[joe-frank-list] researching Joe Frank

[russellbell at gmail.com]

	Quoth Tayt J Harlin <tjh219 at nyu.edu>:

	'That's incredible, Russell. Thanks for sharing it.'
	You're welcome.

	'Are you writing a biography of Joe?'
	No.  In 2007 I was researching the Congressional Record for
some other reason and saw the name Meier Langermann.  I remembered
that name from the LA Weekly article, 'Joe Frank is off the air'
(1997).  I looked up all the entries in the Record and saw that
multiple bills had been submitted 'for the relief of Meier Langermann,
his wife Friederike, and his son Joseph' ('for the relief of' =
permission to stay in the US).  Eventually 1 passed, and FDR vetoed
it: there's a letter in the Congressional Record refusing Joe
permission to stay in the US signed by FDR.  I remembered the story
his mother tells about her unhappy marriage, first in 'God only
knows', reused in 'Higher learning' and was touched by the pathos:
because of an unhappy marriage, she and her family were spared the
Holocaust.  There's a powerful novel to be written.  What happened to
Meier Langermann's first wife?  their children, if they had any?
	A few years earlier my mother had asked me to research the
genealogy of her family.  The city library had subscriptions to
ancestry.com at 2 computers in the special collections branch.  I
enjoyed looking up her family and my father's, then looked up some
other people who interested me.  I did the same to Joe's family after
the above.

russell bell