My mother Catherine spent two weeks in New York with us in February. Her birthday was celebrated during her visit. And one birthday present was a puzzle of the New York Times front page of the day she was born.

Let’s look even closer, here is the date at the top of the page. February 11, 1937.

My mother turned 87.

Here she is at the swanky restaurant overlooking Columbus Circle where we celebrated her birthday, blowing out the candle the waiter presented along with complimentary petit fours while singing “Happy Birthday”.

Next to Mom is her girlhood friend Sheila. They’ve known each other since elementary school. Sheila was the one who gave Mom the New York Times front page puzzle.

The 500 piece puzzle wasn’t necessarily easy to put together. But we managed to finish it before Mom’s visit concluded. Allowing us to sandwich it between two pieces of cardboard for safe travel in Mom’s suitcase to Berlin.

So what was the big news on February 11, 1937?

Well, some of the best known parts of 1930s history are referenced, like President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, The Spanish Civil War, the Dust Bowl and the Nazis.

The main headline and articles on the left side are all about FDR’s effort to reform the Supreme Court, nowadays often referred to as the court packing scheme. But even a passing glance at these articles suggests the whole court reform effort was more complicated than just the effort to add more justices to the court. This day’s paper has the president wrangling with Congress about whether to split different components of the reform effort into separate bills or not, while also discussing how various state legislatures are responding to the effort. Interestingly I found no use of the term “court packing” anywhere on the page.

Meanwhile the secondary headlines on the right side both pertain to the Mid-West. An automobile-strike is averted in Detroit. The article emphasizes just how fatigued Michigan’s Governor Murphy was by the negotiations.

Below that bold face headline is an article regarding efforts to mitigate the devastation brought on by the massive droughts the Great Plains suffered in the 1930s, what we commonly now refer to the as the Dust Bowl.

Between the big bold face headlines, the top of the page also includes a correspondent’s danger-filled report from the Spanish Civil War. Next to that is an article revealing how fears of the upcoming Second World War were already very much alive in early 1937.

Further down the page at center left an article trumpeting the passage of a NY State social security program in Albany is placed next to an article about attempted extortion in a restaurant racketeering trial.

In center right is an article about the Third Reich putting a Jewish run shipping company under a trusteeship and imprisoning its owner Arnold Bernstein. The death penalty is threatened. I looked up Arnold Bernstein’s fate. He was released from Germany in 1939 after the Nazis forced him to pay massive fines and give up his company.

The other center right article about easing of restrictions for the Catholic Church in Mexico is a snap shot from the history of the Mexican Revolution and decades of aftermath. Again Wikipedia helps with the fuller story: apparently President Cárdenas “kept the peace with the Catholic Church as an institution” after “the 1929 peace agreement between the Catholic Church and the Mexican state”.

At the bottom of the front page is what reads like a sordid and complicated kidnapping case gone horribly bad, with the kidnapped 10 year old boy’s nude and battered body discovered January 11 in Everett, WA. Unlike this era’s famous Lindburgh Baby case, this child kidnapping tragedy seems to have gone forgotten in the passage of time.

We didn’t just work on the puzzle while Mom was here. In fact she saw four Broadway shows: “Days of Wine and Roses”, “Merrily We Roll Along”, “Appropriate” and “Kimberly Akimbo”. All good shows that my mother enjoyed. With extra plaudits to the four-decades-in-the-making heartbreaking brilliance of “Merrily” and the big humanistic heart of “Kimberly”.

Mom had also really wanted to see “Harmony” – the musical about the Comedian Harmonists, the hugely popular 1930s German vocal group, and how the Nazis broke them up – and we had tickets to see it on her birthday, but sadly that production closed the previous week. A real shame – I had seen this musical when it played Off-Broadway and really loved it. Great production and Barry Manilow’s score gets it absolutely right. “Harmony” deserved a much better fate on Broadway than it received.