A closer look at Albert Einstein’s famous summer in Southold

In one of this summer’s biggest blockbusters, “Oppenheimer,” there are several references to the game-changing letter that J. Robert Oppenheimer’s colleague and confidant Albert Einstein wrote to President Franklin Roosevelt in the summer of 1939, warning that Germany’s Third Reich might already be working on an atomic bomb. The letter prompted FDR to launch the top-secret Manhattan Project — led by Oppenheimer — which developed the world’s first nuclear weapon.

The story of the famous letter — mailed 84 years ago next Wednesday from a post office in Southold — has been told and retold on the North Fork for generations, as has the “sundial/sandals” incident that unfolded between Einstein and Rothman’s Department Store owner David Rothman.

Far less has been written about the remarkable friendship that developed between Einstein and Mr. Rothman — a man with an eighth-grade education who befriended one of the world’s most advanced thinkers during the course of that fateful summer.

In 1963, Mr. Rothman’s daughter, Joan Rothman Brill, pursuing a bachelor’s degree at Southampton College, recorded her father’s verbatim recollections on reel-to-reel tapes for a term paper that she later turned into a book, “My Father and Albert Einstein.”

Her nephew, Mr. Rothman’s grandson Ron Rothman, reprinted those transcripts in a 2012 update to the original book that he titled “My Grandfather and Albert Einstein,” which includes new essays from Mr. Rothman’s descendants.

The transcripts, plus letters the two men exchanged over the years, provide the most thorough first-person accounts of the friendship, and convey Mr. Rothman’s clear affection for the man he called “Dr. Einstein.” Einstein died in 1955. Mr. Rothman passed away in 1981.

In July 1939, Einstein entered Rothman’s Department Store on Main Road in Southold, a location now known as Einstein Square, and was captivated by the music playing on the store’s phonograph: Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor. Well aware of Einstein’s presence in town, Mr. Rothman scrambled to turn down the volume, according to the audio transcripts. As Mr. Rothman lowered the sound, Einstein implored him to leave it be.

“‘Please, do not touch it. Let it play. It is beautiful,’ ” Mr. Rothman recounted the scientist saying.

“He started to wave his arms up in the air, humming and singing, and beating time to the music as if he were conducting it,” Mr. Rothman said on the 1963 recordings. “He seemed to be enjoying it immensely, so I let it play until it finished.”

The two men got to talking, and Einstein asked the storekeeper, in his thick German accent, for sandals. Mr. Rothman famously misunderstood and, thinking the world-renowned physicist needed a sundial for some sort of experiment, led Einstein outside and offered up his own garden’s sundial.

Initially bewildered, Einstein soon caught on and “let out a belly laugh, ‘Ho, ho, ho, ho,’ and he laughed and laughed,” according to the transcripts.

“Finally, he picked up his foot and showed me, ‘Sundahls,’ ” he said. “Einstein was looking for sandals he could wear on the beach!”

Mr. Rothman was mortified. Einstein was amused as he purchased the sandals — for $1.35. Ron Rothman told The Suffolk Times last week that one aspect of this famous story that has been mythologized is the notion that his grandfather sold Einstein a pair of women’s sandals, purportedly the only sandals in stock that day. Ron Rothman said that’s not necessarily true.

“If you look up sandals from the period, Euro-style sandals, that’s what they are,” he said. “They just look like women’s sandals. Everybody thinks they were women’s sandals and the fact is that I really don’t think they were.”

“Into the drink”

Mr. Rothman and Einstein soon realized they both played violin — with each man humbly claiming amateur-level skills — and made a date to play together. But when the bows hit the strings “they realized my grandfather wasn’t up to snuff,” Ron Rothman said. “So he set up quartets for other people [to play with Einstein] at his house.”

In the transcripts, Mr. Rothman recalled those summer evenings in 1939.

“People around here got to know on what nights the string quartet would be playing, and a good crowd would be standing around outside our house, listening to the music through the windows or hoping to catch a glimpse of him,” Mr. Rothman said. “I always sneaked him in and out through the back door.”

One of the observations about his new friend that seemed to most amuse Mr. Rothman — at least at first — was Einstein’s poor sailing skills. Even the father of quantum physics seemed to see himself for what he was — and wasn’t — as a Peconic Bay mariner. He named his East End sailboat “Tiniff,” Yiddish for “junk.” 

