Summer in Europe - 1960

 

In 1960, this was the de rigueur trip for upper middle-class white kids to take, a six-week summer tour of Europe.  The University put it together brilliantly.  Three days in England to start with, to get our foreign legs stable and to pass the jet lag.  Then we had a single Belgian bus and driver for the whole continental part, which kept us a tight-knit group.

It wasn't really a group of college kids.  There were two little old ladies, two middle-aged ladies, three middle-aged chaperoning faculty members and four other kids besides me.  I was really two years too old for this trip, being 21.  I buddied up with the driver often, and snuck out after hours, sometimes with him, but always looking for adventure, drinking and girls.  I also wound up deserting the group as we were about to travel back to the States, but I'll get back to that story later.

I was jet lagged when we arrived in London at 3:00 in the afternoon.  These were long flights in those days (1960), 13 or 14 hours with a refueling stop in Shannon, Ireland.  We went straight to bed after an early 7:00 PM dinner in the hotel.  I got up about 3:00 AM, unable to sleep, and just having to see what London was like.  I walked for a bit and then got on the underground, but it was over-ground here and I got off when I passed an open air food market, a large one where restaurants and shops came to get their supplies in the morning.  I had breakfast there and then walked back to the hotel, stealing the best bottle of milk I had ever had from someone's front porch, glass bottle with cream at the top, just like when I was a kid.

I felt like I was home here in England, and I felt the same way when I came back to live there twenty years later.  I don't really know why I didn't lose my way that day; I must have walked ten miles.  But I made it back to the hotel and we embarked on a whirlwind tour of England, which was mostly confusing.  Why Stratford?  This wasn’t a theater arts or English language tour.  It sucked up half our time for a play we didn’t understand.  We visited the Tower of London, where England stores the crown jewels and we saw royal guards in costume.

We took the ferry across the channel to Oostende where we met our driver.  The first town we toured was Brussels, but the first I remember was Paris.  What a fantastic city.  I fell in love with Paris and I have been back dozens of times; I'll never tire of Paris.  I figured out that we were staying in a hotel that mostly rented rooms by the hour.  Our faculty chaperon told us to stay away from the hotel bar downstairs, but of course that only made me more curious.  On one of my escapes from the rest of the group, I found myself talking at a Place Pigalle sidewalk café to a drag queen.  We spoke for over an hour about what it was like to live in Paris versus living in the countryside.  Three hours later that evening, our whole staid group was walking to dinner along a main street, and there, riding a bicycle past us is Etienne in full costume frantically waving and shouting, "Peetaarr."  No one knew what to make of it.

We wove our way down through Germany and Austria finally arriving in Oberammergau, which was supposed to be a high point of our tour.  We were "lucky" because they only performed a Passion Play once every ten years and this was one of those years.  The Passion Play consisted of day after day of reenactment of the tortures of Jesus.  Scenes went on for three and four hours, while we sat outdoors, on hard folding chairs, bored, since we didn't understand German and felt that ten minutes of this was enough. But the worst part was the accommodation and especially the food, or lack thereof. 

When you only get tourists once every ten years (and there were few in 1940, 1930 or 1920) then you only pull together makeshift accommodations.  We were all crammed into two rooms, a boy’s room and a girl’s room.  Meals were twice a day.  A perfunctory continental breakfast, which we learned to stuff up on, and an adequate, but sparse dinner meal.  Lunch was on us to forage for, but there was little available in the town to purchase and no restaurants.  The German attendees to the play brought large picnic baskets from home and munched all day.  Neither our school nor tour guide had planned on this.  No one had any experience with a town that only had tourists once every ten years.  Think Oliver Twist.

We left this place one morning after what we felt was three days of starvation.  We drove through the Italian Alps and descended upon a tiny restaurant that our bus driver knew well.  We proceeded to have the best meal of the trip.  And we were all converted to lovers of Italian food and meals.  They started us off with a pasta course which took off the edge of our hunger.  Then they brought a soup course, more bread and red wine.  Then came a fish course and people were beginning to fall by the wayside.  After that the main entrée of roast beef and more wine.  And, of course, there was dessert to follow.  We were all sated.

Tours like these were expensive, even in 1960 – six weeks, chaperoned and guided, all inclusive – I’m guessing $1,000 a week – these days, at least $50,000, up to a hundred for the package.  So, organizers were always looking for cheap sites – CHURCHES.  As we drove through France and Germany, we’d stop at 3 and 4 churches  day.  Now, “after …”, I tended to hang around, to stretch my legs, with the bus driver, as the others entered the church.  We had many conversations: he had a wife and family in Belgium; tour guides were highly respected for their knowledge and experience; he did three trips a year like this which put him in an middle class tier; he got bored and enjoyed carousing a bit at times.

