"Putzy" & 1909

When the marshal of Harvard's Class of 1909 began sending out invitations last month to 1909's 25th Reunion in June he came upon the name Ernst Franz Sedgwick ("Putzy") Hanfstaengl. Few Nineteen-Niners could forget the bellowing, arm-waving German youth who won his first Harvard fame playing the piano at a freshman beer party. When "Putzy" Hanfstaengl first heard the Yale cheering section sing "Bright College Years" he cried out: "Why the Elis! They sing my Wacht am Rhein!" Scion of the great Connecticut and Massachusetts family of Sedgwick and the famed art-printers of Munich, he made the good Harvard clubs. But his Harvard loyalty and his German patriotism split badly in 1915 when he raised his cheerful bellow in Manhattan's Harvard Club in celebration of the sinking of the Lusitania and was asked to resign. When the U. S. went to war Hanfstaengl was in Manhattan tending the family's branch store and could not get back to Germany. On his return in 1922 he threw in his lot with an obscure troublemaker named Adolf Hitler. By last week he was Chancellor Hitler's best personal friend, his liaison officer with the U. S. and British Press, his favorite pianoplayer.

Last month Harvard Professor Elliott Carr Cutler, 1909 Class Marshal, remembered his pleasant post-graduate visit with "Putzy's" family in Munich. To the reunion invitation Professor Cutler added a personal note asking "Putzy" to be an aide and wear a silk hat and a frock coat again at Cambridge in June. In Berlin last week, invitation in hand, exuberant, psychic Herr Hanfstaengl bubbled: "I am looking forward to the reunion with the greatest anticipation. I may even, as a surprise, take with me my film, Hans Westmar [TIME, Dec. 25]. That film can show better than any words of mine what we Nazis stand for.''

Some of his old classmates were also looking forward last week to their reunion with "Putzy" with the greatest anticipation. There was Radio Newsman Hans von Kaltenborn, whose 17-year-old son was standing on a Berlin curb when a Nazi storm trooper slapped him for not saluting the Nazi flag carried by a passing detachment (TIME, Sept. 18). There were also several well-known U. S. Jewish classmates, including Lee Simonson, famed scenic artist, and Edwin Isaak Marks, vice president of Manhattan's R. H. Macy & Co. Other "Putzy" classmates: Boston Post Publisher Richard Grozier; Francis B. Biddle and Arthur E. Newbold, both of Philadelphia; Playwright Robert Middlemass Middlemass and Theodore Roosevelt Jr.

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