After 70 years spent selling everything from women’s hats to early television sets to magazine advertisements, 94-year-old Ted Lilienthal finally retired last year. Now he’s focusing on one item he could never put a price on: his autograph collection. Spanning four generations and filling two thick albums kept secure in an undisclosed location, the collection includes signatures from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Charles Darwin, Jefferson Davis, Thomas Edison, Brigham Young, Al Jolson, Walt Disney, John D. Rockefeller and Colin Powell. “All the famous people are practically in there,” Lilienthal says. He suspects that if he were to take it onto Antiques Roadshow, “it would be a sensation . . . but I doubt I will let it out of family possession.”
Passed down from oldest son to oldest son, the collection started with his great-grandfather, Max Lilienthal. A rabbi from Munich who moved to the United States in the 1840s after serving the Russian czar for four years, Max Lilienthal was chief rabbi of three New York congregations and later moved to Ohio, where he became one of the leading advocates of Reform Judaism. He collected signatures of many high-profile people through his connections. Fellow Ohioan “William Howard Taft was a very close friend of my great-grandfather’s,” Lilienthal notes.
Lilienthal says he’s never counted the autographs, but guesses there are thousands. “It’s voluminous—it encompasses many centuries and wars,” including signatures from “top opera stars, athletes, presidents, heads of state.” The oldest entry in the albums is a 1770 handwritten letter from German poet Friedrich Schiller, the author of the ode “To Joy.”
Upon retiring from San Francisco magazine after 21 years, Lilienthal planned to go through the collection “and redo it in new albums.” But an archivist he consulted said the albums themselves are historically important.
Lilienthal, a social science/social thought major at Stanford, added the signatures of famous people he’s met over the years, but he wasn’t an autograph hound. “If something happens to fall into my lap, that’s great.”
Something happened when he worked for Hastings men’s store during World War II, selling military uniforms. A manufacturer asked Lilienthal to host a soldier who was in town. “We were out to lunch, and the conversation came to autograph albums, and [the soldier] said, ‘I have one that should be in your collection.’” When the soldier next met Lilienthal, he gave him a “large, imposing document”—the appointment of a new mayor of Berlin that had been signed by Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring.
“He said, ‘I was in the first wave of American troops that went into Berlin, and I went into this guy’s office and took it, and now it’s yours,’ ” Lilienthal recounts.
Although Lilienthal anticipates keeping the collection in his family—he has two daughters and a son, five grandchildren and one great-grandson—he shows the albums readily. “Anyone who wants to see it is welcome to. It’s a source of conversation. People see it, and they’re just fascinated with it.”
—STEPHANIE CONDON, ’05
