Albert Einstein has been dead for 49 years, but Ralph Gardner can still see the great physicist’s dark eyes across the chessboard.
“Dr. Einstein taught me how to play chess,” says Gardner, a former New York Times editor. In 1934 Gardner was 11 years old. He had learned to speak German from his grandparents, so a friend invited him to a Manhattan tea party honoring Einstein (who spoke at least four languages but preferred German). “First, he asked me if I played an instrument,” says Gardner. “I told him no. He said he played the violin. Then he asked me if I played chess. I said no. I was getting worried that he would think I couldn’t do anything. He said he would teach me chess, and he did.” Einstein returned for several successive Saturdays and taught his new student until tea was served. Gardner learned later that the tea party recurred weekly because Einstein, a professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, was arranging passage out of Germany for Jewish college professors.
Memories of Einstein are just as strong for Gillett Griffin. In 1954, after eating dinner at Einstein’s house at the invitation of a mutual friend, Griffin watched curiously as Einstein wound up a plastic toy bird with suction cups for feet. “He stuck it on the mirror,” recalls Griffin, 76, a Princeton art curator for more than 50 years. “It ran up the mirror, then fell back into his hand. He said, ‘Do you like it?’ I said I loved it.” The next day, Einstein’s stepdaughter and secretary both called and told Griffin, “The professor says come back whenever you like. You are part of the family.”
Teacher and toy aficionado are just two of the endless descriptions applied to the most famous scientist who ever lived, the man Time magazine dubbed the person of the 20th century. Almost every adjective ever applied to a human being has been pasted across Einstein’s iconic visage with its towering forehead, tangled white mane, and sometimes goofy smile: genius, secular saint, pacifist, humanitarian, indifferent parent, jokester, poet, dreamer, musician, world saver, father of the bomb, loyal friend, flirt, even fraud.
