Einstein, and Karen Carlson, at Veblen House and Cottage

It was an honor and a joy to welcome a cousin of Einstein's, Karen Carlson, and her husband Don Johnson to Herrontown Woods on Jan. 15. Growing up in Illinois, Karen didn't find out that she was related to Einstein until she was 18. Her mother, whose escape from Nazi Germany in 1939 was sponsored by Einstein, had wanted to protect Karen from anti-semitism. Now retired, Karen and her husband have traveled to 14 countries to trace her family's history. She is on the advisory board for the Princeton Einstein Museum of Science. 

Elizabeth Romanaux, who leads the museum initiative, was the one who suggested Karen visit Herrontown Woods, given that Einstein was a close friend of Oswald and Elizabeth Veblen, and often came to visit. 

While in town, Karen gave several talks, including one at the Princeton Public Library entitled "How Albert Einstein Saved My Family and Why History Matters." To a full house, Karen told her story of growing up unaware of her her family's jewish heritage, and her mission in recent years to reconnect with relatives in her mother's native Ulm and elsewhere.

While we showed her and Don the Veblen House and Cottage grounds, there was a chance to also learn something of Don's life. When he was a child in Honduras, his mother moved to the U.S. in search of a better life. She found it in NY City, then arranged for Don and his two siblings to join her when he was 14. He later sang in rhythm and blues bands for awhile, and remembers reading books by Oswald Veblen's uncle Thorstein as part of his studies of sociology at UMass in Amherst. During that time, he went south to cover some of the race demonstrations in the 1960s, then pursued a career in journalism. Don first knew of Einstein not as a mathematician or physicist but as a folk hero in NY in the 1950s. He remembered the fascination people felt for Einstein's combination of genius and unassuming informality, captured thirty years prior in a description in the NY Times during Einstein's first visit to America in 1921. 

“A man in a faded gray raincoat and a flopping black hat that nearly concealed the gray hair that straggled over his ears stood on the boat deck of the steamship Rotterdam yesterday, timidly facing a battery of cameramen. In one hand he clutched a shiny briar pipe and with the other clung to a precious violin. He looked like an artist — a musician. He was.”

In 2018, a feature article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly, The Power of Small Numbers, gave a similar description of Oswald Veblen's attire: 

Tall and lanky, he had the furtive vanity typical of a mathematician, dressing in handsome but deliberately shabby suits. One of his colleagues, Hermann Goldstine, recalled, “We always had a theory with Veblen that after he bought a new jacket and pants he would hire somebody to wear them for a few years so that they wouldn’t look new when he put them on.”

Karen and Don enjoyed our "Inside Out Museum" that tells the story of the Veblens' legacy on the outside walls of the house. 

Einstein had multiple reasons to visit Veblen House and Cottage. First was close professional ties. Oswald was the first faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein the second. Veblen designed the building, Old Fine Hall, where Einstein had his first office after moving to Princeton in 1933. Oswald Veblen's vision and tireless effort proved instrumental in Einstein's decision to move to Princeton. 

After Elizabeth Veblen died in 1974, long after Oswald and Einstein had passed away, a list of household items to be auctioned off included "trunks of Einstein" -- left in the attic of Veblen House for storage.

At the Veblens', Einstein would also have found an opportunity to speak his native German. The longtime caretaker, Max Latterman, was a German immigrant. 

Rebecca Martin tells the story of her ancestors once living in the Veblen Cottage, further into the woods from the House, and having Einstein come by.

"My grandmother lived in the farm cottage along with her parents and siblings during the 1930s. There's a story about Albert Einstein walking through the woods around the house and speaking to my great grandmother, who would feed him a sandwich and talk with him. She spoke German, so I'm guessing that if this story is true, he probably appreciated communicating with someone in his native language."

Veblen later used the Cottage as a study and getaway, and sometimes Einstein would join him. Both Karen and Don spoke of the peacefulness of the site, and Karen said it seemed the sort of place she could come to write her book. Given that Einstein's sponsorship saved the lives of her and her family, she is naming the book Einstein's Gift. 

We showed Karen and Don a chessboard, found in the Veblen Cottage back in the late 1960s and recently donated to the Friends of Herrontown Woods. It may well be a board used by Einstein and Veblen to play chess on a quiet Sunday afternoon in Herrontown Woods, long ago.