“One morning, Einstein and his sister … decided to go sailing,” Mr. Rothman recalled in the transcripts. “Einstein was in the bow of the boat raising the sail. It was hoisted just about all the way when a gust of wind capsized the boat. Both of them went into the drink, and neither of them could swim a stroke. Somehow they managed to grab the boat and hang on,” Mr. Rothman recalled.

“There they were, and if it hadn’t been for a 15-year-old boy who lived opposite them and spotted them, I don’t know what would have happened.”

He said that “this young boy … ran down the beach, swam out, and pulled in the boat, with Dr. Einstein and [his sister] hanging on to it.”

Einstein’s hapless sailing attempts, little known outside the North Fork, have become deeply embedded in local lore.

“He was pretty bad,” Ron Rothman said last week. “He was pretty bad everywhere he sailed, and over the years, I’ve run into a number of people out here who rescued him.

“He would basically go out and daydream. And if you know the tide and currents off Nassau Point, I’m sure he had trouble getting back … and somebody would bring him in.”

Seemingly lacking any nautical knowledge and unable to swim, Einstein would apparently just wing it on local waters. He loved his sailboat, Mr. Rothman said in the recordings, and one day that summer made plans to sail it from his home on Nassau Point to “the head of Town Creek,” where Mr. Rothman lived.

Einstein and his sister set out at 9:30 in the morning. As the hours ticked by with no sign of the boat, Mr. Rothman began to worry.

By 6 p.m. that evening, he was frantic.

“I took the car and drove to Founders Landing and scanned the water,” he recalled in the transcripts. “No sailboat was in sight. I sped to Cedar Beach; no sign of them there. Then down to Town Harbor Road; still no sign.”

By the time the sun began to set, Mr. Rothman was “rac[ing] home, intending to call for help from police and the Coast Guard.

“I was just about to pick up the phone when it rang: ‘Hey Dave, this is Captain Meyer. There’s a wild-looking couple with white hair who need haircuts, asking how to sail a boat to your house. I can hardly understand them.’ ”

Mr. Rothman rushed down to Founders Landing to retrieve the pair — just as they were about to set sail yet again.

“There I found them. Einstein’s pants were rolled up, his feet knee deep in water … the professor and his sister … pushing the boat out into the water, intending to sail it up the creek.”

Mr. Rothman called Tony Slatka from Goldsmith’s boatyard (now Goldsmith’s Boat Shop) to ask for the boat to be towed to his Southold home.

Mr. Rothman’s most vivid memory of that day, according to the transcripts, was when he realized the true extent of Einstein’s reverence for America.

“We went down to Town Creek and Tony was just about coming in with their boat. When they pulled it up on shore, Tony started to pull the mast out … there was a little American flag that the Einsteins had at the top of the mast. As Tony was pulling the mast out, the flag slipped out somehow and fell into the mud.

“I saw Einstein rush forward, right into the mud, and promptly pick up the flag. He wiped it off carefully. I saw him rolling it up neatly and I felt this showed the deep respect he had for our country. It moved me, because I saw it fall, and thought nothing of it, while Einstein rushed forward to pick it up.”

“Kingly elegance”

Five years later, Einstein was still pining for Peconic Bay. In one of more than two dozen letters he sent to Mr. Rothman, his fond memories of the waters off Southold are clear. 

“Your Bay is really the most beautiful sailing ground I ever experienced and I regret that the health of my family compels me to go into the mountains for recreation.”

In another letter, Einstein described his time in Southold as his “happiest summer ever.”

For years, Mr. Rothman continued to send Einstein fresh pairs of Rothman’s Department Store sandals or, as Einstein called them in a 1944 letter, his “sailing shoes.”

In an undated letter, Einstein writes, “Dear Mr. Rothman, [i]t was very kind of you to send me again, this year, a gift of my favorite sandals. I cannot wear them yet because those you have given me last year  are still full of kingly elegance. I wear them always, in the sailboat and out.”

In an interview with The Suffolk Times last week, Ron Rothman cleared up some historic confusion over a few details about Einstein’s letter to Roosevelt.

“In the letter, the return address is wrong,” he said this week. “The fact that it’s ‘Old Grove, I think, was a misunderstanding of Old Cove [Boulevard].

“And it’s postmarked Peconic because at that time, Nassau Point was part of the Peconic postal district.”

Ron Rothman said he’s been unable to definitively locate the spot from where Einstein mailed the letter, but he believes it was a post office “at the end of Skunk Lane.”