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A Birth and a Death

Melville Feynman (he pronounced his surname like the more standard variants: Fineman or Feinman) came from Minsk, Byelorussia. He immigrated with his parents, Louis and Anne, in 1895, at the age of five, and grew up in Patchogue, Long Island. He had a fascination with science but, like other immigrating Jews of his era, no possible means to fulfill it. He studied a fringe version of medicine called homeopathy; then he embarked on a series of businesses, selling uniforms for police officers and mail carriers, selling an automobile polish called Whiz (for a while the Feynmans had a garage full of it), trying to open a chain of cleaners, and finally returning to the uniform business with a company called Wender & Goldstein. He struggled for much of his business life.

His wife had grown up in better circumstances. Lucille was the daughter of a successful milliner who had emigrated as a child from Poland to an English orphanage, where he acquired the name Henry Phillips. From there Lucille’s father came to the United States, where he got his first job selling needles and thread from a pack on his back. He met Johanna Helinsky, a daughter of German-Polish immigrants, when she repaired his watch in a store on the Lower East Side of New York. Henry and Johanna not only married but also went into business together. They had an idea that rationalized the trimming of the elaborate hats that women wore before World War I, and their millinery business thrived. They moved to a town house well uptown on the East Side, on 92d Street near Park Avenue, and there Lucille, the youngest of their five children, was born in 1895.

Like many well-off, assimilating Jews, Lucille Phillips attended the Ethical Culture School (an institution whose broad humanist ethos soon left its mark on J. Robert Oppenheimer, nine years her junior). She prepared to teach kindergarten. Instead, soon after graduating, still a teenager, she met Melville. The introduction to her future husband came through her best friend. Melville was the friend’s date; Lucille was invited to accompany a friend of Melville’s. They went for a drive, with Lucille joining Melville’s friend sitting in the back seat. On the return trip, it was Lucille and Melville who sat together.

A few days later he said, “Don’t get married to anybody else.” This was not quite a proposal, and her father would not allow her to marry Melville until three years later, when she turned twenty-one. They moved into an inexpensive apartment in upper Manhattan in 1917, and Richard was born in a Manhattan hospital the next year.

A later family legend held that Melville announced in advance that, if the baby was a boy, he would be a scientist. Lucille supposedly replied, Don’t count your chickens before they hatch. But Richard’s father undertook to help his prophecy along. Before the baby was out of his high chair, he brought home some blue and white floor tiles and laid them out in patterns, blue-white-blue-white or blue-white-white-blue-white-white, trying to coax the baby to recognize visual rhythms, the shadow of mathematics. Richard had walked at an early age, but he was two before he talked. His mother worried for months. Then, as late talkers so often do, Richard became suddenly and unstoppably voluble. Melville bought the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Richard devoured it. Melville took his son on trips to the American Museum of Natural History, with its animal tableaux in glass cases and its famous, towering, bone-and-wire dinosaurs. He described dinosaurs in a way that taught a lesson about expressing dimensions in human units: “twenty-five feet high and the head is six feet across” meant, he explained, that “if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window”—a vivid enough illustration for any small boy.

Melville’s gift to the family was knowledge and seriousness. Humor and a love of storytelling