[ index | 1970 ]

W.F. Friedman

The son of a Jew from Bucharest, he was born Wolfe Frederick Friedman on September 24, 1891. At the time, his family was living in the southern Russian city of Kishinev, now the capital of the Soviet Republic of Moldavia near the Rumanian border, where his father, Frederick, was employed as an interpreter and translator in the Russian Postal Service.

As a wave of anti-Semitism began to swell throughout the country, Frederick began looking west and in 1892 set sail for New York. After settling in Pittsburgh, where he got a job selling sewing machines door to door for Singer, he sent for his wife, Rosa and their two children. On September 26, 1896, two days after his fifth birthday, Wolfe officially became William as his father took the citizenship oath in a Pittsburgh courthouse.

Friedman received his bachelor of science degree in Feburary 1914, and eventually signed on as a geneticist at Riverbank Laboratories, a philanthropic research organization located on a five-hundred-acre estate in Geneva, Illinois, outside Chicago.

Run by "Colonel" George Fabyan, an heir to a cotton fortune who chose to spend it dabbling in science

-- James Bamford: THE PUZZLE PALACE, 1982.

[ index | 1969 ]