Ernie was the father of a friend of mine. Born in 1925 in North Carolina, he spent his childhood out west in California. As a young man, he fought in World War II, during which time he earned a Purple Heart, and afterwards attended Yale. After a long and distinguished career that included reporting for Radio Free Europe in Germany, serving as the U.S. Vice Consul of the Displaced Persons Visa Office in Salzburg, and working for a New York think tank, Ernie retired in the late 1980s.
He was by all accounts a great retiree, using his free time to cultivate his unique and varied tastes. He went to jazz concerts, museums, plays, and films as often as he could. He liked to read The Economist and The New Yorker every week, usually while reading a couple of books as well. He loved tennis and watched it whenever he could. Later in life he became an avid baseball fan, rooting for Joe Torre's Yankees with gusto.
Those boxes are a treasure trove of found whimsy. While Ernie didn't have much opportunity for aesthetic expression other than his general enjoyment of culture, he did have a hidden knack for acquiring odd, amusing, or otherwise curious images and objects. And it is to that particular facet of his personality that this website is dedicated.
After retiring, Ernie often talked of writing a memoir, documenting the interesting places he'd been. He even had a title all ready to go. As a reporter for Radio Free Europe, he was present at the famous Khrushchev-Kennedy 1961 summit in Vienna. At a certain moment, he found himself standing near Vyacheslav Molotov, the onetime foreign minister of the USSR who was stationed in Vienna at the International Atomic Energy Agency. He saw this fact of being a "bystander to history" as central to his identity, and so he wanted to call his memoir "Standing Next to Molotov." Unfortunately, he never got the chance to write it.
2 comments:
what a wonderful idea!
Thank you for doing this - it is such a fitting tribute to Ernie whom I had the luck to know as a true and loyal friend for more than 30 years.
Looking forward to seeing more of this truly interesting and rare collection.
Sylvia Gardner-Wittgenstein
a family friend
what a joy! and a mystery solved, too...as Ernie's nephew here in Los Angeles, I received over the past 50 years some of the strangest cards from him - the messages were all the usual sorts of salutations (familial, holidays,reports of his latest jazz haunt or player, etc) but the imagery was delightfully unpredictable and absurdly entertaining.
I grew up with a photo of Ernie at the microphone at the news desk of Radio Free Europe - it resided on my father's dresser. That planted a seed - and when, 20 years later I began my own career in radio at KPFK-fm, Ernie's smiling face was never far from my mind. He told me, years later, that it was a fake! he was never on-the-air at all, and just happened to be there on photo day, and jumped in....
keep those cards a-coming!
John Schneider
Venice, California
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