Of Work, Boredom and Demons

When my GI Bill money finally came through, I had already gotten my undergraduate degree. I took the money and enrolled in night classes at the University of Missouri at Kansas City Law School. I was a married man now. I had a day job as well, in the promotion department of Hallmark Cards. I edited a weekly in-house newsletter and contributed to a monthly magazine, Cards, which was distributed to all Hallmark Card dealers in the US and Canada. I wrote how-to articles on laying out display windows, attracting new customers to stores, displaying merchandise in the store to maximize sales and I did occasional features on Hallmark Card artists and new products like paper dresses, pop-up greeting cards and paper designs. The job was more boring than watching paint dry. But it paid the then princely sum of $12,000 a year. My wife was a designer in their art department.

I should have had a clue about the place, when in my second week there a crew of five white-suited storm troopers carried out one of the design artists in a strait jacket after he’d gone berserk in his cubicle, had ripped all his clothes off and had set about to trash the joint, tossing ink wells and paint pots against the walls. He also tried to crash through the floor-to-ceiling glass walls surrounding the ninth floor, but had only succeeded in bouncing off the reinforced glass and knocking himself out. Everyone just stood by silently and watched. No one lifted a finger. No one discussed the incident afterwards. It was as if it had never happened.

My boss, a fellow named Gus Johnson and in his late forties, showed up one day after I had suffered through several months of tedium, wearing a flashy, double-breasted navy-blue zoot-suit with wide white vertical stripes over a light blue silk shirt with French cuffs and a flowery Ascot. It was an extraordinary statement to show up in such a suit, because the Hallmark Cards white-collar uniform was a plain black suit, white shirt and a narrow subdued tie. Nothing else was acceptable.

No one looked at him or paid any attention to him. He strolled through the department, stopping a various cubicles to shoot his cuffs or adjust his tie, trying to show off his new suit in the best light. When he didn’t get a reaction, he retreated to this office and soon reappeared in shirtsleeves. At Hallmark that was considered out of uniform and cause for reprimand. Again no reaction. The tie went next. He flung it over his shoulder into the aisle between the open waist-high cubicles. Soon the shirt followed, than the shoes, socks, trousers and, finally, his yellow polka-dotted boxer shorts. He was now stark naked. Still no one reacted. Everyone pretended it was business as usual, discussed his or her assignment with him, asked about his kids, talked about the weather.

I made the mistake of asking him, if he wanted to try one of the new A-line paper dresses that had just been added to the Hallmark line and of which I had several samples hanging in my cubicle. He looked at me as if I had just stepped off a UFO, turned beet-red and commenced to scream at me: “How dare you speak to me like that? Why would I want to wear one of your paper rags? I am wearing a brand new Zegna suit.” I tried to point out that he was bare-assed naked, but he would have none of it. “You are toast here,” he yelled and stormed down the hall toward the corner office of the VP Marketing to finalize my demise. But nothing happened.

We never saw him again. And again, no one talked about Mr. Johnson’s bizarre flame-out. I decided it was time to look for other employment.

My wife’s father had been a crooner on the radio in Kansas City in the 30’s and 40’s. He’d had his own show. He knew the General Manager of one of the city’s radio stations, who was a friend and a fellow member of the Kansas City Country Club. Membership to this club was restricted to white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Jews, Catholics and other exotics, never mind blacks, didn’t need to apply. Anyway, he got me an interview and I talked myself into a job in the station’s promotion department. Money-wise it was a lateral move, but at least I could relate to the people working there. They seemed normal.

Mike McCurdy was my new boss. He always wore a jaunty bow tie, spoke softly and drank gin like a fish water. He liked dry Martinis. His Martinis were made up of a generous helping of Bombay Gin, what my brother would have called a three-finger shot, followed by a close pass past the glass with an open bottle of vermouth. He believed that the vermouth fumes gave his drink that special je-ne-sais-quoi. He never appeared drunk, but I know that five of those gin-only Martinis had to have an effect. Mike never showed it. Only his speech became even softer and slower.

When he had to fly, he always carried a large thermos filled with gin. He feared flying above all. By departure time he had to be pushed onto the plane in a wheelchair. He explained to the stewardess that he had a lower intestinal problem which sometimes weakened his system, but that he would be ok, since he carried his prescribed medicinal fluids with him in his thermos.

The station carried the games of the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs. Those were the Hank Stram glory days, when the Chiefs won Super Bowl III. I got to know most of the players. I helped them cut commercials and promos at the station, guys like Len Dawson, Buck Buchanan, Ernie Ladd, Otis Taylor, Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, Mike Garrett, Jan Stenerud and Fred Arbanas, a one-eyed wide receiver.

My job was to write copy for station promos, retail ads and to schedule placement of radio spots. I did voice-overs and handled special sales events for the retail sales guys. There were no women in this or any other sales department in town then, nor were there any other minorities selling advertising in those days before affirmative action. I also made sure that my boss made it back to the station after his five-Martini lunches. He had a tendency to wander when he got loaded and needed tending.

