Aristocrat. Baron Maximilian Edmund Hugo Wilhelm von Romberg carried a heritage as long and heavy as his name. He was the only son of one of the first German officers to be killed in World War I. Baron Maximilian Conrad Joseph Gustave Felix Edward von Romberg. He was the grandson of Baron Wilhelm von Romberg, First General of the southern troops in the Franco-Prussian War. Max's mother was Antoinette MacDonough Converse, daughter of a wealthy, old-line Massachusetts banking family. Her wedding to the baron in July 1907 had been a major society event, linking European nobility with Boston Brahmins. Little Max was born on March 7,1911, in Wiesbaden, a famous spa in southern Germany dating back to Roman times. Its many hot springs and flower-filled parks attracted visitors from all over the world. Since the unification of the German states in 1871 under Otto von Bismarck, Wiesbaden had served as a Prussian district capital. Max's father, a captain in the Eightieth Prussian Fusiliers, was killed on September 23,1914, at the age of thirty-seven, only fifty-one days after Germany declared war on France. In the First Battle of the Marne, which took place throughout September, German troops attempted to sweep through Alsace Lorraine to-ward Paris but were forced to retreat short of their goal. Captain von Romberg fell at Cerny, which came under intense artillery. Suddenly a widow, Antoinette tried to reorder her life and that of her son. To attempt a trans-Atlantic trip back to her own family was risky, in spite of the fact that the United States was at that point a neutral nation, but to stay in Wiesbaden was also risky, because of its location in the southwest corner of the German Empire near Alsace Lorraine, which France was determined to reclaim. Antoinette made the uneasy decision to stay in Wiesbaden with her little son, Only three years old at the time of his father's death, Max was the nineteenth in his family to hold the title of baron, which extended back more than one thousand years. This was a heavy heritage for a fatherless young boy to carry, especially after the Great War came to an exhausted end. In the United States at that time, the title of baron would have caused him to be branded as a "Hun" or a "Bosch." On the other hand, in Germany he would have been suspect because his mother was a Yankee, not withstanding his father's death in battle, which made him a hero. It is not surprising that Max and his mother chose to travel during the 1920s, never settling anywhere, though Max always called Wiesbaden his home. Several times they visited Santa Barbara, where Antoinette had relatives. Eventually she married Richard Wayne, a star of silent films, and moved to Nice on the French Riviera. As for Max, by the time he met Emily Hall, he was already dashing, passionate, and reckless. At 4:00 in the afternoon on April 14,1928 Emily Purdon Hall married Maximilian von Romberg at the Episcopal Church of the Transfiguration in New York City, known affectionately by New Yorkers as "The Little Church Around the Corner." Max was then pretending to be eighteen and Emily was twenty. Max's first brush with death occurred in September 1928, just five months after his wedding. He had flown his newly acquired plane to Mines Field in Los Angeles, the terminus for the great cross-country air races that had begun at Roosevelt Field in New York. On a stormy night in February, Max was driving his $9,000 Cadillac (painted the von Romberg colors of maroon and gray) to Palm Springs when the car skidded out of control, spun off the road, plunged thirty feet down an embankment, and overturned in White Water Creek. The car was totally wrecked, but Max escaped with minor cuts and bruises. On June 4,1938, at 11:45 A.M., Max took off from Roosevelt Field, New York, and headed toward Red Bank, New Jersey, where he intended to play a week-end of polo at Monmouth Country Club. He was flying the Beechcraft biplane that he had purchased after his last crash just the year before. At 12:15 P.M. an official at the Red Bank Airport heard a plane circling overhead, but since the ceiling was only about four hundred feet he could not see it. For the next twenty minutes he and the other bystanders heard the plane circle and circle. Some bystanders reported that the engine seemed to be missing at times, but airport officials later said that was a common illusion when the clouds were low and thick. According to one eyewitness, suddenly the plane shot down through the clouds with its motor at full speed and plunged straight into the North Shrewsbury River. Upon impact, the baron's parachute opened and floated out of the cabin and up to the surface. When the volunteer firemen arrived just minutes after the crash, they attached a line to the canopy and pulled his body out of the wreckage, which lay in ten feet of water.