Newport Stories: The Omelet King, or, On the Very American Story--in Some of the Best and Worst Senses--of Rudy Stanish
[Here is the second installment of a series of posts by Benjamin Railton that originally appeared on his blog AmericanStudies .] Like so many evocative American places, the Newport, Rhode Island mansion The Breakers contains and connects to numerous histories, stories, and themes worth sharing. So in this series, I’ll highlight and analyze five such topics. As always, your thoughts will be very welcome too! While I hope that yesterday’s post complicated some of the simplest narratives about a figure like Cornelius Vanderbilt II, it was nonetheless, I admit, still pretty crazy to use the phrase “rags to riches” to describe Commodore Vanderbilt’s grandson. But how about Rudolph “Rudy” Stanish , who began life as the seventh of thirteen children born to an Eastern European (Croatian and Serbian) immigrant couple in Yukon, Pennsylvania, and ended his life as the world famous Omelet King , chef to some of America’s most prominent people and families? A young man who was brough...