The Nine Lives of Hubert J. de Heinrich Podcast

08/09/2021

Chapter 8: Enter Susan

Around 1962, I realized I couldn’t stay in California. I missed the seasons, which I had experienced again while traveling in Europe. Consequently, I decided to go East. George was by that time working for an air freight firm in the East. He was thinking the company should open a new office in Hartford, Connecticut, at Bradley Field. He said, “Why don’t you come and run that office in Hartford?” I, of course, was thinking: Hartford, the insurance capital of the U.S., must have girls, typists, masses of them. I was prepared for self-defense. I got into my ’61 VW Bug—an old one with divided windows in the back—and drove East. I found a companion, probably through an ad. One of us slept in the back seat while the other drove. We didn’t stop much, except in Cheyenne. I was a big Western fan, and I thought Cheyenne was going to be the real stuff. But it was nothing of the sort! Anyway, in three days, we were in New York. I moved up to Hartford, to the airport. There were some sheds, and that’s where my office was located. The goal of my job was getting air freight orders, and that turned out to be a problem. The big plum would have been Pratt & Whitney, the jet engine manufacturer, which was headquartered in Hartford. A single order to transport an engine would have been very profitable. But that order never happened. The next best thing was insurance, but that was tough as well. I never got out of the office much before 9 o’clock at night. There were always night flights, for which I had to complete paperwork. And there were no girls. Hartford was an awful place for another reason: It was dead asleep on its feet at night, and the only place I could eat after work were diners. No, I thought, I can’t live like this. I wrote to my mother: “Mami, send me a recipe. I have to look out for myself, because diners are not my thing.” There was a two-week interlude, while the letters went to California and back. After I received her response, with a recipe, I started cooking. It was just one dish—a Hungarian dish, obviously, maybe chicken paprikás. After a week or so, I had mastered it. I knew what it should taste like, and the result of my efforts was pretty good. I sat down and wrote to Mami: “Next recipe.” I received it, I looked at it, and I realized: The basic recipe is the same, and all that’s required is changing the meat. I quit bothering my mother and started cooking on my own. (Ever since, I’ve become fairly adept at cooking. I was never very good at following recipes, but if I get a general idea, I can personalize it with the ingredients available to me. No preparation can take more than an hour—I refuse that!) In the meantime, the business in Hartford was not developing as we had hoped. George told me to come back to New York, and I moved in with him. He was living with a young man, of French origin, who was a cook. And George was a cook, and now I was cook. Thus one of us would cook every Thursday night, which was a sure-fire hit with girls. I never had a problem getting a date for that night. I joined George’s circle of friends too. As a group, we rented a shack in Lonelyville on Fire Island in the summers, and houses in Bromley or Mad River Glen in Vermont during the winters. At this time, the charter ski flight business to Europe was booming. Gradually, skiing became our dominant vacation plan, our seasons traditionally opening with an obligatory viewing of Warren Miller ski films. For one memorable trip in St. Anton, I managed to enroll in the ski trail grooming team, as Ratraks were as yet unknown. The crew was made up of young men and women, mainly English-speaking, of various nationalities. Our job was grooming, tamping down new snow, and evening out moguls and ruts. Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter

16 min

08/01/2021

Chapter 7: For the Love of Skiing

Remember my friend Skip Adams? He wrote to me, saying he was thinking of taking a tour of Europe with another friend of ours, Frank Robinson, who had just finished his military service. The three of us decided to do this together, and we met in Bremen. Our first excursion was to Scandinavia. We went by ship to Norway. We toured all the way to the north of Norway by bus to see the fjords. For three days, I went off on my own from Narvik on a little postal boat that delivered mail and picked up milk from the various islands. Daylight lasted all night long, because of its location close to the Arctic Circle. It was a beautiful experience. Returning to the Continent, we traveled on together. In Belgium, Skip and Frank met my friends. In Munich, we decided it was time to motor ourselves, and we bought an old VW van. For some reason, we wound up in Landeck, Austria, and consulted with a carpenter named Mr. Czapeck about converting this van into living quarters. It would need to be insulated inside and outfitted with bunk beds, which is precisely what we did. We stayed in the back of his workshop for what turned out to be an itchy week. We were working with glass wool for insulation—awful stuff, like wool but made out of glass particles—and it found its way into everything, even our clothes. After the paneling was up and sealed, we said goodbye to Mr. Czapeck and started a tour of Europe. We traveled all the way down to the Amalfi coast, camping out in the newly outfitted van. Personal hygiene was a little bit wanting, as you can imagine, because those lovely mountain streams were extremely cold. In Amalfi, we stayed for a week or so with a very good college friend who was a naval officer. We lived the life of Riley there—girls and everything—in this absolutely, breathtakingly beautiful locale. At this point, my companions decided to return to the States. I kept the van and moved to Kitzbühel, where it was my intention to camp out. Except it was November in the Alps. And I didn’t have any method of heating the van. That lasted two nights, until I rented a basement apartment—complete with a kitchen with a wood-burning stove—in a family house. I spent the next three months living in this wonderful place. Just in time for Thanksgiving, Patsy von Schlegel and Nancy Vesterby—not girlfriends, but we knew one another quite well—showed up in Kitzbühel for a few days. We went out for Thanksgiving dinner, which consisted of hot dogs. My intention in coming to Kitzbühel was to learn to ski. I had started skiing very late, after I graduated from college, because I just couldn’t afford it before that. I could ski a bit, but very poorly. Until the real snow arrived, I kept in shape by going up to the Hahnenkamm every day on foot. Now, Kitzbühel and St. Anton were the main skiing areas of Austria, and there were a lot of young ski bums in those days in Kitzbühel. One of the people I met there was a man I called Little Hugh. (I was Big Hugh.) He was a halfback or quarterback for the Montreal football team. (The Canadian league played American football, but with slightly different rules.) He was a real athlete, the first person I’d ever known who went jogging when it was still dark in the morning. The people of Kitzbühel would look at him and say, “Who is that crazy guy running through the village every day?” At that time, there was a very famous ski instructor, Karl Koller, the head of a ski school in Kitzbühel, who took Hugh under his wing. He must have thought, “Here’s an athlete I can teach parallel skiing from day one.” That’s what he did, and Hugh was, predictably, really very good. Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter

12 min

07/25/2021

Chapter 6: Living the High Life

By the time I graduated from Berkeley High, I was quite fluent in my newest language. I even got an A in English class. I applied for and was awarded a scholarship from Levi Strauss, a local company, and thus I entered UCal. I planned to live at home. By that time Willi Fellner returned from Princeton and resumed his professorship at Berkeley, and so we moved to a little house on Brookside Drive. I got my first car after graduation, a 1939 Plymouth, which was really not the ideal automobile. The car to have in those days was a ’41 Ford coupe, but at least I had wheels, so I was happy. I had always wanted to be a doctor, but my guidance counselor took one look at me and said, “Wow, with that hand, you are not going to make it in medical school.” “How can we maybe circumvent that?” I asked him. I don’t wish that counselor well because his response was: “Why don’t you try biochemistry and go the back way, into medical research?” I was young, naïve, and stupid enough to follow that advice. I enrolled in biochemistry. Lo and behold, chemistry became my strongest subject, and I got an A. I was off and running. But in my second year came the reckoning: I just couldn’t wrap my mind around physics—and around calculus even less. I crashed and burned, maintaining my grade point average thanks to all those credits from chemistry. I switched my academic focus to political science and economics (and in the course of that study took a yearlong course taught by Hannah Arendt). I was also taught nonacademic things in college, specifically that if you wanted to be anybody, you had to belong to one of the fraternities or sororities. Consequently, I went through rush, got accepted, I became a member of Chi Phi, a fraternity with some great attractions. First of all, they were located a bit further out than all the other sorority and fraternity houses. Second, they had a fantastic bar. (Those two facts were linked, because, of course, no alcohol was permitted within two miles of campus.) Third, they were socially active and, because of the bar, very popular with the sororities. Last, they were neighbors of the Betas, the fraternity that Skip belonged to, and a nice bunch of guys. Once again, my wish for friendship was fulfilled. Thanks to Dick Stevens, the tennis coach, I made the tennis team. I had five hours a day of tennis practice, plus a job pumping gas. I don’t know how I managed to study at all. I probably didn’t. Life was getting a little better—with girls and football games, I became totally immersed and integrated in the American way of life. As the years went on, that was almost more important than my studies, a fact I regret now, to some extent. One day, Sammy Davis, Jr., was scheduled to appear at the Fairmont Hotel. We always wanted to do something special during football season, and someone suggested—I’m not taking credit for it—“Why don’t we invite Sammy Davis for an appearance? Maybe he’ll sing something!” A committee, including me, was chosen to go to the Fairmont, meet with Mr. Davis, and convince him to come to the Chi Phi house on a Saturday after the football game. I said, “Mr. Davis, we have no idea what you should do, but I think it would be great if you were to come in the afternoon. We’ll spread the word. Don’t worry, there will be a lot of people, and maybe you could sing.” “Okay, I’ll do it,” he said. “No fee.” He was a nice and charming guy. In those days, UCal Berkeley was still predominantly white. But he was at the height of his popularity in those days, which must have played into the scheme of things. He appeared on the given Saturday. We didn’t have any posters or publicity, just word of mouth, but there was a crowd of hundreds of people. Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter.

