Hinterlander
Jr. Member
This may be a beginner's question but... I've* been using the additional freetime that I seem to have nowadays to "go back to the basics" and reread both Sims Ely's book and the Bark Notes. Something that never really stood out to me before really caught my attention for some reason this time. On pages 87 & 88 of his book (my copy is the "Third Printing, April 1957"), Sims states "Helena Thomas (or Julia, as she is sometimes called in these apocryphal versions)" and "Helena was Mrs. Charles Thomas, not Mrs. J. E.". It had seemed to me that the common knowledge from everything else that I have read, including numerous books and posts on this and other forums, was that Julia was Julia who had been married to Emil W. Thomas. These men were contemporaries of Helena and interviewed her and Rheiny face to face multiple times to get to the facts of what Waltz had told them. It then hit me that if they couldn't get something as basic as her name and identity correct, what does that say for everything else in their books/manuscripts? Or, have we just skewed (and screwed) everything to fit our own narrative? Can anyone help enlighten me on this?
Sal
Sal