No cell phones, no Euro, no credit cards, no common market, these things caused us to learn about: international communications, financial rates of exchange and money markets, border and immigration laws, letters of introduction.  For my bus driver, six weeks was like a military tour of duty, a secret mission.  He was out of contact with his family, as we were, for the six weeks.  I sent post cards home – he might have as well  There wasn’t a world-wide telephone network, so no calling home.  There were International Operators, just like there were interstate operators back in America, but they were expensive, slow and ify.

Italy was for us and we thoroughly enjoyed Florence and Rome.  I did my "essay" on Florence; we had to write up the trip or an aspect of it, to get credit.  I loved Florence.  It was a sort of San Francisco sized town that you could get to know easily and feel comfortable about.  I met a Jewish man one day having coffee who said the war had blinded him, but he had been an antiquarian book collector before the war.  He took me up to his apartment where to my amazement, there were thousands of old books, mostly rotting.  He felt sure the Nazis had infested worms in his books on purpose.  He didn't know what he was going to do with his collection.  Italy was colorful and earthy – a painter’s paradise.

There are so many experiences gathered on a trip like this – the 6-week tour is the equivalent of an additional year of study, at an important level – language, culture, the universality of life.  It should be a government paid-for option, like the Peace Corps.

When I was working a prolonged project in England in the eighties, I brought my daughter over to attend a prep school in Oxford.  I took her to Paris twice on 3-day weekends.  I sent her on the prep school summer tour, and she fell in love with Tuscany – didn’t want to leave.

Twenty years later, when my daughter was teaching Humanities at Notre Dame University in San Mateo, she chaperoned an NDU group for the summer tour and took her teenage daughter along.  So, me, daughter, granddaughter – it’s a family tradition.

We took the ferry over to Greece and hooked up with a female Greek guide that was so much fun (think Melina Mercouri).  One day, two policemen got on the bus and rode with us for ten miles or so.  After they got off, she translated that they had asked if they could borrow the two young co-eds for a day or two, they would return them to us on our way back.  She had apologized that they were still virgins and the family would have a fit.  On another occasion, she took only us men into a "special" room where the ancient Greeks had pornographic scenes depicted on the walls as murals.  She loved this kind of stuff.

 

The school tour trip was winding down and we were in Frankfurt planning to return to the States in two days.  I got it in my head that it was too soon to go back and so I went out and bought a Maico motorcycle, 90 cc.  I left a note for the faculty chaperon and set out for Bayreuth to see the Wagner Opera Festival.

 

I had no real plan and I was in no hurry.  I purposely picked small roads and small towns.  I’d pick a town and stay at a gasthaus for three days.  I would read the German newspapers, watch German TV, and talk to whoever could bear to listen to my German. 

I wanted to see if I could get along where they didn’t prefer to speak English.  When I returned to the States, I would be in my 5^th and final year of college and taking my 3^rd year of German.  I had one physics and three math classes to complete to graduate, and the rest, elective courses, to maintain my full-time status. 

 

I made it to Bayreuth, but barely and not successfully.  I was coming down with something, flu-like, but with photosensitivity. 

The town was jam-packed – I had trouble finding a room.  Finally, I got a hotel room.  I just wanted to sleep and stay quiet in a dark place.  At one point, a chambermaid came in, and  noted that I was feverish.  She wanted me to take a bath, insisted on it.  I groggily followed orders.  The bath woke me out of a delirium. 

I suddenly realized that I was thinking in German.  The experiment had worked, in the extreme.  I hadn’t used English in days now, a week.  It was easier for my brain to think in German, because it was out of practice for using English.  I saw how this worked five years later when I brought my stepson to America, after a military tour in Germany.  He was five – had only spoken German all his life, and after one year of school in America, he forgot it all.

 

The hotel people urged me to see a doctor – they made me an appointment.  The doctor examined me thoroughly.  He diagnosed me with “Uveitis”, which translates from the Latin as, “You’ve got an eye problem, but we don’t know what or why”.  They recommended that I get back to the States ASAP and see a specialist.

I did go back – but missed the Wagner Festival.  My Uveitis plagued me every 4 years, for the next 25,-and then magically disappeared at age 45, never it be a problem again.  My guess is it was the switch from hard to soft contacts, or a change in the contact lens wetting solution.

Nogales Bullfights 1959

 

In our second year of college, our merry band of misfits discovered Nogales, just across the Mexican border.  Nogales featured a twelve square block red light district.  It took us that entire school year of Saturday nights to explore all the cantinas, dancing with all the lovely señoritas.  By springtime, we began to tire of carousing for a long evening and then heading back home at three in the morning.  Surprisingly, John was the one to lead the way in this regard.  The rest of us had pretensions of love affairs back in Tucson, none of which ever consummated. John didn't.  He wagered all his betting money on Nogales and started spending Saturday night there.

