On a related note (see postscript) - while researching for this thread I came
across:
Billings Learned Hand - born on January 27, 1872, in Albany, New York, the
second and last child of Samuel Hand (1833–86) and Lydia Hand (née Learned).
His mother's family traditionally used surnames as given names ...
Hand started at Harvard College in 1889, initially focusing on classical
studies
and mathematics ... however, he changed direction ... studying under the
eminent
and inspirational philosophers William James, Josiah Royce and George
Santayana.
He later described himself as a "serious boy", a hard worker who did not smoke,
drink, or consort with prostitutes. ... He became a member of the Hasty Pudding
Club
and appeared as a blond-wigged chorus girl in the 1892 student musical.
For a while, he seriously considered post-graduate work in philosophy, but he
received
no encouragement from his family or philosophy professors. Doubting himself, he
"drifted"
toward law.
Judge Learned Hand served more than 50 years on the federal bench, many of them
as
Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals, Second Circuit. His judicial stature
ranks close
to that of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Louis Brandeis.
Hand left behind an archive of more than 100,000 documents and a handful of
folksongs
that he learned as a child and young man. He performed them just like a
traditional ballad
singer, and the Library of Congress recorded several of them.
Chris Bruce,
humming 'A Froggy Went A'courting'
in Kiel, Germnay
P.S. Here's a recording of Judge Learned Hand singing The Iron Merrimac
'single-handedly' ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKN_W35P8jA
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