a genuine Albert Einstein Autograph?” I asked. He opened a drawer behind his counter and pulled out a fistful of Einstein autographs. Look, mister, he said. If instead of writing “To Buddy with all good wishes” Einstein had written something like “Dear Buddy, I’ll tell you a secret. I didn’t write the theory, I copied it from the kid sitting next to me.” Then I’d give you a million dollars! Autographs like yours and these aren’t worth much. My dreams of selling my autograph for a fortune were blasted.
I no longer have the autograph. I’m afraid I changed residences one time two often and lost it while doing so. However, everything I have stated in this article is the God’s honest truth – except, perhaps the exact quotes of the conversation that took place almost seventy years ago. At the time of my meeting with Albert Einstein, he was already world famous but certainly not as famous as he was to become later on. In retrospect, of the billions and billions of people who have inhabited this earth over one-hundred year period, very few can claim to have rubbed elbows with the Man of the Century.
