A photograph of my cousin Benjamin Nathan Rippe (son of Maurice and Winifred "Winnie" (Nathan) Rippe & their in New York City on October 24th, 1943 just before he headed for Europe.

Ben would be involved in the Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes, Rhineland and Central Europe campaigns. For awhile he would find himself a commandant of an American Prisoner of War camp in Salzburg, Austria. Ben was one of the kindest souls I have ever known and suspect his humanity and kindness had to have held out during his command in Europe.

On his return to the states Ben still serving with Army Intelligence was pleased to find his new duty stateside was working with some of the artists and writers that had immigrated to New York City in the late 1930s and early 1940s fleeing from the Nazis.

Among the many artists Ben met in the 1940s, he became good friends with Marcel Duchamp. I often imagine Ben and Duchamp at Peggy Guggenheim's "Art Of This Century Gallery" on 30 West 57th Street and mingling with the likes of Max Ernst, Yves Tanguy, Wassily Kandinsky, Lee Krasner, Jean Arp, Fernand Leger, Andre Masson, Roberto Matta, William Baziotes, Alexander Calder, Joseph Cornell, Hans Hofmann, Willem & Elaine de Kooning, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock, Richard Pousette-Dart, Ad Reinhardt and the list could go on.

Maurice Rippe was a friend and classmate of Edward Kasner, the well-known mathematician that, along with his 9 year old nephew came up with the name Googol as a number with 100 zeros after it - which as we all know was appropriated in 1996 as the name for the Internet company Google. Though it’s not clear if it was intentionally misspelled so it would either read better graphically or would avoid any lawsuits.

Below is an image of a postcard written by Edward Kasner notifying Maurice he had sent a letter of recommendation for Ben to teach at Harvard just the week before.

April 27th, 1939
430 West 116th Street

I wrote a recommendation for Ben as a
teacher and sent it to Harvard last week.
Let me know results.

Ed


Ben did end up teaching at Harvard before and after the war.