Over the long distance wire to the Einstein home in Princeton, it was learned yesterday that the founder of the theory of relativity was spending his fifty-fifth birthday “just the same as he spends every other birthday.”
Frau Einstein, speaking for the professor, who spent the morning wandering in the vicinity of the Princeton campus accompanied only by his mathematical abstractions, said that she and her husband would spend the day alone.
“We always do,” Frau Einstein said. “I have made a nice cake for him, and tonight we shall sit by ourselves and light fifty-five candles after dinner. We are being selfish tonight, for we intend having no company for dinner.”
TAX MYTH EXPLODED
Frau Einstein exploded reports that the mathematical wizard had made out his income tax report by simply working it out in equations as he did his vaunted Relativity Theory.
“The truth of the matter is this,” Frau Einstein disclosed. “I, myself, made out the professor’s income tax report.”
Asked whether or not the professor appeared happy on his birthday, she revealed that “the professor has grown quite indifferent to birthdays. He is quite as happy as ever–no more and certainly no less.”
She said that a great number of congratulatory messages had been received from friends and well-wishers of the professor, but she refused to disclose the identities of those who had sent them.
“I am afraid,” she remarked, “that we are not sufficiently Americanized as yet to tell you who writes to us. We insist on keeping our private correspondence private.”
Professor Einstein, in a letter to the Weequahic High School, in Newark, where students yesterday celebrated the professor’s birthday, extolled the American educational system as being superior to European methods.
The letter in the savant’s manuscript, translated from German began: “What one must demand from the school in the first place is something negative; it should not suppress in the young a feeling of independence, a joy of living, personal initiative, and the urge for knowledge. This most important demand the schools in the United States fulfill in a most satisfactory manner in contrast to the schools of Europe.”
DEVELOPMENT OF JOY
He wrote that the schools should develop the power of thought, character, perseverence and social consciousness. He recommended the development of a joy in intellectual and artistic studies, “so that the people may become sensitive to the finer enjoyment of life.”
“I almost forgot to mention,” he wrote, “that the schools should also transmit information.” He said he believed the significance of this is properly not overestimated in this country.
When asked yesterday whether or not this was the first birthday the professor had spent away from his German home, Frau Einstein replied, “Not at all. He has never spent a birthday at home.”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
