Cobblestones: The Story of My Life

By Herbert Freeman

An autobiographical story, Cobblestones describes the life story of the author from his early days in Germany, his emigration during the Nazi period, his separation from his family and his difficulties in obtaining a visa to come to the United States, resolved finally only through the intercession of Professor Albert Einstein. In his new country he had to learn English and adapt to the new countrys culture in Waterford, NY, a small central New York village, and later Cohoes, NY where he graduated as valedictorian of his high school class. After college and graduate school, he joined industry and within a decade rose to head a department with over 100 persons. This was followed by a move to academia - New York University, then Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and finally Rutgers University, from where he retired. In industry he designed one of the early computers (for which he received the IEEE Pioneer Award). He was active in some of the leading computer professional organizations, traveled widely in the US, Europe, Asia, and South America, and received many awards. Just prior to retirement he founded and successfully led a pioneering software company for eight years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 19, 2009
• ISBN: 9781462815944

Herbert Freeman

A retired professor of computer engineering, Herbert Freeman obtained his bachelors degree from Union College in Schenectady, NY and his graduate degrees from Columbia University. He was born in Germany and came to the United States before World War II at the age of 12. He grew up in upstate New York, and lived on Long Island and central New York, and for the past 23 years in central New Jersey, where he now lives with his wife of more than 50 years. In addition to this autobiography he has published more than 6 technical books.

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Copyright © 2009 by Herbert Freeman.

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Contents

Preface

1 The First Years

2 The Long Journey

3 The Early Days in the United States

4 College and University

5 Industry

6 The Move to Academia:

New York University

7 Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

8 Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

9 MapText, Inc.

10 Family

11 Retirement

12 Conclusion

Appendix Attachments

Endnotes

Cobblestones

(The Story of my Life)

Why did I select Cobblestones for the title of this book? I wanted something short and catchy, and this title suggests the little ups and downs I encountered during my life’s journey, not to mention that when I started, most roads were indeed paved with cobblestones. And yet on a road not smoothly paved, one can encounter interesting wanderers, see beautiful vistas, and savor what it is to be a human being.

Preface

This is a narrative story of my life, from its earliest days, through early adulthood, marriage, and then my professional career until retirement. It is strongly focused on my professional career, with only passing references to my family. This may seem overly self-centered to the reader, but I did want to make a record of what I accomplished as a professional engineer and professor. This should not be seen as a slight to my parents, to my dear wife or to my wonderful children. When all is said and done, what really counts is the family you help raise and the children and grandchildren who live after you, not to mention the extended family of which I am part and who to various degrees helped shape who I am and what I accomplished.

I can only say that I have been incredibly fortunate. We all face many decisions in life, many occasions where in our walk through life we can take either this path or that path. It is as if an unseen hand on many of these occasions, unbeknownst to me, guided me to take the right path. Was it luck? Was it the destiny of which Shakespeare speaks, or was it the relatives, friends, and associates I encountered during my travel through life? Whatever or whoever, I can only express my deepest gratitude for the guidance and help that I received.

And finally a word of special gratitude to my wife, Joan, my life’s partner for more than 50 years. There is no more weighty decision in one’s life than the choice of one’s marriage partner. Without her the journey through life would have led nowhere. The wonderful family we have raised together and the many accomplishments would never have come to pass without her support, encouragement, and love.

Chapter 1

The First Years

I was born on Sunday, 13 December 1925, at 7:30 AM according to my birth certificate. My parents were Leo and Johanna Friedmann. I was the second child. My brother, Henry (Heinrich or Heinz, originally) was born on 28 September 1922. The family resided at Wittelsbacher Allee 87 in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, in a residential section in the eastern part of the city.

I was born at home, as this was the preferred practice then. We lived on the first floor, that is, one floor above the ground floor, in what would in the US be called the second floor. One floor above us lived a family named Gutmann. They had grown-up children, one of whom, Emily, we’ll hear more about later. Below us was a small drugstore owned by people named Mehnert, who had a little girl, a bit younger than I. My father was a physician. His office was in the building next door, at Wittelsbacher Allee 85. He was a general practitioner and his patients all lived within easy walking distance of his office. We did not have an automobile, as there really was no need for it and few people owned automobiles at that time. Public transportation was good. A streetcar ran right on our street, with a stop every two blocks.

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Johanna, our maid, Henry (left) and Herbert (right) on a bench in the Ostpark (probably summer 1926)

My father was born in Lübeck, a city in northern Germany, but his family moved to Frankfurt¹ when he was only two years old. He had three brothers, Max, Moritz, and Semmi, all older than he, and two sisters, Selma and Recha, both younger. His father was a Hebrew-school teacher and extremely religious. Max, Semmi and Selma followed the orthodox tradition. The others did not. Moritz decided to emigrate to the United States in 1908, and eventually changed his name to Maurice Freeman. Semmi served in the German army in World War I and died as a soldier in Romania. Max worked for a company, Beer Sondheimer. They had sent him to a branch in England before World War I, and when the war started, he was interned there for the duration of the war. After the war he returned to Frankfurt and married Klara Michel, daughter of a distinguished Frankfurt family. They had four children—Salli (Samuel), Fanni, Edit, and Martin. Selma married Hosias Wolfsohn, a ritual slaughterer, and lived in Berlin with their three children, Fanni, Mary, and Karl.