John was the only one with a car, so we had to adapt.  For a while, we hitched rides back with other college kids, but you couldn't depend on this and if you waited too long there were no rides.  John wound up with a regular girlfriend, Lūpe.  He treated her with respect, and she took him home early Saturday night.  If we decided to stay and go back with John, we had to meet him at the Bull Fights on Sunday afternoon.  This became a ritual.  We would sleep in and have breakfast at the cantina with the women we had gone to bed with the night before.  Around noon, we would take a cab to the bull ring.  The partying was just beginning again.  We would take a table in the plaza outside the bull ring and eat tacos and drink cervesas.  John would show up about 1:30 and after another round of beers, we would buy cheap seat tickets and enter the Plaza de Toros.

After having watched movies of the greatest Spanish bullfights at The Sinaloa Café in San Francisco, these Nogales fights were bad.  This was a border town on the edge of Mexico, a million miles from real bullfighters.  If the Torero didn't wet his pants running from an old cow, the crowd would cheer.  We learned just how bad the Picadors could be, mauling the bull and sometimes their horses in the process.  Quite often the Toreros were boo-ed out of the ring for failure to show bravery in front of uniformly poor-quality bulls.  It seemed like at least once each Sunday the crowd would be cheering for the bull.  And once, but only once in my life, I witnessed a bull being set free after the Picadors failed to cut his neck muscles and the bull fighter was so scared that he wouldn’t go in for a kill.

We always left before five, by which time the ring was bloody and the noon-time beer had worn off.  I never got to see a bull fighter go down in the late afternoon's hot sun, as discussed in Garcia Lorca's "a las cinco de la tarde." [1]

Another answer to John's staying over on Saturday nights was to get a car of our own.  Except John's, all our parents had been wise enough to send us away to school with no cars and little money.  In my third year at the U of A, I paid $50 for a twenty-year old, rattletrap 1939 Chevy coupe.  There wasn't much use for the car except (1) going out to eat along Speedway; this was a straight, flat road that had a dozen cheap restaurants -no one ever went over 30 MPH,  (2) going up to Sabino Canyon to try and get laid -this never seemed to work out, but like mice in a cage, young boys never stop trying, and (3) was going to Nogales and this always worked out.

There was this one time when we[2] were coming back on a Sunday, about eight or nine o'clock in the morning.  I was driving and Vince, Rich, and Gus were all asleep.  Well, the problem was, I was asleep too.  I closed my eyes for a moment and the next thing I knew, I was fighting the wheel as we had run off the road to the right and were careening down into a ditch.  I jerked the wheel to the left in an automatic reaction and we veered at a 90º angle back across the road.  If a truck or even passenger vehicle had been going South at that time, it would have broad sided us something terrible.

We went head on into a ditch on the other side of the road and slammed to a stop.  When everybody else woke up, got out and looked at the underside of the car, we universally agreed that the car was toast.  The front tie-rod was bending at a 20º angle, as were the right front tire and fender.  Suddenly, an oversized truck with a Mexican family of twelve appears and they all piled out to look at what happened.  The men climbed under the car to assess the damage.  The kids scattered over the surrounding countryside.  The women magically pulled out baskets of prepared food, chicken, salads, beer and cakes, and set up a picnic.  The men reported that it was simple to fix; just pull out the tie-rod, hammer it straight again and re-install it.  This stunned us.  We assured them that we had no money to pay for repairs.  They said that doesn't matter, they would do it anyway.  We ate the food and played with the kids. 

Amazingly, they were successful enough that we were able to get the car back on the road to great cheers from all.  We limped back into Tucson at four in the afternoon, having traveled at under 15 MPH for 60 miles.  The car was emitting horrible noises the whole way.  I parked the Chevy at Greenlee Hall with the keys in it, a note and the pink slip legally signed and dated. 

My days of traveling to Nogales were over.

---

[1] A las cinco de la tarde.
Eran las cinco en punto de la tarde.
Un niño trajo la blanca sábana
a las cinco de la tarde.
Una espuerta de cal ya prevenida
a las cinco de la tarde.
Lo demás era muerte y sólo muerte
a las cinco de la tarde.

[2] We were all nerds, non-fraternity types: Vince from Las Vegas graduated in actuarial statistics and relocated in Hartford, Rich from the south went into the priesthood, Gus went back to Kansas and took over his dad’s Deere dealership, John from Fargo’s wheat fields married a librarian and got his PhD in brain chemistry, I went back to get a Masters in computer science then traveled the world with IBM.

Parachuting Spring 1961

 

I graduated University that spring and decided to take a summer course while I figured out what to do about military service.  Being a graduate student allowed me to eat at the faculty dining area.  I met this cute Chemistry graduate student over lunch one day.  This woman was into skydiving and I didn't even know what it was.  "Meet me on the faculty dining patio at noon Friday," she said when I proposed to come along on her next jump. 

