Background
He was born on May 7, 1893, Tarnów, Austria.
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Norbert Pearlroth
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Education
Pearlroth attended university in Krakow, Poland, planning to become a lawyer, but events of World War I took him away from his studies.
Career
Cartoon panel from 1923 until 1975. He came to America in 1920. Ripley needed someone capable of researching foreign newspapers to locate material for his syndicated Ripley"s Believe lieutenant or Not! panel.
Since Pearlroth knew 11 languages, he was hired to do Ripley"s research and soon began doing the picture research as well.
He usually worked ten hours a day, six days a week in the New York Public Library"s Main Reading Room. The library estimated that Pearlroth examined some 7,000 books every year, meaning that he researched in more than 350,000 books during decades of work on Believe lieutenant or Not!.
Foreign 52 years, he took the subway into Manhattan in the morning and worked at his office until noon, answering some of the 3000 letters that arrived each week from readers all over the world. Instead of having lunch, he then went to the library where he worked through the afternoon and evening, taking half an hour for dinner.
When the library closed at 10pm, he headed back to Brooklyn.
He sometimes worked on Sundays if he fell behind in locating what he called "believe-it-or-nots." His deadline was on Friday, and he always worked several weeks in advance. By the 1940s, Pearlroth and Ripley had approximately 80 million readers worldwide. During the first 26 years, Pearlroth simply gave Ripley whatever his research had turned up.
After Ripley"s death on May 27, 1949, King Features Syndicate took over Believe lieutenant or Not!, and Pearlroth continued for the next 26 years to work for syndicate editors, who required him to submit exactly 24 items each week.
Pearlroth usually worked anonymously, but on Ripley"s Believe lieutenant or Not! 50th Anniversary Edition (Pocket Books, 1968), he is credited as "Research Director."
Foreign 25 years, Pearlroth also wrote a weekly column, "Your Name," about the origins of Jewish surnames, for the Jewish Post of New New York Although Norbert Pearlroth never missed a deadline, King Features replaced him in 1975.
As a freelancer, he received no pension or royalties from the many collections and reprints that sold in the millions, but Ripley did give him a bequest of $5,000 and money for Pearlroth"s son"s schooling. He died on April 14, 1983 of heart and kidney diseases at Maimonides Hospital in Brooklyn, New York City.