22 min

07/18/2021

Chapter 5: Coming to America

My father was convinced that the Russians would invade Western Europe. In order to put an ocean between them and himself, he and my mother decided that they had to emigrate to the United States. First, he discovered that the American quota for Hungarian immigrants had been filled. Next, he corresponded with the Fellners, who by now were in California and had bought agricultural property near Sacramento. From this, an idea—and I don’t know whose it was—emerged. My father would become a farmer, and we would emigrate on the farmer’s visa, with the Fellners sponsoring us. As 1950 began, we started the application process. As a consequence, my father had to appear before the American agricultural attaché in The Hague, because the American embassy required proof that he was a farmer. Since any documentation of this status was nonexistent, he was invited instead to come and pass a farming test. Of course, he knew nothing about farming. I acted as his coach, reading a book about agriculture and getting him prepared. He boarded a train to The Hague and took the test. After the test, the attaché told him, “Mr. de Heinrich, you passed the test with flying colors. But I’m looking at your hands, and I don’t believe that you’ve ever held a hoe in your life.” But congratulations, you are a farmer! In the meantime, the conflict in Korea had broken out. A lot of Eastern Europeans thought the way my father did and were convinced: “This is it.” My father was in a total panic, wondering how he would get us to the States before the Russians arrived. A man named Béla Dreher was living with his sons, Béla and Jenö, in Belgium at the time. The Drehers, were a big brewing family in Hungary and friends of ours. My father and the sons put their heads together and decided to buy open tickets to Rabat, Morocco, where Dreher senior owned a rice plantation. Every day my father went down to the Sabena office in downtown Brussels and changed the tickets to the following day. And then, all of a sudden, our visas arrived on August 15. Remember Aunt Lucy? Lucy Fellner, who was usually in Monte Carlo, heard that we wanted to get to the States. She went every year to visit her brothers there, as she had to spend some time in the U.S.—which she hated, as it took her away from her beloved casino—to maintain her American citizenship. She had contacts everywhere, and she made arrangements for us to travel to the U.S. on the French Line. We had our visas. We had passage on the French Line’s ship Ile de France. And our belongings were already packed, just in case the Russians invaded and we had to go to Rabat. We took the train to Paris and checked into our hotel, the St. James Albany on the Rue de Rivoli. When we arrived, we got the news that the Ile de France had run aground near Le Havre. The voyage was canceled. My father finally gets everything lined up, and now the ship runs aground? Are you joking? Here we were, stranded in Paris. The call went out again to Lucy néni, who castigated the French Line: “How can you do this to my friends?” In response, the French Line really went out of their way to help. They gave us cabin-class tickets on the Liberté, a German ship that as war compensation had been given to the French. This would be its maiden voyage under the French flag and as the flagship of the line. In addition, the French Line picked up our hotel bill. We were living on the French Line’s tab in Paris, and of course we enjoyed it thoroughly. It was a very pleasant stay after the initial shock. My father’s mood improved with each day that embarkment came closer. Finally, he was going to get some water between himself and the Russians. The concept of a sea voyage was all new to us. We finally took the train to Le Havre and boarded the Liberté. Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter.