I was there (I was horny).  It is comical to look back now, in view of today's strict rules.  They asked us to stand on top of the six-foot cement walls around the patio.  "Now jump, and as you land on your bended knees, roll forward putting your body-weight onto your right shoulder and roll forward."  I executed this maneuver three times and they passed me into the "ready" battalion for first jumps.

It was a group of dedicated zealots and I was beginning to forget my friend, who was with her favorite girlfriend.  I met them all, the following Sunday out in the middle of nowhere in Northwest Tucson.  We were in a mail and photography plane, the distinguishing characteristic of which was a hole in the back of the plane's floor for the camera equipment.  This plane was a bi-plane and they asked me to crawl out, when we got to five thousand feet and grab a hold of the struts between the wings.  The signal for the crawl-out time was by a finger-pointing motion and the hands pushing out.  This was because the noise was deafening and you really couldn't hear what anybody said, even when they shouted.

Once out there, they had cautioned me, there would be a rush of air and I must hang on with my hands and let my feet dangle in the wind.  The speed was about 100 MPH and I would dangle straight out parallel to the airplane.  When they gave me the "Thumbs Up," I was to let go, to free fall for a while.  I had to pass the "wash" of the plane and I had to be far enough out on the wing that I wouldn't hit the plane's tail when I let go.  I had no idea what to expect, so I just did as they instructed and it all went as planned.

 

This first jump, they tied my rip cord to the airplane in case I panicked or passed out and couldn't pull it myself.  That doesn't mean we didn't need to know how.  I had two chutes strapped on, a big one on my back and a belly pack on my front.  That was in case the back pack either didn't open or failed to deploy properly.  I only had two seconds of free-fall before the rip cord pulled, but I loved it.  It's an ultimate thrill ride rush and I can understand today's kids loving to bungie jump.  The same moments of thrill, but safer.

Once the parachute deployed, all sense of speed and motion ceased, I was floating, or more like suspended up in the air.  I studied the ground, but it was not getting closer.  Not until I got to about 1,000 feet from land.  The 3,500 feet of descent up until that moment took about three to four minutes.  I had totally spaced out for that time and then suddenly, the ground was rapidly approaching.  The last minute was hectic.  I had to try and use my chute cords to guide myself to the designated landing site.  I was trying to remember everything about how to hit the ground and what to do when I did.  There was no, "wait a minute" option.

I executed the fall perfectly with a proper roll.  They all congratulated me, and I was ready to go up again.  “I’ll do a proper free-fall.  No need to tie the rip cord to the plane.”  I assured them, “I didn't panic or pass out and would be just fine.”  "You'll have to wait until next week, I'm afraid," they said.  "With this little plane, we can only take three at a time, so everyone only gets one jump today."  We went out for pizza afterward and drank beer.  The experienced people told old war stories.

I went out three more times that summer and did do free-falls.  We were always in a different airplane.  Once we went up in a B-25 and a storm was coming in, fierce winds and rain came on us suddenly.  We were going to go to 10,000 feet but the Jumpmaster and the pilot agreed that the wind would blow the parachutes unpredictably and they'd have a challenging time finding us to pick us up with the jump truck.  Coming in was one of the roughest rides I've ever had and scariest too.  The FAA had not checked out the pilot in this plane and the pilot wasn't sure how to manage it in the strong crosswinds at the landing strip.  I've experienced rough landings before.  I wasn't scared in those landings.  The B-25 pilot made me scared because he kept nervously saying he wasn't sure about this.  We would lurch up and down, the wings tilting left and right, tossed about like a rowboat in the ocean.  It was my last jump day for the summer.  I was going into the Army.

I came back the following summer on my way to Germany.  I went up once with the old crew.  I was so scared of jumping that day.  I hit the ground like a rock, all stiff-legged, crumpling into a ball.  I wasn't scared of the jumping part, but of breaking my leg on landing.  I had heard so many stories in the past year while in the Army, about people pulling their rip cords too late, at 500 feet or less.  It sounded like skiing to me.  That was my last jump ever.

Train Trip Across the Rockies – Sept 1991

 

I booked a sleeper car on the train, through Chicago, to Detroit.  My father was famous in the family for always suggesting, whenever someone complained about traffic or airports, "Why don't you take the train?"  I had finally called his bluff.  I was preparing a speech to deliver in Dearborn, and I asked him to come with me on the train across country.  I had him, and he had to say yes.

The train is a faded pleasure.  No more white-gloved porters to wait on your every need.  No more three-star meals.  The train was simply full of people who were fearful of traveling, afraid to fly, and they all smoked.

The cabin seemed luxurious to start with until we realized that the two sleeping berths popped down.  We had to sleep in here too.  In a poor location decision, Railroad management had positioned the smoking car, just up wind of us, so we got the back draft of a hundred people sucking as much as they could on tobacco plants.  The even nastier result of this was that we had to pass through the smoking car to get to the observation car, which was where you could get afternoon cocktails and thus, a place we often frequented.

