My Uncle Manuel Rosenberg had audiences with kings, generals, popes, scientists, actors, and presidents. He amassed an extensive collection of 20,000 autographed celebrity drawings. In an LA Herald article dated August 23, 1917, while visiting Universal Studios sketching movie stars, he announced that he was writing a book, "People I Have Met in the Movies." Although Uncle Manuel never wrote that printed work, he published four other important reference books on newspaper art, cartooning, and drawing. These are some of Manuel's drawings that accompanied articles for the Cincinnati Post and Scripps-Howard newspapers. They are live sketches he did during interviews of luminaries in history-some remembered and some forgotten.
My quest to learn more about my Uncle Manuel Rosenberg began in October 2016, on a rainy New York City morning. My plan was to take a quick peek at Uncle Manuel’s drawings at the Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library—and then head off to lunch. What ended up happening was that I spent the next week, from the moment the library opened until it closed, immersed in and obsessed with his archived collection of sketches, newspaper clippings, and typed notes. More than 300 sketches and caricatures of leading personalities in public life and the arts included escape artist Harry Houdini; British Egyptologist Howard Carter, who discovered King Tut’s tomb; comedian Groucho Marx; pianist Liberace; and actress Debbie Reynolds, along with numerous other entertainers, sportsmen, politicians, and writers.
The Rare Book and Manuscript Library was eerily quiet. In the forty-three years since my uncle’s work was donated to Columbia by his wife, Lydie Rosenberg, I was the first person to check out the box. Multiple boxes, really. Gray cardboard boxes filled with magical treasures collected over a lifetime. As I opened the lid on the first box and touched the pencil sketch on top, I got zapped. It was as if an invisible current of energy connected me directly to Uncle Manuel. To the people he met and the places he went. Tears began to stream down my face. I was hoping no one noticed, yet even if they did, I didn’t care. I was having a meaningful moment. It was actually more than a meaningful moment; it was a deep connection to where I came from. An instinctive understanding that the reason I was the way I was, might be because Uncle Manuel was the way he was. It only took me fifty-nine years to get here, and I was about to open a portal to a new way of thinking and being in the world through my understanding of my great-uncle Manuel Rosenberg and his world and contributions as an artist, journalist, world traveler, teacher, editor, publisher, and speaker.