My father and his sister Recha were considered the smart ones in the family, and both were sent on to higher education. My father attended the Goethe Gymnasium (a so-called classical high school for which you had to pass a special entrance examination) and then went on to study medicine in Würzburg, München (Munich), and Freiburg-im-Breisgau, from where he obtained his doctor-of-medicine degree in 1911. His doctoral dissertation topic was Die Genitaltuberculose des Weibes (Genital Tuberculosis of Women) and his diploma, on parchment and in Latin, impresses viewers to this day. He served

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My father as medical officer in World War I (at far right)

as a Medical Officer at the front in the German army in World War I, in both France and Romania. After the war he took a position as a resident at a hospital in Fürth, a city near Nürnberg, Germany, and there was introduced to the woman who would become his wife and my mother, Johanna Friedmann (coincidentally with the same last name.) Recha became a public-school teacher and never married. My paternal grandparents (Samuel Friedmann and Fanni Schwarzschild) both died well before I was born and thus I had no opportunity to get to know them. They are buried in the Jewish cemetery on Rat Beil Strasse in Frankfurt, in the section reserved for members of the Religionsgesellschaft, a very orthodox synagogue. I visited their graves in 2002 and found their gravestones in good order.

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My mother’s maiden name was Johanna Friedmann. Her parents were Leon Reuben Friedmann and Hedwig Hurwitz. The similarity between my mother’s last name and that of the man she married was totally coincidental. My father’s family had its roots in Germany as far back as can be traced (to the mid-1700’s at least), whereas my mother’s parents had come from Lithuania, where her grandfather (Samuel Koppel Friedmann) lived (he died in 1935 at the age of 93). My mother’s parents settled in Nürnberg, Germany, where my grandfather, trained as a watchmaker and jeweler, opened a store. My mother (born in 1892) was the oldest of five children; the other four were all boys: Theo (1893), Benno (1896), Salli (1898) (name changed to Walter after he came to the US because Salli was considered strictly a girl’s name), and Hillel (Heinrich or Heiner) (1900). All four served in the German army in World War I. Benno, who rose to the rank of Feldwebel (sergeant), was injured during the war. Theo and Benno became businessmen and lived in Munich, Salli studied medicine and opened a practice in Limbach, a small town in Saxony near the city of Chemnitz, and Heiner, the youngest, became an accountant and worked in the big department store Tietz in Munich and Frankfurt. Theo’s wife was Lola, and they had two girls—Hedwig (or ‘Hede’) (later called ‘Hedy’) who was one year younger than my brother, and Lore (later called ‘Laura’), who was about two years younger than I. Walter’s wife was Lotte and they had one girl, Eva. Benno’s wife was also named Lotte. They had one boy, Walter, the youngest of all the cousins, born in 1930, who died of an infectious disease at the age of 4. They then had two girls, Hadassah, born in 1935, and Alisa, born in 1937. ²

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We had a maid, as most middle-class families did at that time, to help with the housework and to look after the children. The maid, often a young woman from a village in the countryside, would remain a couple of years, and then be replaced by another. The one I remember best was one named Johanna. She came from a small village in the vicinity of Frankfurt, Altenstadt in Hessen, and after a few years returned there and got married to a Mr. Fingernagel. My mother was quite fond of her. Many years later, when I was about nine years old, Johanna invited me to come and spend a couple of weeks living with her family in the little village. But more about this later.

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When I was about two years old I contracted scarlet fever. My parents moved my brother Henry, who was three years older, out to live with our grandparents so that he would not catch the disease from me. I remember looking out from a window and waving to my brother who came to visit but stayed on the street below. I was puzzled that he seemed so small, and it was explained to me that the reason was that I was looking at him from far away. When I had recovered from the disease, a painter came to the house to paint the walls and all the furniture in the room, especially including Henry’s toy chest, to disinfect it.

In the spring of 1929 Henry was enrolled in the Friedrich Ebert Reform Schule (school). It was called that because it used a modern curriculum, with the children having individual, movable desks and chairs, and not the old-fashioned bolted-to-the-floor tables and benches. Also the school was co-educational, an innovation at that time. The school was slated to get a new modern building but since it was not yet finished, it shared the facilities with another school, the Gebrüder Grimm Schule, at the corner of Rhönstrasse and Luxemburger Allee. My mother once took me along in a stroller to meet Henry (then called ‘Heinrich’ or ‘Heinz’ for short), and all the girls from his class came to look at the cute little baby (me, at age 3).

I attended a private Kindergarten, starting when I was only 4½ years old. (Kindergartens only existed as private ones; the public school system did not provide for them.) The teacher (if that is the right word to call this person) was a Tante Carmen. It took a while until Henry was able to explain to me that she was not really a ‘Tante’ (aunt) but was merely called that to make the children feel comfortable with her. Once my cousin Laura (then called ‘Lore’) was in town with her family, and I was asked to take her along with me to the Kindergarten for the day. On the way home we (probably I) got the bright idea to place little stones on the trolley tracks to see what would happen to them when the trolley drove over them. (They got crushed.) Anyway my mother looking out of a corner window from our apartment and wondering why we were late coming home, saw us