It took us six hours to get to Reno.  We must have stopped at every crossroad along the way.  If I had known this when I was booking the train, I too would have planned a stop-over there, half the people on the train got off in Reno, just to go gambling.

We pulled out of Reno about 7:00 pm and decided on late dinner.  We had already figured out that an early dinner, 5 rather than 7, left us with the hours from 6-10, or midnight, with little to do other than: smoke, drink, or watch the inky blackness go by.  We opted for the middle path.  The food was atrocious.  I wasn't sure that Dickie could stomach this food.  We decided to stick with hamburgers from here on in, and this worked out well.  The chef was working from a menu that he had seen in an up-scale magazine and was trying to imitate it, but the sauces were bad, the entrée mis-cooked, and the garnish missing.  The whole thing didn't blend well into a meal that was worth eating.

OK, so we had to work to avoid smoke and food. The morning after Reno was the desolate desert around Salt Lake.  It's a big country and we spent the day approaching the Rockies. The vistas were amazing.

My father had driven us past the Rockies panorama on our way to California, when I was ten years old.  He was concerned then with the "When do we get there?" and "I have to pee" type of problems to have seen the view.  We were now in an observation car, crawling along at twenty miles an hour.  I looked straight up a sheer cliff, thousands of feet above me.  It was awe-inspiring.  The vista took me aback.  That was the Rockies and the railroad planned the trip so that we would see the most impressive views of it, late in the afternoon.  How small I felt among the power of nature around me.

Added to the majesty of it, our slow speed let the storm we had started in, back in Oakland, catch up to us, all along the way.  There was thunder and lightning.  We went to sleep with rain falling and an exhausting day behind us.

We awoke the 2^nd morning in Kansas City, and I devoured a local newspaper.  My father told me about growing up in the Plains States.  The rainstorm that had been coming down in buckets when we started was now progressing across the country at about the same speed we were, just preceding us by a 2-3 hours.  We followed that storm front for two thousand miles, back in distance and time, as we made our way to the Midwest where we had both grown up.  We got to talk in depth about life in the Midwest over those next few days.

In Chicago, my father had all sorts of memory places to visit.  We started with the swanky Drake Hotel he had come to, during the war.  It was famous for the Palm Court Room.  We had drinks there and then, on to Shaw's Crab House, still a popular place when visiting Chicago.  It’s a '40s-style restaurant with a vast menu of fresh seafood and live Jazz music.  The place was full of beautiful women and[PA1]  they tempted us to continue partying, but he didn't want to upset me, and I didn't want to upset him.  The next day we got back on a morning commute train.  We talked with a black man the whole way.  He was about my father's age, and we spoke of the war and Michigan in the thirties.  This, as we rambled through gorgeous Western Michigan countryside, flat and well-wooded with water; ponds, streams and lakes.

When we arrived at the Detroit station, I couldn't believe it.  The railroad had kept the station on the outskirts of town.  It was a deserted whistle stop.  There was one taxi cab, a beat-up car.  The trunk lock didn't work; then again, neither did the door locks.  We quivered as the driver took us to the designated hotel along Woodward Avenue.

My father showed me four landmark sites; Tillie's boarding house where Mother lived, before they were married (’37), BH Tool where he worked  (40’s) until the move to California.  We went out to Grosse Pointe to my elementary school and the house on Lewiston.  My parents always associated Detroit with the Lewiston house.  We ate at two places he loved fifty years before, and he told me Detroit stories I'd never heard and don’t remember. 

I wouldn't call it a jam, but my father and I got scared as we left Grosse Pointe and tried to retrace his morning commute to BH Tool, fifty years prior.  We pulled up to a light in a depressed area.  The houses were all boarded up or burned out.  A car pulled up along-side of us and a group of angry, young black men cursed us and screamed at us that they would kill us.  We were scared.  We took out of there like bats out of hell.

He flew back to SFO Sunday night.  I stayed in the area the next few days.  There was an armed-guard riding the “BART” system there; my hotel had keycards that gave me access to certain floors; the mall had full-time police-patrols.  This wasn’t my Detroit.

Detroit was a stepping stone for some during WW-II: the war brought good money, and if you saved it, migration: Exit West, afterward.  For others, it was a jump to the middle class, but then, each subsequent American war brought a new automobile maker into the world market: Volkswagen, Japanese, Korean.  Manufacturing moved South, leaving Detroit abandoned.

---

 [PA1]

The Harp - 1982

 

 

Bettina had moved to Berkeley after threats from her father in L.A. that he'd shoot me and put her in a nunnery if she continued to stay at my apartment.  My fear was serious enough that I bought a bullet-proof vest and encouraged her to move out.  But Bill Campbell and I still went over to Berkeley often to visit.  On one of these occasions she planted the seed that she would like to learn a musical instrument.  I think she was, at that time, strumming away on an old guitar.