18 min

07/11/2021

Chapter 4: Summer in the Hospital

During the first days of summer vacation in 1949, Vincent and I were in the park racing our bicycles, playing Tour de France. Bicycling is a big sport in Belgium, and the Tour de France was being followed closely by the whole country. I was trying to pass him on the inside of a gravel pathway, and my tires slipped on a tree root, throwing me against the tree and breaking my arm right above the elbow, in a clean break. Vincent’s uncle, Dr. Appelmans, was a professor and chief of surgery at the hospital at the University of Louvain, so I was transported there. He put my arm in a cast and sent me back to my room. Maybe three hours passed. The doctor was just ecstatic at how beautifully he had set the bone, like a puzzle. (Doctors, it seems to me, are always satisfied with their work.) But my hand had turned almost black. My father says to him, “You take that cast off, or I’ll take my hunting knife here and I’ll cut it off.” They removed the cast, but it was too late. It was not a split cast, and as my arm had swelled inside it, my hand became paralyzed. They barely managed to save my arm from gangrene. My arm was put in traction via a rod through my elbow, which meant I had to lie on my back. Since I had an open wound along most of my lower arm, as a result of useless surgery, I was given penicillin to stave off infection. In those days penicillin had to be administered by injections, in three-hour intervals, around the clock, in the sides of the upper thighs. (Ever since that hospitalization, I have had a phobia about needles.) They tried all sorts of torture methods to revive the nerves, but nothing worked. It was all dead. I was well cared-for, especially because the doctor was trying to do everything he could to make amends. I was given a private room and had everything I needed. I was not in pain, or at least I don’t remember being in pain. My main concern was that I was bedridden. Because my arm was in traction, all my personal care had to be done in bed, which of course I wasn’t accustomed to. And this university hospital was not only Catholic, but Jesuit. All the orderlies were nuns, with their huge headgear. God knows why, but I used to call them penguins. (You can see how I became Jesuit-damaged.) My parents were understandably upset. My father, always a bit of a pessimist in the best of circumstances, was especially fretful. He had just managed to escape Hungary, and now his son was bedridden. What would the future hold? I was mostly annoyed because this happened at the very beginning of summer vacation. Nobody told me at the time that I would be left with a paralyzed hand, and I didn’t realize it myself until after they took my arm out of traction. But after four or five weeks, my hand was in a completely cramped position, and I had developed a so-called Volkmann’s contracture. After the bone healed, my wound was sewn up, allowing the skin to heal. I was given all sorts of therapies, some of which were administered diligently by my poor mother. Electroshocks were applied to my arm to make the nerves and muscles jump, imitating motion. I wore special stretching devices to get my fingers unclenched, but as soon as the devices were removed, back my fingers went. I was living in Brussels with my parents and brother at this time, and school had begun for the year. This was now the morning routine: My mother woke me up and applied electroshocks from a little machine. I was also given vitamin shots, particularly vitamin C and vitamin B, which hurt like hell. To make matters worse, my father administered the shots to save money. Needless to say, I didn’t look forward to any of this. I did a stint at Bochum-Langendreer in Germany with a very famous neurosurgeon, Professor Tönis. He said, “There’s not much we can do, but let’s try a sympathectomy to increase the blood supply to my arm... Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter.