About six months into this job, I decided to quit smoking. By then I had a 2- to 3-pack-a-day habit. Pall Mall non-filters were my brand of choice and they began to affect my health. I was 29 years old and could not climb a flight of stairs without huffing and hacking my lungs out. I decided to quit cold turkey and I did. Everyone was impressed. The problem was that I compensated for the Nicotine-urge with stuffing my face with chocolate. I blimped up to 230 pounds.

My wife suggested amphetamines – speed – to help me lose weight. She knew a doctor who prescribed them freely as part of a weight-loss program. They worked in getting my weight back down to 190, but they made me totally paranoid and brought to the surface all my suppressed memories, which I had banished from my conscience as a matter of survival. My nights were wracked by nightmares.

The faces of the dead I had left behind in my years in the employ of Uncle Sam swam up out the mists of my drugged and paranoid mind. Dismembered body parts and scenes of destruction flashed before my eyes. It all came flooding back. I thought I had buried my nightmares deep enough to be rid of them forever. I was wrong.

I went to work in the mornings totally exhausted, tense. I was a bundle of nerves. I didn’t eat and reverted to my old stand-by – vodka – to take the edge off. I was a mess. My job performance suffered. I skipped Law School classes regularly and ultimately had to resign. My home life suffered. Finally, one of my co-workers suggested I join a gym and work out. I took his advice. I put a stop to the speed, the vodka and the chocolate binging and began to feel better. I worked out every day. My body improved. Sleep returned and I re-buried my nightmares. I also increased my neck size to 17 inches and noticed that most of the serious guys in the gym were taking steroids. They kept after me to try some of their concoctions, which helped them bulk up and give their muscles definition. They looked great, but I had had it with chemicals in my system and refused. I quit the gym and took up golf.

I Don't See A Reason For Belgium

I know, you’re thinking what’s the big deal about Belgium. They seem like nice enough people. They haven’t hurt anybody, except maybe the Congolese. Call me a bigot, but I have my reasons for being blinkered about them. Let me try to lay out for you where I am coming from (and damn the dangling participle).

When I was a kid, we had a parlor game, called: Can you name one famous Belgian whose name isn’t Leopold? Of course, you can’t, because they don’t exist. Perhaps there is a list of famous Belgians somewhere. I never saw it and wouldn’t know where to find it. I don’t think I am going to search for it either.

Belgians aren’t a people like say the Brits, the French or even the Poles. They don’t identify themselves as Belgians, but as either Flemish or Walloon. Most Belgians are Flemings, protestant and speak Dutch. They are settled in Flanders, in the northern part of the country. The rest are French-speaking Walloons and Catholic and they populate the area bordering France. Only around Brussels do they mix to any extent. Another 10% are German, who live in the east along the German border and they all hate each other. It is an extremely dull place. The only reason that there is a country called Belgium is religion and European power politics.

Here’s a brief history lesson: The region known as the Southern Netherlands was ruled by the Catholic Spanish and Austrian Hapsburgs. In 1795 the French Republic invaded and annexed what is now known as Belgium. After Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 it became part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands as a buffer against French aggression and was ruled by a protestant Dutch king. In 1830, aided by the French, the Catholics staged a revolution against protestant domination and the place became independent under the first Leopold, a German from the house of Saxe-Coburg, which is still in charge there today. Today, the French don’t understand why anyone would want to annex Belgium.

If you ask a Belgian the question about famous Belgians, he or she will at first get very upset at being asked such a condescending question and then, after calming down, will name The Singing Nun, Hercule Poirot, Jean Claude Van Damme, Tin Tin and a number of other names you’ll never have heard of. It’s tough to be known for the reputed nutritional values of Brussels sprouts, Belgian waffles, chocolate and beer. And keep in mind that Tin Tin’s first adventure took him to the Soviet Union (Knifje in de Sovietunie, 1929). Are the communists behind Belgium’s existence? And the Swiss would heatedly contest the notion that Belgian chocolate is any good. Ditto for the Bavarians and Belgian beer. Belgians are the European version of Newfies. They are the butt of jokes. They are thought of as unsophisticated rubes, a bit dim witted and phlegmatic, sort of like their beer – heavy.

If you ask a Frenchman his opinion of the Belgians, he’ll shrug and point out to you that you can’t expect much from people who favor horsemeat as their national repast. He’ll add that eating horse dulls your senses, because, as everyone knows, Belgian horses are plough horses, huge, heavy and hairy.

I know a little bit about Belgians, besides the fact that I grew up next door to them. My oldest son married one. I had made the mistake of inviting him on a tour of the beer halls of Bavaria, when he graduated from university. I had ignored the fact that he was not a connoisseur of outstanding beer. On our first stop in a small city along the Rhine, we invited ourselves to a stranger’s wedding reception. We had to drink many toasts to the bride and groom and all the relatives in attendance. I had a very good time. My son got sick, threw up and plugged up the toilet, flooding the joint. He was embarrassed and didn’t believe me when I tried to tell him that this was nothing out of the ordinary. Instead of hair of the dog, he decided to head south to Venice to soak up some culture. There he met this Belgian girl, who was camping on the steps of the Venice railroad station. And being a naïve American from Kansas City, he fell for her. I can’t blame her for trying to escape the tedium that is Belgium.