My current project was going well.  PEMEX stands for Petróleos Mexicanos, the nationalized Mexican Oil company.  At the request of PEMEX, I had organized the project into two teams, one Mexican and the other American, but with some PEMEX people temporarily relocated to San Francisco and several Rand people, usually me, spending weeks at a time down in Mexico City.  I agreed to do the documentation in English and Spanish, so we were continually doing translations.  For my part, as I staffed the Rand team, I hired native Spanish-speaking people whenever possible.  There were about 12-15 people on each team.  On occasion, we entertained the entire crew in San Francisco, including a taco dinner at my Coleridge Street house with the Mexican men doing the cooking.  They were impressed with my neighborhood food shopping around 29^th and Mission, Little Mexico.

When I used to go down to Mexico City for a stint, the PEMEX staffers would always take the opportunity to drag me out dining and drinking.  They tried to shock me with exotic foods, but I loved this sort of thing.  One place prepared pregnant eel, only lightly cooked so that the baby eels still wriggled as I spooned them down my throat.  These days I much prefer the Japanese style of cooking eel, it is deliciously flavorful.  One night we went to an authentic Spanish restaurant whose specialty was baby pig.  The pigs were so young that you could eat the whole thing and that's the way they served it, one to a customer, apple in the mouth so that the belly would swell up while cooking.  The ritual was for the serving waiter to grab a pottery plate and strike the pig's belly.  This, after they bring the swollen piglet, steaming to your place.  With a flourish, the waiter's stroke bursts the piglet's belly with a loud pop, the waiter tosses the plate into a nearby fireplace smashing it to bits.  The more adventuresome ate the eyes and brains; I did eat the ears and skin and the luscious meat inside. 

There was this one occasion, where there was a Mariachi band playing at the restaurant.  But besides the trumpets and silvery get-ups, one unique twist was that the band also included a harpist.  Not your regular symphonic harp, but sort of a medium sized one, four-foot-tall rather than six and with fewer strings.  The music that came out of that harp was fantastic and it mesmerized me.  They told me that we were at a Vera Cruz style restaurant and that this was a Vera Cruz harp. 

The Harp

I told them, in an off-handed, bantering way, that I would love to get one of these instruments for my girlfriend back in the States.  They picked up on this immediately and began negotiations with the harp player.  He said that it was hard to get them except in Vera Cruz, and I felt relieved.  I was flying back the next morning and didn't want pressure to go on a shopping trip.  But then came the translation, "He will be glad to sell you his, how much would you offer?"  I discussed this around the table, we wound up with $200.  He agreed, to my dismay, and left the harp: my Mexican team-mates rolling in laughter; me trying to figure out how to get this white elephant back to SFO.

I get to the airport the next day, luggage checked through, with the harp in my hands.  "I'll be carrying this on with me."  I said to the check-in woman.  She said she didn't think so but didn't stop me.  "I'll be carrying this on with me."  I said to the ticket collector at the boarding ramp.  She said she didn't think so but didn't stop me.  "I'll be carrying this on with me."  I said to the flight-attendant at the entrance to the plane.  "Let me call the Captain."  She said.  He and I agreed that the harp would ride in the crew's luggage stowage area.  The Captain himself would personally oversee it; and hand it to me on the other end.

 

Bettina and Peter in Mexico City 1981

There was no case for this instrument, made of wood that was old and fragile.  I had been sure that if I had checked it through, I would wind up with a pile of sticks by the time we got to SFO.  My fear was a reverse dè já vu.  Two years after this episode, after a week in the Burgundy wine country of France, my friend Bill and I were returning to England, each with a suitcase containing a dozen bottles of wine.  As the airport carousel chug-chugged away, we began to hear the tinkle of broken glass, then as our suitcases hit the peak of the ramp and started their downward descent, we saw the rivulets of fine French wine leading the way down the ramp. 

I got the harp home OK and two days later Bill and I paid a visit to Bettina and said, "Close your eyes for a present."  She loved such surprises.  "What is it?" she said, and I explained.  She was shell-shocked at the enterprise that had gone into this venture just for a gift for her.  She took three lessons from someone, but it just became a conversation piece.  She was my travel companion in those lonely years on the road: London, Paris, and Mexico City, a youthful party girl, but Valedictorian of her Berkeley graduating class.

Zermatt - Spring Break - 1982

 

 

I met Patti in Zermatt April 11^th,1982.  This was a ten-day trip for me.  Zermatt was a hard place to get to.  For Patti's first Spring break at St Claire's school in Oxford, I sent her to Switzerland on a package deal that included a week’s stay with meals and skiing lessons every day.  She knew nothing about skiing and what better place to learn than Zermatt, looking up at the Matterhorn.  I sent her on the train on Saturday, April 3^rd, a week before I left to pick her up.