7 min

07/04/2021

Chapter 3: Escape from Hungary

After the siege, we began to put the house back together. The first order of business was heating the interior, and that required replacing the windows that had been blown out by the bomb in January. At that time in Hungary, houses were built with double windows. Before the siege, my father had had the foresight to have all the inside windows removed and stored in the cellar. When those were put back, we could heat the house with coal-fired cast-iron stoves brought up from the firm’s warehouse. With the few servants who remained— Anna néni, our cook; the maid, Jolán (God bless her heart); and my grandmother’s factotum—the housecleaning went fairly quickly. The families settled into different apartments and made do. I lived in the salon—the room that was previously entered only on holidays. (Slowly, as the situation normalized during the spring and summer, everybody who was staying with us managed to return home.) The Swedes installed their hospital on the third floor, which was where the Heinrich firm’s office was. A lot of Hungarian officers and soldiers arrived, got rid of their uniforms, and departed as civilians. One gentleman, who eventually became the Hungarian ambassador to Austria, met me years later and said: “I shed my uniform at your house.” We were fortunate to have Russian guards at our house, but outside it was chaos. The Russian troops were coming in and going out. There were dromedaries and horses hauling freight, Cossacks riding in the streets, open railcars filled with corpses rolling by on streetcar tracks. The level of destruction was tremendous. All the bridges across the Danube had been blown up by the Germans. Until the streetcar rails were repaired, there was not enough transport, and terrible accidents happened regularly because people were hanging between the cars or from their steps. We tended little victory gardens, just to keep busy. Food was scarce but increasingly available on the black market and for barter. Peasant women, who traditionally demonstrated their status and wealth by wearing multiple skirts, now wore sausages, bacon, and other edibles in place of underskirts. In payment, they accepted our tools, nails, and scythes, which also disappeared under their skirts. The school system reopened. The Russians installed pontoon bridges across the Danube in March or so, after the thaw, allowing us eventually to cross the river and go to school. By now, I was in gymnasium, which is high school. My brother and I and the Fellners all went back to school, first on foot and later via streetcar. I don’t know how businesses managed it, but offices, including ours, started working again. They may have obtained merchandise from warehouses that had not been damaged. One of these, about two blocks from the house, had a patch of grass and a sandbox outside. We kept a few chickens on our gang,and it was Feri’s responsibility to walk them there, walking leading them by a string attached to their feet. He found this chore absolutely humiliating, but my task was much easier. I only had to take our dog there and to play. Right after the siege, we received care packages from American acquaintances. We found their contents very curious, especially the denim pants, which were quite popular in the States in those days. Also surprising were what appeared to be dog biscuits. (These turned out to be saltines, but we didn’t know what saltines were.) Of course, we thought the Americans were crazy. We were starving, and they sent us dog biscuits and light blue pants, for God’s sake. After the school year ended, the family did manage to go to the Balaton via freight car to allow the kids the enjoyment of a little country air. But the summer house in Földvár was not reachable, because the Mária Kert had been requisitioned by a workers’ organization and.... Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter.

25 min

06/27/2021

Chapter 2: The Siege of Budapest

In 1939, we traveled aboard the last Orient Express before the war began. This was the luxurious train that connected the Black Sea with the North Sea and was a very popular mode of travel. It took a day and a half to go from Ostend, where we had been visiting my grandparents, back home to Budapest. It would be the last time we saw them. After that, we couldn’t travel outside Hungary. I remember vividly looking out the windows and seeing first Nazi signs as we passed through Germany. We children heard about the war, of course, but we didn’t know much about it in the beginning. There were no shortages that I can remember. Everything proceeded as usual. My parents, however, understood the political situation. Obviously it affected the business—positively, in a way, because we, like all such businesses, supplied strategic goods, iron, and steel. We had certain privileges like cars and gasoline, which was otherwise rationed. The Heinrichs had enough stamps to get even that precious commodity. The firm, retail as well as wholesale, evolved. We sold everything from nails, screwdrivers, and hammers to all sorts of household articles, like enamel dishes and knives. But we also sold things like rails, steel plates, and wire—all of which we had in our warehouses—directly to construction companies. My father and his cousins cooperated well in running the business—and business was good. Social life hadn’t diminished. Jews were not being persecuted (and Jews were of course very important to the cultural and social life of Budapest and of Hungary in general). We were part of the Axis, because we didn’t have any choice, in light of Hungary’s geographical location. Austria has been annexed in 1938 by Nazi Germany. By that time, Italy—with Mussolini and the Fascisti already in power—was on the side of Hitler. Miklós Horthy, the head of state, tried his best to keep Hungary neutral, but it was impossible. The only negotiation option open to him was to join the war effort on the side of the Axis powers, with the proviso that the Germans would not enter Hungary. Our military and police remained in hands of the Hungarian government. Obviously, there were right-leaning members of the government, but Horthy was able to maneuver things so that the civil population—except for those whose sons had been conscripted into the army—was largely unaffected by the war. At least there were no troop movements visible. Hungary was then a small country, with maybe ten or eleven million people. Today business is international, but there was no globalization at that time. We were Hungarians, doing Hungarian business. Although the Hapsburgs in Austria were already exiled or banned by the end of World War I, Hungary remained a kingdom, theoretically. As part of the defunct dual monarchy, the king of Hungary remained a member of the Hapsburg family, and in the absence of such a member, Admiral Horthy had been named regent. At the top of Central European societies like ours were the nobility and aristocracy, those who possessed large land holdings. These were prominent people—huge families with huge holdings—and they were striving to stay that way. Members of the peasantry owned virtually nothing but perhaps small plots of land. The days of serfdom were long gone, but this level of society remained, just called by a different name. The category in between—which today we call the middle class—was the so-called gentry, some of whom earned nobility. The Heinrich family was in that category; recall that my ancestors had earned nobility through acts of courage and aiding the war effort during the Napoleonic Wars. (One marker of this level of status was the amount of taxes paid. There were actual published lists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of what people paid in taxes....) Listen to the episode for the entire chapter.