I tried to warn him off, endeavored to point out some of the Belgian shortcomings, but to no avail. He didn’t want to understand my peculiar predilection. He didn’t see the point about being rude to Belgians.

But my bias runs deeper than ethnicity. Consider this: Belgian women don’t shave their underarms or anywhere else, for that matter. Well, it’s not really a Belgian-only thing. Lots of European women don’t, but among Belgians it seems a pervasive custom. Now I know that some guys think that bushy pits are an olfactory Garden of Eden. I can relate to that. I have a very sensitive nose and can appreciate a fragrant whiff of funk firing up my brain’s pleasure centers, but it can get overwhelming. For example, if you’re in a car with a hairy woman, the wafting bouquet of smells can get pretty funky. I’m speaking from experience here. It’s an odd thing, but women with furry pits always seem to also have a thing about not opening the car’s windows, lest they catch a draft. They seem inured to stink. To be honest, before I arrived in North America, b.o. never bothered me, but it sure does now. Would you call that cultural assimilation or delayed bias? I blame the Belgians.

Like many Europeans, especially those from deepest Bavaria, Belgians also seem to have an adverse relationship with their orthodontists or, more likely, none at all. They have terrible looking teeth. Maybe they don’t have orthodontists in Belgium. I have never seen anyone there sporting braces. The combination of buck-toothed choppers, shaggy armpits and funky odors has put me off Belgian women. I imagine Belgian men are no different, though I haven’t had any personal relations with any.

Perhaps Belgians have redeeming features, but their country doesn’t serve a purpose. They are lousy at war. They are not good at peace either. They are unable to agree on anything among themselves, including forming a government. The various ethnic factions simply hate each other. The specter of the country’s break-up is never far from the surface. Call me jaundiced, if you must; but I say: Who cares?

Lessons Learned from Love, Beer and Brawling

I was 16 when I fell in love for the first time. Her name was Lorelei Kuehn. She and her family lived in a huge apartment in the Plassenburg, the medieval fortress overlooking my high school in Kulmbach, in the northeastern corner of Bavaria. Her father was a portrait painter and a bomb victim from Berlin and a died-in-the-wool Nazi. All his kids had Germanic names that started with the letter L. Her brothers’ names were Lohengrin, Leberecht and Liebhart. Lorelei was blond and she was hot. I was besotted with her. She flirted with everyone. I couldn’t really compete with some of my classmates. Most came from well-to-do families and they were city kids. I was a country bumpkin who was only a mediocre student and on top of that I had broken the code by asking uncomfortable questions about the recent past and my teachers’ involvement with the Nazis. Many had been ardent believers and had a difficult time reconciling current realities with their past. Questions about recent history were not welcome. In short, I was not one of the gang.

Lorelei allowed me to become her personal bag wallah. She let me carry her books from the Lyceum, the girls’ high school across town next to the city park, through the center of the old city with its cobblestone streets and ancient framework houses and up the steep approach road to the castle. I am sure all the other kids in my class were snickering about me behind my back. I never got past first base with her. I was too innocent and timid. I didn’t believe all the dirt my friend, Helmut, told me about her. My infatuation with her lasted a year, before I grew tired of her. She told me I was not advancement material. Her ambition was to become a translator in the Foreign Office in Bonn. She obviously had plans for bigger and better things. I don’t know whether she ever reached her goal. I lost track of her.

The result of my unrequited crush on Lorelei was that I shut myself off from further pain and stayed away from girls for the duration. I shut down emotionally or, rather, I channeled my feelings into aggressive behavior. Here I was, 17 years old, a frustrated virgin, determined not to get hurt again by opening up to another person. Not a very bright decision, but 17-year-olds are not known for thinking things through. At least not this one. In case you’re wondering, I did not lose my virginity until I was 21 years old and that momentous event took place in a cathouse in Phenix City, Alabama. More on that at some other time.

To compensate, I developed a taste for beer, basically because that’s all I could afford at the time, and for brawling. Keep in mind that in that part of the country beer was considered one of the basic food groups, part of the grain family. After all, it was made from barley or wheat. You’ll find it in the lunch buckets of most workers for consumption in the office or on the work site or in the factory in Bavaria. It is normal.

In those days, a bottle of beer cost the equivalent of two bits. But one of my classmates was the scion of the Reichel brewing family, who owned one of the four major breweries in Kulmbach, which called itself the "Beer Capital of the World." Through him we gained access to what was called “green” beer, beer that hadn’t fully fermented and thus had not been inventoried yet. This brew was quite turbid and had bits of all sorts of matter floating in it. It also had a tendency to clean out your system. We didn’t care. We called this condition “der schnelle Fritz” – the speedy Fritz. The refugees among us called it “der flotte Otto” – the nimble Otto. Fritz, Otto – the result was the same.

Sometimes when I was flush with cash, I invested in a bottle of “Kulminator Eis Bock”, a strong local beer with a 13% alcohol content. It came in a short stubby brown bottle and had an almost cloyingly sweet taste. One bottle was all you needed to put you out of your misery.

