ALBERT AT EASE: HUMANIZING EINSTEIN

Cover photo of Antiques Roadshow Insider, March 2015: a 1947 Einstein portrait by Ozzie Sweet.

One of the best parts of editing a publication is going through correspondence sent in by readers, whether they’re complimenting, criticizing, or simply commenting. Along those lines, I just received a letter that instantly became one of my all-time favorites.

Here’s the set-up: Our March 2015 issue featured a cover story on Albert Einstein mementos and documents by author Laura Gehl. The cover photo: a rare smiling portrait of a completely disarmed Einstein. As I wrote in my column in the same issue (and expanded upon in my Feb. 10 entry here), Ozzie Sweet took the portrait in 1947 at Princeton University, and he clearly had Prof. Einstein feeling at ease. You just don’t see many photographs of him with such an honest, comfortable smile.

The  Einstein image and coverage inspired some amazingly clear memories from reader Carole Hemingway. As a young girl in New Jersey, she met Albert Einstein and wound up visiting him on several occasions. Her description of his demeanor and his gentleness go a long way in humanizing the great physicist. It’s worth reading:

“After a friend of mine bought me a subscription to Insider as a gift, I got your March issue, with Albert Einstein featured in the cover story and in ‘The First Word.’ I read the sentence, ‘How often do you get to know someone who stood face to face with Albert Einstein?’ and I thought, I did!

“I was living in New Jersey at the time, and I was 9 or 10 years old. My science teacher, whom I adored, had polio, and walking wasn’t easy for her. The other kids used to make fun of her, but I stayed after school and washed the blackboards. I learned a lot from Mrs. Stein; she had a unique way of teaching science—it was like storytelling. She made it interesting.

“One day she asked me if I’d like to go and meet a dear friend of hers. She said my mother would have to sign a permission slip, and she did. So on a Saturday, we pulled up to 112 Mercer St. in Princeton, and I got nervous. Yep, it was him: Albert Einstein. It was a fall day, I smelled wood smoke, and the air was crisp. I was introduced to “the man,” and he took my hand and kissed it. I knew I was never going to be the same again.

“I sat in a corner on a couch by the fireplace playing with one of his cats while Mrs. Strein talked to him. Then he came over to me, knelt beside me, and said, ‘Child, come and join us in conversation,’ to which I responded, ‘I’m a kid; what could I possibly have in common with you?’ He answered, ‘Can you swim?’ to which I replied, ‘No.’ He said, ‘Neither can I. Let’s talk; I’m sure we will find other common ground.’

“Well, that started several years of visits and lots of warm and funny conversations between us. We sailed in his leaky boat and bailed out a lot of water, and his housekeeper would come out on the lawn screaming in German because neither of us wore life preservers — our code for bravery, I guess. I watched him deliver a litter of kittens to a mother cat that otherwise would have died. And he had the first herb garden, before we knew what they were. When I asked him if he liked living in Princeton, he joked, ‘The people here should be put in mason’s jars, with holes poked in the top so they could breathe, so I could observe them.’

“He was a gentle man, a kind man, and he allowed me to call him ‘Uncle Al.’ And I simply adored him. These are just a few of the memories of Albert Einstein that I have. There are others, too. And as I read the articles in your magazine, I thought, ‘Here’s all this memorabilia going for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had a real relationship with Albert Einstein.’ Try putting that on the auction block!”

A bidder at Sotheby’s in London may have paid $84,976 for this pair of Albert Einstein handprints, but Insider reader Carole Hemingway has her own priceless Einstein “memento” — her recollections of a series of visits with him while she was growing up. (About these prints above:  A hand-reader named Marianne Raschig made  them in 1930 and included them in a book of handprints she compiled.)

THE GREENEST HOBBY

Is there a more environmentally friendly hobby than antiques and collectibles? Instead of adding more wood, paper, metals, plastics, and other materials to landfills, we save it all—storing it, displaying it, preserving it.

In certain antiques and collectibles categories, the greenness goes beyond saving; it gets into reusing. The hot new category of Street Art, for example, features creations made from discarded materials. In the Arms and Militaria category, think of all the weaponry, ammunition, and supplies that rest in treasured collections rather than underneath tons of trash. And Folk Art, of course, has a long, long history of practitioners “making do” with reusable materials to create furniture and boxes, decorative items and keepsakes.

I was reminded of the hobby’s greenness recently when I met, finally, a woman named Arlette Sherwood, who lives in a small town in western New York State. I say “finally” because 10 years ago, my sister gave me a piece of her work: a tote bag crocheted entirely from those plastic grocery bags that are, essentially, landfill nightmares. I was instantly impressed by the creativity of the bag and have since bought a few for my daughters.

Arlette Sherwood displays two of the hundreds of carry bags she has crocheted using throw-away plastic retail bags.

I arranged to meet Arlette while doing some research on recycling for another project. The sheer quantity of trash piling up in the United States is alarming: The Environmental Protection Agency notes that we make 251 million tons of garbage per year. A humbling side stat: The U.S. accounts for only 5 percent of our planet’s population but produces 30 percent of its trash.

Anyway, I found Arlette to be as impressive (friendly, sweet, funny) as her tote bags are useful. I looked at a selection of her new creations and thought, “These bags are a kind of utilitarian folk art—all of them hand-crafted, all using throwaway materials, all destined to stick around for a long time.”

At least 420 plastic grocery bags went into this lot of six all-purpose tote bags crocheted by Arlette Sherwood.

They’re colorful, too. You’d be surprised at how many retail stores use customized plastic bags at their checkouts, giving Arlette a nice palette of colors. And they’re water-resistant, tough, and useful.

Even at 93, Arlette can finish a 16 x 20-inch tote bag (using 70 plastic grocery bags) in about a week. She carefully cuts the grocery bags into thin strips and then crochets them into her tough but attractive bags.

How do people use them? “Mostly as a tote for shopping,” she says. “They’re also excellent beach bags because they’re waterproof. I’ve had students buy them to use for their school books. My daughter has five of them; she uses three of them, all in different colors, as totes for work. She uses another to carry her bible and notepad to church and still another as a beach bag.”

Creating tote bags is a worthy hobby—one that keeps Arlette busy, earns a little money (she has made well more than 200 of them, and donates proceeds to her church), and, yes, helps saves the environment, a bag at a time. Her admirers often collect them, too; my sister owns dozens.

In doing further research on recycling and antiques, I stumbled upon an apropos passage in an 1820 book, The Frugal Housewife, that makes as much sense today as it did nearly 200 years ago, when author Lydia Child wrote it: “Nothing should be thrown away so long as it is possible to make any use of it, however trifling that use may be.”