Home
Search transcripts:    Advanced Search
Notable New     Yorkers
Select     Notable New Yorker

Frances PerkinsFrances Perkins
Photo Gallery
Transcript

Part:         Session:         Page of 915

time I heard of the Roerich museum.

Roerich gave lectures around in various places.

There were many enterprises in New York that had lectures that didn't have to be paid for. You didn't have to pay the lecturer, but you were doing good to the community by attracting their attention to intellectual subjects.

Roerich was interested in mysticism. Whether he himself was a mystic I never knew. I seem to remember that he had a kind of a scraggly beard, was sort of stopped shouldered, elderly, or middle-aged, looking old to me at the time that I saw him, which was when I was a young student at Columbia. He was well-known in New York. Nobody took him amiss. If you said you'd been up to see Roerich or the Roerich museum, nobody would have thought that was queer. He was supposed to know a good deal about the religions of the East, which is as good a scholarly specialty as any other. The extent to which he was a practitioner of them I never heard. That wasn't mentioned. But if he had been, it wouldn't have upset anybody in New York. I have very little recollection now of what his museum contained, but I know it was interesting.

I don't think I went to the museum more than once or twice - possibly twice. I think this librarian went





© 2006 Columbia University Libraries | Oral History Research Office | Rights and Permissions | Help