Fridays after school was beer day, when we’d meet Karl Reichel behind his brewery and he’d let us have however many bottles we could handle. There usually were five or six of us. I remember riding my bike home after those sessions, a 15 km trip, and being so out of it that I crashed into the ditch and passed out, waking up soaking wet and freezing in the dark. The offshoot of those occasions was that my mother, who always waited up for me, berated me when I got home and threatened to slap me about severely.

If I didn’t fall off my bike on the road home, I usually was able to get the booze out of my system by the time I reached my house. The road, a two-lane highway, was fairly level for the first 13 klicks, but the last two were a real bugger. The two-lane road turned into a gravel country lane and became steep and twisty. You had to stand on your pedals the whole way. This was in the days when 3-speed bikes were the latest. They gave you a real workout. Getting off and pushing the bike was not an option. It was a sign of weakness and all the kids’d be on your case.

Sometimes I took the train for the first 12 km and rode my bike the last stretch from the depot up the mountain to my house. In winter I skied down the mountain to the railroad station in the morning and back up in the afternoon. It made for strong legs and healthy lungs.

To make matters worse, I joined a fraternity, R.A.V. Absolvia, were the raison d’être was the consumption of large quantities of beer, which had to be drunk standing up, from a tall five-liter glass boot without spilling a drop while the rest of the gang sang Latin student drinking songs. "Gaudeamus igitur juvenes dum sumus" (let us rejoice therefore while we are young) was our favorite. You had to hold the glass boot with the toe down or it would create an air bubble when you reached the foot and your face would be sloshed in beer. After a couple of these, it was hard to tell whether the boot pointed up or down. The older members of the group, the “Philisters,” were university students and, even though it was outlawed, some of them secretly practiced dueling with sabers. It was a sign of esteem and honor to sport a dueling scar. Fortunately, I never advanced up the ranks that far.

The offshoot of my frequent encounters with beer was not always oblivion. More times then not I got into fights and usually got my butt kicked. I’d come home with bloody knuckles and bruises and gashes on my face and torn clothes. And my mother would berate me.

Saturday night was usually fight night in the beer halls my friends and I frequented. The slightest perceived insult or affront could result in a wild melee with chairs and beer steins flying and blood and vomit everywhere. The favorite trick was to smash your stein on the table’s edge, so it broke from the handle and to start whaling away. This ceramic or glass handle was our version of a knuckleduster. It was very effective and persuasive. Drinking and brawling went hand in glove. That’s what you did in a small town for entertainment. Everyone participated, including the ladies. No one ever got injured seriously. I think my mother enjoyed applying her iodine tinctures and tonics to my cuts and bruises, listening to my howls.

I had joined the local soccer club, which played in the lowest level of the county league and game day, Sunday, was the highlight of the town’s social scene. The day usually started with church services at 10, followed by a gathering of the players, their families and followers at the Goldene Rose pub. Fortified by several liters of beer each, this mob then moved to the soccer pitch. By game time at 2 o’clock, the home crowd and the visitors, who had invigorated themselves at the town’s other pub, “zur Linde”- to the Lime Tree – were in fine form, with insults flying and the odd scuffle breaking out.

Visitors never showed their faces at the Goldene Rose. That was the rule. Even though they came from nearby villages, they were considered foreigners, to be distrusted. You had to keep an eye on them. It didn’t matter which side won the game. Whatever the outcome, it was the poor referee’s fault. The fans of the losing side would chase him with sticks, walking canes and umbrellas, rocks, anything that was handy to zur Linde, where he had to change into his civvies and where his moped was parked. Sometimes he’d have to lay low for hours before it was safe for him to mount his moped and head home.

After one particularly galling loss of the home team, the three Braunersreuter brothers, all star players on our team, and some of their friends waylaid the referee on his way home, beat the hell out of him and tossed him into the creek that paralleled the road, for good measure. He filed charges and half the town had to appear in court as witnesses against the Braunersreuters, but all the witnesses turned out to have been blind, no one had seen anything and the charges were dismissed. The league, however, declared our home field off limits and we had to play all our games away for a year. We lost every match. One of the reasons was that the opposing teams and their fans didn’t have to worry about retaliation when they visited our village. But we kept score and when the suspension was finally lifted, it was payback time with a vengeance, but not on the soccer pitch. We didn’t want to get suspended again

It was a tradition that on the evening of the game there was a dance at the zur Linde for players and fans of both teams. These Sunday night dances were considered neutral territory. Disputes were settled outside. As long as none of the foreigners, that is the visitors from the next village over, tried to make out with any of the local girls, things remained fairly civilized.

The dance following the first game after the lifting of the home-field suspension made the front page of the local weekly newspaper, the Stadtsteinacher Nachrichten. The visiting team that Sunday was the F.C. Tannenwirtshaus, a village about three miles up the road. Most of the inhabitants of this town were either named Turbanisch or Buss and were the descendants of gypsies who were force-settled there after the Napoleonic Wars. They were basically tinkers, poachers and fruit and vegetable traders, whose gaily-painted trucks could be seen all over northeastern Bavaria buying and selling local produce.

One of the visiting players, a fellow named Bartl (short for Bartholomew) Buss, worked for my father as custodian of his fish farm, located in Tannenwirtshaus. He had learned somehow that there was going to be trouble after the game. He instructed his teammates and fans to bring ax handles and to hide them behind the zur Linde for use that evening.