27 min

06/20/2021

Chapter 1: Family Rituals

According to my birth certificate, my name is Hubertusz, from the Latin Hubertus. One day, when my mother was heavily pregnant with me, my father was out hunting. He was stalking a particular stag, and he swore, “If I shoot this stag, and the baby is a girl, she’s going to be called Diana [the Roman goddess of the hunt], and if it’s a boy, he’ll be called Hubert.” Guess what? He got that stag. My namesake, St. Hubert, is a Belgian saint. According to legend, he was out hunting on Christmas in the year 686, when he saw an apparition of a white stag with a cross between its antlers. He spared the animal, but even so St. Hubert became the patron saint of hunters. (I’ve visited the town in Belgium—called, naturally, Saint-Hubert—where this event is said to have occurred.) The Heinrich Udvar, the main house where I grew up, was a busy place. The ground floor, fronting the Üllöi út, housed the retail store of the firm. In the left wing of the building was the apartment of the portás bácsi and portás néni (the portier and his wife). Above them on the rez-de-chausée lived the vice bácsi and vice néni (the house caretaker and his wife). Our portás bácsi ruled with an iron fist. He wore a uniform and had a frightening looking mustache, big and curly. The portás bácsi didn’t get his hands dirty, and so the manual labor—like sweeping horse manure—was the responsibility of the vice bácsi. At the end of each work day, he would check employees leaving the premises for stolen goods. (In Hungarian, “néni,” meaning aunt, and “bácsi,” meaning uncle, are titles of respect, not of family. When I was younger, I called every man above the age of twenty “bácsi.” When I am in Hungary now, I am always called bácsi, because of my age.) A vaulted entrance covered the approach to the house to protect the vehicles that pulled up. During my childhood, most of the traffic consisted of horse-drawn carriages, some of which hauled freight. Automobiles and trucks came much later. The first car that my father owned (at least the first car that I can recall) was a Steyr-Puch, an Austrian brand. It was a two-seater with an additional two seats available inside the trunk, making its use practical only in fine weather, as winters were extremely cold in those days in Hungary. My father’s second car was a Mercedes model 170, but when he went out alone, he preferred his Puch motorcycle. The house’s first floor, probably the original family home, belonged to my grandmother. Opposite her apartment (in the right-hand wing) was cousin Gábor. The floor above that on the left-hand side was ours, across from Uncle Dezsö’s apartment (which later belonged to his son, Pisti). The offices of the firm were on the next floor. At the back lived my great-uncle Aladár, who was addicted to morphine.He lived with his sister, Margit, who was known as Matata. Inside, an elevator was flanked by a stairway, an arrangement that was considered very modern at the time.The elevator was operated by the liftes bácsi. We children were not allowed to use the elevator without him. Furthermore, the elevator was to be used only for going up! The apartments were quite large. Our apartment had three rooms in the front: a master bedroom, the gentlemen’s room, and the salon. A corridor led to the dining room in back. Off that corridor was the main entrance to the apartment. From the dining room another corridor led back to the kitchen, servants’ quarters, a toilet, and the room where my brother and I slept. The kitchen was also accessible through the gang, an open walkway in the courtyard. There was a gang for each story of the building, and they were all open to the air except for the walkway at the top floor, which was shielded by a glass cover. The building had no central heating, except in the apartment of my grandmother. Listen to the episode for the entire Chapter.

