User:StanZegel

Stan Zegel lives in the Chicago area, where he pursues his love of European History as time permits. His specialties are Austrian, German, and English history. He also has a strange passion for wanting to know the language and meaning of the surname borne by every person he meets. (Zegel is Dutch, meaning a signet, stamp or seal.)

Having a natural inclination as a teacher (although not working as one), he likes to help readers by cross-indexing items and putting events into context so that actions can be judged by the standards of their time, and not today's standards. He loves to help draw out the Why (see an example), not just the What.

He is the primary author of the major article about the cathedral in Vienna, the imperial tombs in Vienna and other related topics.

He has retired as a newspaper publisher, and also published a scholarly zoological work Herpetarium Hibernae: An Illustrated Catalog of All Indiginous Species of Serpents of the Irish Isles.

Stan has participated in amateur dramatics for many years, and accepts only title-character parts. He is well known in the area for his portrayals of Harvey and Godot in the plays Harvey and Waiting for Godot and once managed to handle both roles in the same evening at two theatres five miles apart. He also often played the title role in Edward, My Son until he grew too old for the part.

Pet peeve: misplacement of adverbs of limitation, e.g. "he only did it five times" instead of the proper "he did it only five times."

Stan is a Kentucky Colonel, former city councilman and candidate for mayor.

Chicago Tribune Op-ed 12Feb2010

On April 27, 1872, the Cunard Line passenger liner Batavia arrived in New York City (from Liverpool via Queenstown) with Meindert Zegel (known to history as The Great Immigrant), his wife and their three children from the Dutch island of Texel. Thus April 27, 2010 was the 138th anniversary of the arrival of the Zegel Family in the New World.

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Wikipedia