Cooper Union
Edward Lawrence Rehm, born in 1884, the youngest of the Rehm children, was by all evidence an industrious lad. He secured his first employment at age 15 as a clerk for The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the progressive university in today’s East Village where Abraham Lincoln had spoken several decades before. At the corner of Third Avenue and East 8 th Street, Cooper Union sat on the edge of Kleindeutschland, still vibrant at the turn of the century.
Edward took advantage of his work situation to also earn an engineering degree from the institution, and it was during his studies that he met Edna Jacobs, a student at the Women’s Free School for Telegraphy, operated by Cooper Union in partnership with Western Union.
They married in 1907 in a ceremony presided over by a Presbyterian minister at her family’s home in Passaic, N.J. After a wedding trip, they would settle in adjacent Hasbrouck Heights. Later they would raise their four children in a home at 40 Marion Road in nearby Montclair, N.J. Edward became Cooper Union’s chief clerk in 1910, assistant secretary in 1918 and finally secretary, CU’s chief non-academic administrator, in 1926. He retired in 1948, having had just one employer during his 49-year career.
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