The Braunersreuters expected nothing less and had directed their youngest brother, Albin, who at 15 was so short that he could easily have passed for a midget, to hide in the bushes behind the pub to keep an eye on the guests’ activities and to report back to the Goldene Rose with his findings. Needless to say, the home side appropriated the ax handles while the visitors were dancing inside. Everyone waited in the shadows outside for the show to begin. When all was set, Guenther Schwappacher, the mayor’s son, tossed two stink bombs onto the dance floor, emptying the hall in no time. We set upon the hapless dancers with our borrowed ax handles and beat the crap out of them. Several ended up in the hospital with broken bones and other lesser injuries.

The upshot was a major trial with 43 defendants from both villages and with jail sentences and fines handed out to the combatants. This time there were plenty of witnesses pointing the finger at each other. Revenge was sworn. It was the beginning of a vendetta that lasted for years, maybe not as deadly as those in Sicily or the Balkans, but certainly as deeply felt.

I learned a valuable lesson from this incident, several actually. One, never step into harm’s way sloshed, two, always have a solid exit strategy and three, you got to have deniability, in case there are repercussions. It’s not enough to have a sound plan of attack; you also need a way out, if things go sour, to stay below the horizon in the aftermath and you need an alibi. And you need a clear mind to see what’s going on around you. I didn’t have any of the above in the incident following the opening of the soccer season. I was arrested along with everybody else and it was only my father’s standing and influence, which got me out of this mess. He was not very happy with me. My mother, of course, berated me to no end.

The other lessons I came away with from this incident were never to trust somebody else to look out for your best interests and it’s best not to have any partners, who can later rat you out to save their own skin. Of course, the downside of this is that you can’t blame anybody else for your blunders.

Remembering My Mother

I was leafing through an old photo album of mine the other day and I came across some black and white pictures of my grandparents on my mother’s side. My grandfather was Swiss and a cheese-maker by trade. He came from the Canton of Thurgau in the German-speaking part of Switzerland. He was a large and extremely strong man. He used to shave his head with a straight razor every Saturday morning and when he was done he’d polish it with a smoked pork rind. He didn’t care that this attracted flies to his head. He’d convinced himself that the medicinal benefits outweighed the nuisance of the flies buzzing around his shiny dome and that the rank smell emanating from his head protected him from disease.

My grandfather had other strange routines as well, such as his eating habits. Watching him eat was not everyone’s cup of tea. He’d mix his salad and dessert together with the main course, cut everything up into bite sizes, then pour gravy over the whole mess and eat it with a spoon. He felt it all ended up together in his stomach anyway, so why bother with separate courses or table manners.

He rolled his own cigars from tobacco plants he grew in his garden and he always had two 100-liter barrels of potent apple cider in his cellar for his fortification. The cider came from trees in his orchard. He also raised rabbits and chickens and turkeys. My grandparents lived off their land in the middle of the city in the lean years during and after the war.

His arms and hands were huge. His skin was as tough as leather. One time he showed my brother and me how he could bounce a pointy kitchen knife off his biceps by flexing at the moment of impact. He didn’t even bleed. He was a tough man and not very nice. He spoke Switzer-deutsch, the guttural German dialect spoken by the people from the northern part of Switzerland. It was sometimes very difficult to understand him. But you never dared to tell him that, because he assumed everyone spoke like him and should be able to understand him. If you didn’t, you were stupid. Perhaps his hearing was impaired. I was scared to death of him when I was a child.

In his youth, he had been the Swiss “Hoseluepfle” champion, a form of wrestling popular in Switzerland in which you tried to upend your opponent by picking him up by his shorts, which ended in heavy cloth rolls around the waist and thighs and tossing him unto his back or off the mat. It literally means “lift by the pants,” sort of like a Swiss version of Sumo. His strength came from manipulating the 200 lb. wheels of Swiss cheese every day of his life since he was a boy.

My grandparents lived in Schweinfurt. During the war and the countless bombing raids on Schweinfurt’s ball bearing plants and extensive marshalling yards, my grandfather believed that because he was a Swiss citizen and thus a neutral, he should not have to suffer any bomb damage. When the bombs did hit his place, he was outraged. My grandmother told him that the airmen who dropped the bombs probably hadn’t seen his Swiss passport, which he always carried with him, and so mistook him for a Nazi. He didn’t think that was funny, but he never had a sense of humor, least of all about himself.

He also hated the Americans because they arrested him after the city fell and took him, along with all males over 16 years old in Schweinfurt, to an internment camp near the airport, where they were trying to ferret out the Nazis among them. The soldiers who arrested him, weren’t impressed with his Swiss papers. It didn’t matter, that they sent him home the next day with his passport. My grandfather held a grudge.

They should have arrested my grandmother instead. Unlike the rest of my family, my grandmother was a true believer before the war, a Nazi party member. On formal occasions, she liked to be addressed as “Partei Genossin” - party comrade. She had been turfed out of Switzerland before the war for insisting on flying swastika pennants on her car while visiting my grandfather’s family. They said it violated Swiss neutrality. She said it was the future. My grandmother was a nurse-midwife, who during her long career brought more than 5,000 babies into the world. My grandmother was also a speed demon who believed haste was of the essence when driving her car. She drove a 1936 DKW convertible, with which she and my grandfather toured all over Europe, until the Nazis confiscated it for the war effort in 1941.

