Paul Anthony Samuelson was born on May 15, 1915, in the office above his parents' drugstore, at the intersection of 17th and Broadway, in Gary, Indiana.1
His parents were Jewish immigrants from Suwalki, a much-contested land not far from the Baltic that had at various times been part of East Prussia (and hence Germany), Poland, and Russia.
Much of their family history is unknown, even his parents' exact ages. His father acquired the name Frank Samuelson on arrival in the United States at Ellis Island, and when Paul learned that the family name did not go back to the Middle Ages, he “developed a Freudian lack of interest in all things European.” He knew none of his grandparents but this never concerned him. “If somewhere in Europe progenitors of my genes still lived up until about 1925, I cannot ever recall experiencing curiosity or interest.”2 What he knew about his family was learned only much later when he sought things to talk about with his mother, then a widow in her eighties. The name Samuelson was chosen because it was the one favored by a relative, “Uncle Jimmy,” who had landed at Ellis Island a few years before Frank.3What he did know (or at least believed he knew) was that his mother, Ella Lypski, born on March 19 between 1885 and 1888, came from the district's capital, Suwalki, and his father, then Ephraim, was born in 1886 and lived in a small village, Ratzki, on what was then, in the 1880s, the East Prussian frontier.a This location on the border was so that Ephraim's
a. Paul spelled it Rotzk, but Ratzki appears to be the correct name. father could run a horse-trading business in East Prussia, even though he could not get the necessary permit to live there. This geographical difference, though amounting to little more than fifteen miles, was enough to make Ella, whom Paul thought harbored pretensions about the her family's status, very conscious of the difference in class between the two of them. Ella's father, Meyer Lypski, a wheat merchant, had three daughters from his first marriage (Eva, and two others) and six children by his second wife (nee Epstein): Fanny (b.
1888), Ella, Alfred (1887), Frank (1891), Norman, and Sarah (1894).4 Ella's mother and Frank's were sisters, making them first cousins.As was typical of Eastern Europeans of this generation, many members of the family moved to the United States in search of economic opportunity. Paul's great-grandfather had gone there alone before the Civil War, eventually returning with some savings. Paul conjectured that these savings may have been the origin of Ella's sense of her family's superiority, though she preferred to talk of being descended from princes, “via Spain.” Eva left Russia for the United States in 1885, and ended up the wife of the manager of the general store in Hankinson,5 North Dakota. Paul's father, Frank, appears to have left, as a teenager, in 1904,6 going first to New York City and then to Chicago along with some relatives. His motives were, of course, economic, but additional motives were provided by his not wanting to be conscripted into the Russian army, and what Paul described as “his resentments for the surliness and worse on the part of majority neighbors of the Polish Catholic faith.”7
Ella had met and fallen in love with Frank before he left Russia, romantically taking the view that his blue eyes made up for the lower social status of his family, and she decided to follow him to America.8 In her father's grain business, it was common to resort to borrowing to build up inventories when there had been losses, and learning that her father was about to go into debt again, Ella demanded the small amount of money needed to pay for her passage to New York. Her plan was to join Eva in North Dakota, to improve her English, and then to move near to Frank, who was then in pharmacy college in Chicago. This plan worked. She attended school in Hankinson, starting alongside the ten- and eleven-year-olds, including her mortified cousin Hazel, in fifth grade, even though she was by then close to twenty.9 Three weeks later, however, she progressed to seventh- and eighth-grade classes. Then, having finished her education, she moved to Chicago and resumed her relationship with Frank, working in two giant Chicago department stores, an example later followed by her younger sister, Sophie.
At the time of the 1910 Census, she and Frank were living in Chicago in a household that included half a dozen members of the extended family.bBy 1912, Frank had completed his pharmacy training and had acquired a drugstore in Chicago, raising the possibility of marriage to Ella. However, because they were first cousins, this was illegal under Illinois law, so they had to elope to Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the law was more relaxed. They did not remain in Chicago because Ella's eldest brother, Frank, also a pharmacist and a good businessman, told the couple about a pharmacist, Mr. Kline, in Gary who wanted to move to Chicago so that he could train as a doctor. He would be willing to trade his business in the center of Gary for one that was nearer to Rush Medical School. This turned out to be a good exchange for both sides: Mr. Kline became Dr. Kline and apparently had a successful practice, and it gave Frank and Ella a prosperous business in the heart of a town that was to boom two years later.
The reason for Gary's prosperity during Paul's earliest years was the First World War, which even before the United States became a combatant in 1917 raised the demand for steel. High demand for steel resulted in high wages and working hours in a town dominated by US Steel: $1 an hour, with twelve- hour days and seven-day weeks meant that steelworkers could earn $84 a week, which was an excellent income for the time. With such overtime rates, people could not afford to take time off, so if they had a stomach ache, bronchial infection, back pain, or other ailments, they would turn to the pharmacist for diagnosis. Paul recounted how his father would then prescribe calomel (now known to be toxic but then used as a laxative), aspirin, or rubbing alcohol he had himself prepared. Given the high profit margins on home-prepared medicines, the business was a gold mine. Frank, who could speak a variety of Eastern European languages, was able to take advantage of this opportunity by serving the large immigrant workforce.
However, having become rich, Frank lost no time in leaving the pharmacy, after which he was helped by his “brilliant” brother-in-law Alfred in losing his wealth through a series of bad investments. Of the five brothers and brothers-in-law, all pharmacists, only Paul's uncle Frank, the least intellectual of the five, had any success as an investor.Marriage was followed, nine months later, by the birth of Harold and then, two and a half years later, by Paul. Though prospering, the family may have lived in a crowded apartment behind the store, and the office above was that of Dr. Antonio Georgi.10 Paul later described him as “A great man
b. They include Ella's sisters Fannie and Sarah, her brothers Alfred and Frank Lypski (who had emigrated in 1905, a year after Frank), and Fannie's husband, Jacob Steine, a cousin of Frank Samuelson. It is tempting to speculate that Steine was previously Epstein. with the knife, he could cure everything but the common cold by surgery. I am lucky to have escaped with only my tonsils and my adenoids unintact. He was a short and excitable man, with a handsome face.”c He played a role in the success of Frank and Ella's pharmacy, giving them the prescription business from his medical practice and the dispensary at his Mount Angelus Hospital, and it was he who delivered Paul on May 15, 1915, in his office. He sought to name the baby Antonio, after himself. In the end, so they thought, a compromise was reached, whereby he was named after Dr. Georgi's son, Paul, and given the middle name Anthony. It was only a quarter of a century later, shortly before Pearl Harbor, when Paul was sent his official birth certificate in anticipation of the draft, that he discovered that Dr. Georgi had had the last word, registering him as Paul Antonio Samuelson.11