I set out on Saturday morning, April 10^th, from the Birmingham train station.  In those days the train wasn't very direct.  I arrived in London's Euston station about 10:30 am after a lovely and elegant breakfast on the train.  I never missed a chance to partake of that formal English breakfast service.  Then I had to cab over to the International connections train station.  My train to Dover left at 11:45.  That one was a horrible train.  It was slow and the accommodations were shabby.  There was no service, but it only took an hour and a half.

Next was getting on the ferry boat and keep in mind that with each of these transfers, you must personally carry all your luggage with you, up and down staircases, on and off vehicles.  If you were lucky in those days, you caught a "high-speed" ferry that crossed the channel in two hours.  On this occasion, luck was not with me, and I got on one of the four-hour versions.  As I recall, it rained the whole way - I just read a book.

Just like London or Chicago were central hubs and most A-to-B trips go through the hub to make transfers, Paris was the hub for travel in France.  I got on a train at Dover that took me to Paris.  When I got in to the Gare du Nord it was past midnight.  I took a cab over to the Gare d' Est, where my train South took off at 1:15 am.  It had been a long day.  I had taken a sleeping compartment and I snored all the way to Basel the next morning.  At Basel, I again switched trains to a local that took me most of the way to Zermatt.

There were no cars allowed in Zermatt and the only way in, was a little train that ferried people back and forth from Brig, along a twenty-mile route.  So I arrived in the village about noon on Sunday.  I had never been there before, so I asked Patti to show me around.  But, she didn't know anything about the town!  She'd gone out to the bunny slope the first day she got there. and after two hours of lessons, she decided that she didn't like skiing, so she never went back.  She had just stayed in her hotel room the entire week, reading War and Peace.

When cocktail time came around that afternoon, I asked her about the night life, and she said there was none.  When I probed further, she admitted that she hadn't actually gone out at night.  "Zermatt is famous for its après-ski clubs," I said. 

We took a long walk all around the place in the afternoon and we had a fondue and drinks at one place, then a schnitzel and wine for dinner at another place.  I dragged her to three different night clubs, each filled with beautiful young people her age and she said, "Gee, if I'd known these places were here, I'd have gone out more."

The next morning. we retraced our steps with the two trains, arriving in Basel a little past one o'clock.  We had lunch across the street from the Bahnhof and I found us a hotel for the night which turned out to be on the German side of town.  We toured around Basel that Tuesday morning and then I rented a car.  We took off about three and drove for two hours, which got us to the heart of the Schwartzenwald.  We stopped at a health resort of sorts, at least it had a large indoor pool.  We decided to try the pool out before dinner, and it was a great relaxer.  We were the only ones in the pool.  The exercise made us famished; then by seven o'clock, we both ate huge meals. 

We arrived in Heidelberg Wednesday afternoon.  I'd taken a detour to stop in at the "little village" of Sindelfingen, where I had spent a week twenty-years earlier on my college European Tour trying to get a job at IBM.

I had booked us into a small hotel right down town in Heidelberg.  We spent that night and the next day sight-seeing around Heidelberg.  I showed Patti all the old places that Gisela and I had frequented.  Gisela arrived Friday morning and we did a little more sight-seeing.  We had coffee and pastries in that perfect little Patisserie along the main street of Heidelberg.  We ate dinner that night at a Keller somewhere around the student area. 

 

The next day, Saturday, we went down to Schonau,

This was Gisela’s childhood home, where she and her mother lived during the early years of the war.  Gisela took Patti and I on a long walk up to the town's graveyard.  We walked through this old house which now houses a driving school.  Her grandmother and mother raised her her, in those early years.  To Gisela, it is her childhood home.

 

We stayed there in Schonau Saturday night and then we took Gisela back to her parents' house in Mannheim on Sunday. 

 

 

 

I turned the car in there in Mannheim and we visited for an hour or two with her parents.  

Then Gisela walked us to the train station and Patti and I began our trip, on a half-dozen trains, back to England.

ROTC - 1958

 

They don’t do this sort of thing anymore.  It was a different age back then.  Picture yourself in the middle of the movie “Animal House” with John Belushi and that will set the scene.  I lived the reality that they documented in the film in 1978, twenty years later.

When I started out as a freshman, one of the things we had to take was ROTC.  This stands for Reserve Officer’s Training Corps and goes back to the days after the Civil War when the Union figured it needed to maintain a ready officer corps; you could always draft or buy the cannon fodder.  The best place to get recruits for the Army Reserves was the colleges, so the Federal government set up Land Grants in exchange for running an ROTC program.  The University of Arizona was a Land Grant College, with buildings including the ROTC building right in the center of the campus still standing, since 1871.  The Army gave us uniforms and toy guns, but they did not allow us to take them home with us.  We met twice a week for practice marching and attended a one-hour class each week on US Military history – men only.

