Yup, Stan had a doppelganger

Yup, Stan had a doppelganger

What are the chances? That other Stanley Ruby who later worked at the Pentagon had a life that closely mirrored that of our Stan Ruby.

This other Stan was born on November 26, 1920 into a Jewish family in Brooklyn. His father Samuel, an Austrian immigrant, was the proprietor of a leather goods factory. 

He married Gloria Gross in the Bronx on August 28, 1946.

He is listed on West 75th St. in the 1949 Manhattan telephone directory on the line directly above Stanley L. Ruby on W. 116th St.

He was a Columbia University graduate student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science. 

He spent a year at Brookhaven National Laboratory on thesis-related research.

He went on to a career in defense technology program management. 

He died July 10, 2003. His last place of residence was Montgomery, Md. 

He was an entirely different Stanley Ruby, yet his biography almost mirrors that of our father. They must have been mistaken for each other more than once at Columbia, Brookhaven and even later in their career when Stan was a critic of weapons development. 

I wouldn't be surprised if it was one of those things that Stan got used to correcting through the years, whenever someone mistook him for the other Stan Ruby from DARPA. 

What it means for me is that we can throw out that other dissertation and all the malarkey about the Brookhaven chemistry department. We now know that our Stan Ruby was on staff at Brookhaven in 1952-53 but not in 1951-52.

And it proves most emphatically what I wrote just two days ago. Never rule out the possibility of coincidence. Genealogy will find a way to come back and bite your ass.