The car’s seizure by the Nazis in the second year of the war forced her to use a bicycle to go to work until she retired in 1949. She believed in Germany’s destiny, as she put it, that is, until Allied bombs flattened the city around her. After that happened, she withdrew into her work and began to age fast. She died soon after the end of the war.

This fascination with speed seemed to run in the family. Maybe it was something in the genes. My mother was a motor-racing fan. In fact, she named me after Bernd Rosemeyer, the greatest Grand Prix driver of his day. Rosemeyer drove for Auto Union and was known as the “Nebelmeister” – the master of the fog. He excelled in wet driving conditions and his races against and victories over Rudolf Caracciola of Mercedes Benz and Tazio Nuvolari of Alfa Romeo made him a hero in Germany and abroad. His career was meteoric and lasted only three years. “Bernd literally did not know fear,” Caracciola said of his great rival. My mother never missed any of his races and would be glued to the radio at race time to follow the exploits of her hero Rosemeyer was killed in an Auto Union Streamliner during a land speed record attempt on the Frankfurt-Darmstadt-Heidelberg Autobahn on January 28, 1938. My mother was heartbroken when he crashed and died.

My mother, who got her driver’s license at age 50, followed in her hero's footsteps. She drove a 1955 Lloyd 400S, a tiny four-seater of a car with a 2-cylinder, 2-cycle engine which generated 13 HP, with the power of a souped-up lawn mower and a top speed of 80 kph. It cost DM3,780, about $900 in those days. The car sounded like a hoarse and hungry wolf, when it got up to speed. People called it a “Leukoplast-Bomber” even though its body was no longer made from Bakelite, plywood and imitation leather, as the earlier models. Leukoplast was the name of a then-popular form of Band-Aid. This model was the first with a steel body. I sported two rear-hinged doors, a trunk, which, for the first time, could be opened from the outside and, another first, windows that could be cranked open by hand.

My mother didn’t care what people thought of her. To her, the Lloyd was a racecar. She was, what you might call, daring, maybe even reckless, behind the wheel. She passed other traffic on principle and knew only one speed, petal to the metal. She was a good driver, never hit another car, never got a ticket. Of course, this was before speed limits were posted on highways in Germany.

There was one incident my father always brought up when my mother’s driving was discussed. My father hated riding in that car, because he barely fit in. He was too tall and his head was jammed against the roof. But he had never gotten a license to drive, so he had to ride in what he called the death seat next to my mother. This particular incident happened on a winter day on an icy road in northeastern Bavaria. The Lloyd, going full out, failed to negotiate a curve, rolled over and ended up upside down in a snow bank. This was in the days before mandatory seatbelts. Anyway, they were lucky. Nobody got hurt. They climbed out of the car, turned it right side up, popped out the dent in the roof. Got back in and drove off at speed. This car was my mother’s ticket to freedom.

My mother died while I was working for Uncle Sam on the other side of the world and my uncle’s needs prevailed. She died from cancer caused by secondary smoke at age 59. She only got to enjoy life for a short time. Thinking about her still makes me sad, particularly this time of year.

My mother’s birthday is on the 23rd of December. She would be 104 years old this year, if she were still alive. My father, who had a somewhat droll sense of humor, used to give her one shoe for her birthday and the other for Christmas the next day. My mother didn’t think it was funny at all.

My mother has been dead a long time, 45 years, in fact. She and I were close. I was her baby, born when she was 35 years old, ten years after my older brother, an afterthought or an accident. I had a sort of love/hate relationship with her. When I was a kid, my mother was the enforcer in our house. My father wasn’t into punishment. He never touched me, but deferred to her. She had a very fast, vicious and accurate back hand. This went on until I grew too tall for her and she’d have to jump or use a stool to smack me in the mouth. By then I didn’t stand still for that anymore. After that she berated me with sermons on the pratfalls of alcohol and the deadly sin of sloth and how they were going to ruin my life. I didn’t listen. Perhaps I should have.

She could be intimidating. She stood barely 5’and weighed at most 100 pounds. She had a voice that could do a drill sergeant proud. She also had a broken nose, where one of her classmates had whacked her with a medicine ball when she was a teenager. She’d never seen the need to have her nose straightened. When she got angry, you didn’t want to mess with her.

She was my protector. For example, when I had problems in high school my mother stepped front and center. I had asked my teachers, who all had been fervent believers in the man with the funny mustache in their previous incarnations, to explain Auschwitz and Dachau, a taboo subject in those early days after the war. You don’t rock the boat in Germany. Instead of answers I got bad grades. My teachers told my mother that I was not classic education material and would never make it to university. My mother didn’t help matters when she called my teachers Nazi swine and warned them that she would make a major public stink about their past, if her son didn’t graduate.