I was good at this marching thing since I had been doing Cub and Boy Scout marching in parades for years.  I quickly became, first a squad leader, then a platoon leader.  This was not because of any innate talent, but because I liked it and no one else was willing to do these things, like march the other guys around.  I caught the eye of the leader of a platoon of “slicked out” cadets who were our UofA contingent of Pershing’s Rifles.  This group was a non-fraternal organization in the ROTC Corps nation-wide; every Land Grant campus had an elite Pershing’s Rifles Company.

This guy, Marty Link, recruited me into his group.  He was going to become Company Commander next year (his 4^th) and he could see me as one of his platoon leaders, as he was.  He dangled that we would be the ones carrying the flags out pre-game, at all the football games, would march in all sorts of parades, and would get the attention of co-eds who “put out” for uniforms.  That dangle proved not to be true in my case.  Anyway, I fell, hook, line, and sinker and switched into the Pershing’s Rifles group the second semester of my Freshman year. 

I was good at all this sort of stuff, not just the marching, but also organizing and motivating the troops.  My real-life Marty Link was just like the “Animal House” character, Doug Niedermeyer, the drill cadet Captain who gets beaned by a golf ball and rides a horse around the parade grounds.  And, yes, Marty rode a horse when he went megalomaniac but that would be getting ahead of my story. 

So I learned to spit shine my shoes to a reflective sheen; my uniform was almost as inspection ready as Nard’s date pants, my brass sparkled; and I pretty well ran the Pershing’s Rifles’ office, there in the ROTC building, all by the end of my Freshman year.  Second year, I was like the Exec Officer, although by the rules, you couldn’t be a cadet officer unless you had signed on for the 3^rd and 4^th year of ROTC. 

The first two years were mandatory, and all males had to participate at the UofA.  You could apply for continuation beyond the first two years and unless you were crippled, they would let you continue and those few idiots that did were to become the cadet officers that marched the companies around the drill field.  The ratio at that time was about 1 in 100 that signed on to do their 3^rd and 4^th year. 

When I came back in 1957 for my first crack at my sophomore year, I was the key guy in Marty Link’s conquest of the Military world.  We went through the year, accumulating a series of wonderful successes.

I had become the “First Sergeant” of the company, not only leading the marching tricks we could do, but designing them.  Tossing our rifles up in the air while marching around and catching them at the right moment, just before they hit the ground; spinning the rifles and then tossing them to each other in breathe-taking displays of practice and control, sort of like a male equivalent of a baton twirler.  We volunteered for and won prizes at parade after parade and finally wound up at the end of the year in the Cinco de Mayo parade in Nogales.

This scenario repeats in my life … …

After the performance, I talked the marchers into celebrating in a Nogales Cantina.  Not that it took convincing.  I was 21 and anyway, we were in Mexico: age limit 00.  We had no other obligations, this was the time to celebrate, get drunk; there was a bus to take us back at the right time. 

We all know about men who have "the voice."  These men are leaders when it comes to getting troops to storm the next hill, facing machine gun fire.  For whatever reason, I have that voice.

Marty went crazy on me.  “You are violating the chain of command!”  “End this party at once and everybody back in the bus.” 

We all got back in the bus; we had no other way to get back home.  But when we did, Marty Link wanted to court martial me.  Ideally, in his mind, he would have me strung up on the flag pole at “Old Main,” the old ROTC building.

He went immediately to the Commandant of the ROTC Corps and proposed that they throw me out of the Corps for my egregious behavior. 

When I went in to meet the ROTC Lieutenant Colonel, I quickly realized that this man was in the unenviable position of choosing between Joe Lifer and Joe Brains.  He felt caught between the two.  His military background told him that I was insubordinate and had not followed orders.  But he had seen this before and he was not impressed with the situation as a test case. 

“Peter,” he said “Do you want to go on to continue ROTC training?

“No,” I said, “I’m done with all this horse-shit.’

“OK,” says he, “then just let the ensuing crap pass you by."  And I did.

This was the best life-lesson I ever got in college.  When the Army Finance Corps dumped me, I sucked it up and developed a computer career.  When IBM  dumped me, I went into gig work and made twice the money.  And when I was flunking at the end of my Sophomore year at college, I took a deep breath and next year, switched majors to math, then aced the next three years.

Back to Marty.  In late May, end of the school term, I was summarily, defrocked of my rank.  We only had two weeks of school left.  It was a formal affair.  Marty asked permission from the Colonel to slice my epaulets off with his saber, but the Colonel had properly denied this request.

Nonetheless, He stripped me of my rank in a formal ceremony.  But it was one of those occasions where the troops gave me a hoop-hoop-hooray as it proceeded - they considered the punishment beyond the pale.