Fifty years ago today, the course of history was altered, something happened, and the world changed

[DFW]

Last edited Sat Jul 27, 2024, 07:18 AM - Edit history (4)

There was a young woman from the flat farm country of northwestern Germany, who had traveled little, spoke a few words of English, but not well, and thought that the USA was like the dark side of the moon. She knew it was there, but thought it was a place she would never see. She had never eaten Chinese food, Japanese food, Thai food, didn't know what a barbecue was, had never eaten broccoli, zucchini, lobster or scallops. She was born into a post-war era, without refrigerators or TV, slowly rebuilding a demolished, devastated land, whose people knew they had brought it all upon themselves, and were grateful for any help they could get.

She studied what she could, learned quickly, and before she was 20, was managing the finances of a huge bicycle (vital method of transportation in her area) factory with 2000 employees. She liked the job, but wanted to do something else, and was eager to see more of the world. She got a spot in Münster, a regional "big" town down in Westfalia, and started to study social work. As part of her education, she got a summer study spot in West Berlin, a huge metropolis the likes of which she had never seen.

At age 20, her intelligence and curiosity to learn more of the world were already visible on her youthful face:


At the same time, there was a guy in northern Virginia, the son of New Yorkers, but with a father of Southern background (dad born in South Carolina) and his mom descended from deadbeat Mississippi riverboat gamblers who had fled north to escape their debts. His paternal grandmother was a firebrand political liberal, hired by NYC mayor Fiorello LaGuardia as his labor liason, and then fired for being friendler with labor than with the mayor, himself. She later became a chief NYC fundraiser for the mayor of Minneapolis who was running for the US Senate from Minnesota. His name was Hubert Humphrey. This earned her, and later her journalist son, as well as his children, the friendship of the so-called "Minnesota Democratic Mafia," a connection which lasts until this day.

Having been dumped by his first serious girlfriend, who went to Yale and found an apparently higher grade of boyfriend, he nevertheless pursued college courses in (among other languages) German. She had grown up in Germany for years, where he had lived and gone to school in Spain for a while. While they were seeing each other, they made a pact: she would study Spanish and he would study German, a pact that survived their breakup in 1972. Whle in college, he met a former student who had lost his scholarship (he was smart, but lazy, and had bad grades), and had joined the air force, so as not to get sent as an infantry grunt to Vietnam. Upon returning to Philadelphia, he rejoined the Penn Balalaika Orchestra, and the two became friends. The air force vet had been in West Berlin, spying on the Soviet air force, a gig he got because he had had the presence of mind to inform the US air force when he enlisted that he knew German and Russian, something the two friends had in common. He had all sorts of great stories about the folk music scene in West Berlin, and recommended it highly to the college student from Virginia. He went there for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1973, and had a great time, met a lot of new friends there, and made it a project to come back the summer after he graduated in 1974. The two guys in Philadelphia played together as a duo for pocket money, and even got a gig at the National Press Club in Washington in 1975, playing for (then-) President Ford and Vice-President Rockefeller:



But I'm getting a little ahead of the timeline here. After graduating college in 1974, the Virginia guy, having no idea what he wanted to do with his life, went, on the recommendation of his air force (air farce, according to the vet) friend, back to West Berlin and spent most of the summer having a great time in the folk music clubs there. Having been sent packing two years before by his American girlfriend, he was solo and "available." Most German girls smoked, though, and he hated the stink of cigarette smoke, especially the stench it left in their clothes and hair. The musicians who played in these "folk cabarets" were sort of a community unto themselves, often meeting after the last gig was done, around 2 A.M., and meeting in the Borriquito, a Basque restaurant in West Berlin in the neighborhood of the cabaret scene, for breakfast. No one could afford a taxi "home," so we all had to wait until 4:45 A.M. when the buses and the U-Bahn started running again.

One night, when the American guy was done with his performance, he went out into the audience to see his fellow musicians perform. He met a nice, if overly "chatty," girl from Münster, who seemed friendly enough. She then said that she was leaving for China the next day on some study program. So much for that. She then said, "but you should meet my girlfriend from up north." Sure, where is she? "Right here!" She leaned back, and the guy from Virginia (that's me, in case you haven't figured that out yet) saw a vision of beauty that literally (doesn't happen often) took his breath away. I was at a loss as to what kind of a pickup line worked on a girl like that, so I didn't even try. I just stuck out my hand, and said, "hi." Much to my pleasant surprise, it was enough.