At least she didn’t kick them in the balls and throw them down the stairs, as she had done with the Reverend Krenkel, our Lutheran minister, who made the mistake of coming to our house to tell my mother that her son would not be confirmed, because I had laced the reverend’s New Testament with sneezing powder during confirmation classes and had embarrassed him in front of his students. My mother made short shrift of the good pastor and threw him bodily down the stairs into the entry hall. She followed him downstairs and asked him if he thought his superiors would appreciate his well-known taste in little girls. Needless to say, I was confirmed on schedule.

I don’t know what it is about this mother-son relationship, but even nearly half a century after her death, I can feel the tug of the umbilical cord. I know that I am who I am because of my mother. She believed in never giving up, in seeing things through to the end, in standing up for what was right and damn the consequences. I can feel her presence. Following her lead was not always easy and I have learned to compromise, something she would never do. But then she wasn’t a salesman like I. Her success or failure wasn’t measured in dollars and cents. She was a mother.

The Cobbler's Coup d'etat or the "Schuster-Putsch"

In 1949, I lived in a village on the extreme eastern edge of what was then called West Germany, in the Rhoen Mountains. It was a dead-end place within walking distance of the “Iron Curtain”, the divide between east and west. This was a fortified border with minefields, machine gun emplacements and armed watchtowers, manned by East German guards with shoot-to-kill orders should anyone try to get too close to the barbed wire. Gunfire from that border was a common, nightly occurrence. It was aimed at desperate people trying to escape to the West. Some made it across, most didn’t. We got used to it. It was like background traffic noises.

About a mile and half east, along the main road out of our village toward the boundary line, lay the little hamlet of Maierhof. The frontier ran along the edge of the fields surrounding this place. A Meier in medieval times was an estate manager or leaseholder, Hof means farmstead. This hamlet belonged to a baron, for whom my father worked as a forest manager. The main buildings of this place used to be part of a fortified farm, one of three this titled gentleman owned. There were no stores of any kind in Maierhof, no pub, only the farm, a smithy, a barbershop and a cobbler’s workshop. The rest of the inhabitants were pensioners, peasants and day laborers, who mostly worked for my father as loggers and handymen. The farm was run by a German refugee, who’d been kicked out of the ethnic German region of the Banat in Romania in 1945.

The barbershop was the main draw in this hamlet. The barber’s name was Willi Albus. He was not a real licensed barber, but had learned his trade in the army and his haircuts showed it, but he had a monopoly. There were no other barbers around. His shop was open only on Saturdays. Herr Albus was on the road Monday to Friday plying his other trade - black marketeering and smuggling. He was a veteran of the recent war and had rescued a German army motorcycle with sidecar, which he used on his scavenger hunts, as he called them. Herr Albus had great organizational skills. He was a man who could get you pretty much anything your heart desired, if you had the cash or something worthwhile to barter.

Once a month, early on a Saturday morning, my father and I would trek to Maierhof to visit the barber. In those days a haircut cost the equivalent of two bits and a brick of coal to help heat the shop. I liked going to the barber, because it was gossip central, even though the haircuts were pretty much below par. Anything and everything that went on in the surrounding villages was discussed in depth. My father usually went under the scissors and hand-held clippers first and then he would visit Albus Sr., who worked for him as a foreman on one of my father’s logging crews.

Once my father was out of the room and I had been sworn to total silence about what was about to be revealed – the villagers feared my father and didn’t want him to know what went on after his departure -, the conversation in the barbershop switched to sex and the barber would open the top drawer in his desk and pass around the latest sex magazines and pictures he had picked up in his weekly travels and he’d let everyone look at – never touch – his collection of “Parisers,” French condoms, which were his pride and joy. He had them in all colors of the rainbow, with and without warts and protuberances, made from vulcanized rubber or sheep gut. We were fascinated. We couldn’t think of anyone who’d possibly use these things. “Nur die Franzosen” - “only the French,” was the common conclusion. They were much too exotic for our remote neck of the woods. It was sort of a glimpse at a totally foreign and forbidden outside world about which we knew next to nothing. Obviously, we were rubes.

These Saturday mornings were for men and boys only. Women were not allowed and when someone’s wife, mother or girlfriend had the audacity to knock on the door and demand entry or, God forbid, barged in unannounced, the barber would tell her in no uncertain terms to leave “our sanctum” at once and get lost. As odd as this may seem today, his rule prevailed. There was no bra-burning in front of the barbershop, no outraged women waving placards or throwing eggs.

On one of those Saturday mornings in the fall of that year, a man named Alfred Bittermann, who lived next door to Herr Albus’ hair-cutting emporium, was part of the barbershop crowd. He was a cobbler and a bitter old man and a bit of a drunk. He was bitter, because until the end of the war he had been the local Nazi party boss in Maierhof. He had been important and he’d got to wear a fancy brown uniform with its swastika armband and he’d had an official title and he could tell people what to do. He told the barber that he was disgusted with his French trash, “Franzosendreck”, he called it, and that in Adolf’s time smut like that would have been burned in the village square and the purveyors of such un-German vulgarities would have been shipped to the Eastern Front forthwith or to the nearest “KZ” (concentration camp) for re-education. Everyone laughed and ignored him.

