People Named Werbos As Of March 2006

A personal website called www.werbos.com has some duty to list all the people named Werbos, including women formerly named Werbos who changed their name for reason of marriage or divorce.

There are not so many of us. So far as I know (after checking many sources), everyone named Werbos in the Western Hemisphere can trace the name back to my grandfather, Adolph Werbos, who arrived at Ellis Island as a child with his parents George and Helen at the beginning of the twentieth century. He later married Elizabeth Nix, who came to the US in about the same period, and was part of the same German/Austrian/Hungarian community around the Flushing neighborhood of New York City. (Back in those days, of course, the name “Adolph” did not have the connotations it does today. For many years, he went by the nickname “Al.”) By the time I was born in 1947, my grandparents and their three children had all moved to the Philadelphia area. Their three children were, in chronological order:

(1) Walter J. Werbos, my father, who for many years was majority owner and president of the Harry P. Bridge Company, a company which did “marketing, advertising and public relations,” primarily for technological companies like Sprague Electric, Foote Mineral and American Metals Climax. Prior to that, he was a Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy – which allowed me to run all over and get lost on a battleship back when I was 3 or 4 and we lived in Virginia Beach. He died in 1994.

(2) Elizabeth (Elsie) Werbos, who married Charles (“Chick”) Leinhauser, and had four children – Anne Marie, Charles, Paul and John. At this writing in 2006, Elsie is the only member of the older generations still alive; Anne Marie is living with her in their old home in Folcroft, Pennsylvania. John lives in suburban Philadelphia, and has three children; Paul, four; Charles one.

(3) George Werbos, who, with his wife Margaret (“Marge”), had three children – George (“Fritz”), Virginia and Diane. Diane is now a Kennedy – wife of Tom Kennedy in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, with son Michael born in 1995. George is father of Melanie Werbos,

the only Werbos I have never met (yet).

My father married Margaret Mary Donohue, who is currently named Margaret Mary Smith and lives in New Jersey. Their three children, in chronological order, are:

(1) Myself, Paul Werbos.

(2) My sister, Suzanne, who married Roy Johnson and lives in Colorado with her two daughters, Heidi and Amy.

(3) My brother John, in New Jersey, who married (and later was divorced from) Kim Davis, and had three children – Ben, Bryn and Robert.

My parents both remarried, without having new children; however, for many years we had a lot of contact with Gordon Smith Junior and Debbie, our step-siblings.

In 1979, I married (and later was divorced from) Lilymae Fountain, with whom I had three children:

(1) Elizabeth (“Lissa”), who graduated from MIT and is currently a PhD student in physics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

(2) Alexander (“Alex”), who is currently an undergraduate at MIT.

(3) Maia, who (like Lissa and Alex) graduated from Friends Community School in College Park, and then from Holy Redeemer in College Park, has recently entered Eleanor Roosevelt High School.

For almost ten years now, I have been married to Ludmilla Dolmatova Werbos, who has two grown up children, Anton and Julia. Our son Christopher attends Arlington Traditional School here in Virginia.

Ironically, none of the Werboses (or Verbi?) believes in divorce. In my generation and before, we were all raised as Catholics. But real life has its complexities, and we do not always have a choice, especially when there are clashes of fundamental values.

By the way, the name “Werbos” is originally pronounced like the Latin word “Verbus,” even though it is a German name.

(The “w” sound is not typical in German, but names of Latin origin do exist in Germany.) My father and Ludmilla independently traced it back to the general area around Trier or Mosel in northwest Germany, where it seems the same spelling is still in use. My own branch of the family left to go to the Austrian-Hungarian Empire in the mid-1800’s, to escape Bismarck, and had to change the spelling for a time and later change it back because of the political constraints in those areas.

Ludmilla’s tracing showed a family intermarried with wine-growers (like Weingarten) and physicists (like Bohr and Mandel) in the original area. This amuses me, because, when I checked in at a hotel in Mexico in 2003 for an energy conference, I said “Werbos” and they spelled it as “Guervos,” a family which they said was famous for its (stronger) alcohol products. I wondered whether some distant cousins might have escaped Bismarck in a different direction. And I imagined a local headline about my talk: “Guervos wants cars to drink alcohol…”. It is curious how the world itself seems to construct such puns so often. (And how often they turn out to be illusions – as in this case.) Our branch of the family has not had any involvement at all with the alcohol-producing industry, unless you count my role as a junior partner to Fred Heineken in the research initiative he led on Quantitative Systems Biotechnology, or you count the use of neural networks by other people in the fermentation process (e.g., see chapter 10 of the Handbook of Intelligent Control).

Other branches of the family – the Donohues, in particular – also have an interesting history, and I hope in time to add links to more of the words on this page.