Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a
y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the
The Globe and Mail Charlotte Phillips Published March 4, 2021 Bookmark Please log in to listen to this story. Also available in French and Mandarin. Log In Create Free Account
Getting audio file . This translation has been automatically generated and has not been verified for accuracy. Full Disclaimer
Illustration by Adam De Souza
The news item said that German prosecutors had confiscated €50-million worth of Bitcoin from a fraudster but they couldn’t unlock the money without the password. The fraudster served his jail sentence without giving up the code.
I wondered, did they try torturing him with a middle-aged mom like me, repeatedly asking “what the hell is Bitcoin, anyway?” And did those German prosecutors try typing in Scruffy1234? Or Mitsy1963?