You may not know this, but titles and uniforms are big in Germany, always were and probably always will be. To give you an idea of how absurd things are over there when it comes to titles, consider this: I have a friend who was a colonel in the Bundeswehr, the new Germany army. His wife, who was not in the army, was and is addressed as Frau Oberst, Mrs. Colonel. If you have a PhD in, say, botany, you are addressed as Herr Doktor and your spouse is Frau Doktor. If you were a department head in your business or with the local government, you were the Herr Direktor and, of course, your wife was the Frau Direktor. It’s that Prussian thing about one’s place on the social ladder and the need to let everyone know that you are better than the next guy.

Now Herr Bittermann was a nobody. His lofty position, his fancy uniform and his fear-inspiring title were gone. To compensate for this loss of status and change in fortune, he’d turned to booze to drown his disappointments and sorrows. He was a tiny man. If he topped five feet he was tall and I doubt that he broke 100 pounds. He also had the disgusting habit of taking snuff up his nose. He didn’t believe in using a handkerchief in purging his schnozz, but used his fingers to empty both nostrils at the same time in a noisy explosion of snot into the coal bucket by the stove. This created a bit of awkwardness, because no one wanted to volunteer to root around in that bucket to feed coal into the stove to keep the place warm. It took an order from the barber, who, of course, was the boss of his little empire there, for someone to gingerly fish a lump of coal out of the bucket and into the stove. Nevertheless, Herr Bittermann was a very good shoemaker. Every year around Christmas, as long as I can remember, my father had him cobble a new pair of boots for him.

Anyway, Herr Bittermann and his son Christof, who was a couple of years older than I, were both into their cups already that Saturday morning. You’re probably wondering how an under-aged teenager could be drunk in public. That was nothing special. In those days there was no minimum drinking age. If you had the cash and were tall enough to reach the counter, you could buy beer in any pub, no questions asked. It’s probably still that way.

The elder Bittermann announced to the assembled patrons that he had enough of this new government in Germany and that he, Alfred Bittermann, former “Ortsleiter” (village leader) of Maierhof, was going to do something about this deplorable situation. He was going to lead a “Staatsstreich,” a coup d’état, against the incompetents who were running things these days to restore the proper order to things “wie zu Adolf’s Zeiten” - as during Adolf’s time. The men laughed at him and told him he was a drunken fool and to go sober up somewhere. This really infuriated the would-be putschist. He staggered to his feet and told one and all: “You are all traitors and should be shot out of hand,” he yelled, as he made for the door. “Tomorrow is the day of reckoning. You watch me.” We laughed and thought no more of it.

Maierhof’s main connection to the outside world was the bus line, operated by the Postal Service, like all bus lines at that time in Germany. The bus stopped twice a day in Maierhof, at 8:00 in the morning and at 6:30 in the evening. The way I heard it, the next morning, a Sunday, Herr Bittermann, dressed in the full Nazi regalia of his former position and armed with a handgun, hijacked the bus, attached a large swastika flag to the front of it and forced the driver, who didn’t know whether he should laugh or be afraid, to drive the bus back and forth through the village and the surrounding farm country along the border. Herr Bittermann, waving his pistol wildly in the air and taking long pulls from a schnapps bottle, exhorted passengers and the gaping villagers and border guards to take up arms and follow him to the county seat to topple the enemies of the people who were running things into the ground these days. He was going to restore proper order in the Reich. Not surprisingly, no one took up his call to arms. No one followed him. Maybe he should have brought a megaphone to spread his message.

The East German VoPos (People’s Police) on the other side of the border didn’t know what to make of this farce and thought it best to get prepared for an attack. Maybe they saw the threat as real. In any case, they set up machine gun and mortar emplacements and their officers were running back and forth yelling out orders. Some among the onlookers on our side got nervous and there was talk of getting their guns out of hiding and prepare for combat. Most farmers in those days had military hardware stashed in their hay piles. I knew one, who had a functioning “Tiger” tank hidden under his hay in his barn. People were looking for our border police. But, of course, there were no border guards on our side of the line. No one was trying to escape to the East, so there was no need for guards. After a while, when the VoPos didn’t see anyone else armed on our side, calm was restored in their ranks and they started digging foxholes and watched the drama play out. Peace prevailed.

In any case, after about an hour of this, the schnapps got the better of him and Herr Bittermann ingloriously passed out in the front of the bus. A gendarme – that’s what the rural policemen were called -, who’d at last made an appearance on his bicycle and had been pedaling in pursuit the bus, disarmed him and tried to arrest him. But how do you arrest a passed-out drunk, if all you’ve got is a bicycle for transport? This cop had obviously been in similar situations before. He got some bystanders to help him lift the unconscious and sagging would-be putschist onto the handlebars of his bike facing backwards, then got on himself, placed the drunk’s head and arms over his shoulders and started zigzagging down the road to the police station in the valley. When last seen, the former Ortsleiter Bittermann was draped over the policeman, with his head and arms dangling over the constable’s back, disappearing down the road.

Nothing much came of the “Schuster-Putsch”, as the local paper called it. After a couple of days, the court released Herr Bittermann from the county jail due to his age and booze-related problems, but without his uniform and shooting iron, which pissed him off to no end. He became known as the “Putschist” and a minor celebrity in Maierhof and surrounding towns and villages. His new found notoriety helped his cobbling business pick up too.