She had never met an American who spoke German before, and so she found me quite exotic (a first for me!). Obviously, I wasn't the only male of the species who noticed her looks, blindness not being prevalent in 20-somethings in Berlin, but she apparently had no idea how beautiful she was, and found the constant attention from other guys merely annoying. So, we got along from the start. At the end of the summer, we exchanged addresses and telephone numbers. She was positive it was the last time she would ever see me, and that it was nothing more than a nice summer fling. I, on the other hand, knew that a nerd like me NEVER gets a girl like that. We were both 22, so those were the terms in which we thought of ourselves. I knew from my experience in college that a nerd like me NEVER gets a girl like that, but it dawned on me just in time that if I continued with that attitude, I never WOULD get a girl like that, so I ditched the attitude, and kept up the contact. She invited me to spend Christmas with her and her family in Oldenburg, a provincial town in the northwest of Germany where her parents then lived. Still the old-fashioned country girl, getting along with the family was a must if this was to go any farther. She prepared me that her father had lost a leg at Stalingrad during the war, but was no former Nazi, and hated them all the more ever since they had made him a cripple at age 19. His most fervent wish was that if he ever had grandchildren, that they all be girls, so that they would never be up for military service, which was complusory in West Germany in those days. It was a wish that fate was to grant him, by the way.

So, I did go there for Christmas, met her parents and her brother, who shared my tastes in folk music, especially songs in Pladdütsch and the 12 string guitar of Leo Kottke. Her boyfriend at the time we had met was overly jealous and possessive, and intruded on a girls' night out she had organized for her girlfriends. She had asked him not to come. But he just HAD to make sure no other guys were present, so he showed up anyway. A lover of her personal freedom, she was livid, and told him to leave and never come back. This happened, unbeknownst to me, in the months between the summer and Christmas, so we were both "available" by the time Christmas rolled around.

So, my visit went very well. I got along fine with her parents, brother and girlfriends, and we made plans for her first visit to the big bad USA that next summer. Today, fifty years after meeting in that smoky cabaret in West Berlin, we are still together, and are, at the moment, back in the USA for the last week of our annual stay on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, an annual habit we picked up starting in 1984.

Now, after more than two thirds of our lives together, we can't imagine (or hardly even remember!) a time when we weren't together. We have had some scares along the way. She has had cancer twice, and at least one incident where a huge semi crushed her car with her in it (she barely escaped out the window on the passenger side). I have had a couple of cardiac near-misses. I had some close calls with not-quite plane crashes, one poison outbreak at the Düsseldorf airport, a couple of airport bombings, which were somehow supposed to please Allah the merciful, and some run-ins with organized crime from Eastern Europe, and a lot of etc.

On the other hand, we have had some good times and some extraordinary friends and acquaintances. We have seen quite a few parts of Europe (by far not all!), North America, Hawai'i, the Seychelles, the Caribbean. I have been to places she has not (South America, East Asia), and she has been to places I have not (Turkey, Israel). There is still a lot to see, and I probably don't have a lot of time left. Men in my family don't tend to make it to 80, and we are 72.

Some pictures from the first fifty years. Many on DU will have seen some of these pics many times. Some will not. Feel free to skip over the boring parts!

The first pic of us together: Oldenburg, Germany, 1974:


Her first trip to the USA, at my cousins' place in New Hampshire:


Road trip through the USA, 1981, Boston to California and back:

St. Croix, USVI, the same year, on a company-sponsored trip for all employees:


Then, in December, 1981, my brother called me up and asked if I wanted to be best man at his wedding next April. I said sure, and I would ask if my girldfirend could make it, too. He said, quite spontaneously, well, if you BOTH are going to be there, why not make it a double wedding? I said, it sounded like a great idea, but I would have to ask my girlfriend in Germany. So I called her up (I was in Boston, and she was in Germany), and told her of my brother's suggestion. She said, "sure, works for me." Not the most romantic of proposals, but we had been together for over seven years at this point, so, it was not like this was a daring proposal. And so we had our "Axis wedding," as it was called by the Washington press, since my brother's wife was from Japan.

Although she wasn't the one in white, I don't have to tell you who stole the show, do i?


We were now 30, and my wife said, "the clock is ticking, you know." And so, we had our little "planned parenthood" in the literal sense. Here, with her parents in Germany, a few months before our elder daughter made her first appearance:


One soon became two, and so we two became four:


Starting in 1984, we got to learn to love the Cape, and so started coming here every year:


My dad was still going full blast in his job as a print journalist in Washington, eventually becoming the "he knows everybody" guy, and becoming president of the Gridiron Club, a small, but well-known journalists' society in Washington. The president of Gridiron gets to have his family meet with the President and VP of the USA, and so we did:


I think my wife had a secret crush on Al Gore! She certainly talked about him in glowing terms for months afterward.

Meanwhile, we traveled where we could, when we could. Here on Vancouver Island, BC in 1998:


When my dad passed in late 2000, we kept up contact with some of his closer friends, such as Helen Thomas:


We also kept in touch with other DC types we had met over the years:














And a lot of etc., of course
Plus some cool non-Washington people:




Our two daughters--once born in Germany, always born in Germany:


And we got older, too, but I got a lot older than she did, even though we are the same age:
Barcelona, 1998:

Forty-something in New York:

Cape Cod, 2009:


Alaska, 2015:

Hawaii, 2022:


And now?
And now, onward we go. Whatever time we have left, and no one is under any illusions, we intend to make of it what we can. That's all one can do, right?