24 min

06/12/2021

Introduction

Any memoir that I might write has to start with my family background, and that background is very closely connected to my family’s business fortunes. The name Heinrich is of German origin. I have found a vague reference to the Schwarzwald, the Black Forest, but we have discovered no more specific location than that. The first Heinrich we know of was named János. He married a Hungarian woman and had two sons: Alajos I, born in Szekesfehérvár in 1776, and Ferenc, born in 1779. (The Ferenc branch changed their name to Imrédi in the course of time.) Apart from the fact that János had a wife and children, we know nothing about him. Alajos I was the founder of the business, and so our family history starts with him. Alajos I was German. He spoke and wrote in German, and his notes to his five sons were all written in German. In 1790, at the age of fourteen, Alajos I went to Buda, where his mother had relatives. (Budapest didn’t exist as a unified city at that time.) He was an apprentice in a hardware store, or whatever we imagine an eighteenth-century hardware store might have been, for a period of five years. After his apprenticeship concluded, he left Buda and became a bookkeeper in a different hardware business. So here we have a nineteen-year-old boy, with no formal education and nothing to his name. But he was obviously intelligent, clever, and ambitious, because from these origins, we see that he developed. He became successful in the Hungarian town of Györ (in German, called Raab), where he was further employed in the hardware business. Alajos I returned to Buda at a time when Pest had started to grow, mostly due to economic conditions caused by the Napoleonic Wars. There he began to make enough money from the hardware business that he could afford to get married. He and his wife produced ten children, of whom only six survived. In 1806, he entered into a partnership with József Wurm, which flourished because Buda and Pest, still two separate cities, were flourishing as well. Slowly but surely, Pest became a commercial center, in part because of increased commerce on the Danube. When two of his sons, Alajos II and Ferenc II, got older, they became part of the family firm. Before his death, he instructed them to arrange the firm’s future and to take care of the business. The two of them bought out their other brothers, and the firm continued to do well. During the Napoleonic Wars, Austrian steel mills and iron-producing companies were in the hands of the French, a situation that caused disruptions in construction supplies, which were important for the war effort. But Alajos II managed to keep the Austrian-Hungarian troops supplied with the materials they needed. And he undertook a mission, transmitting a letter from the Hungarian Palatine back to the military headquarters in Vöcklabruck, Austria, and he managed to return with a responding letter. In the meanwhile, Ferenc II was a grain merchant outside Budapest. For rendering these services, the family was awarded nobility by the emperor of Austria and king of Hungary on June 1, 1827. Part of the deed bestowed them whatever belonged to the kingdom’s portfolio, grounds, or land in a place called Omorovicza (which is today in Serbia, in the region of Banát). Hence these two brothers were allowed to add the prefix Omorovicza to the family name of Heinrich. (This is also the origin of the “de” preceding the family surname.) Years passed, and the business, then called Wurm & Heinrich, flourished. In the 1840s Ferenc II managed the business, along with others, including his son, Ferenc III, because of his intelligence. In 1843 Wurm retired and left the firm on a very friendly basis, and Ferenc II renamed the business Heinrich A. és Fiai, which means Heinrich A. and Sons. (The A stood for Alajos, the founder.) Listen to the episode for the entire Introduction.

15 min

The Nine Lives of Hubert J. de Heinrich

Episodes

Chapter 8: Enter Susan

Chapter 7: For the Love of Skiing

Chapter 6: Living the High Life

Chapter 5: Coming to America

Chapter 4: Summer in the Hospital

Chapter 3: Escape from Hungary

Chapter 2: The Siege of Budapest

Chapter 1: Family Rituals

Introduction

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