Flights of Fancy

Modes of transportation seemed to captivate the boys’ imaginations. In addition to the Bozo II, Claire designed several impressive pushcarts that he was able to construct thanks to the wheels the boys would scrounge from Fred Hunziker’s automotive shop as well as the provisions they purchased at the local lumberyard. It fell to Freddy and David to not only make the supply runs, but also to come up with the funds for purchasing said supplies. This necessity spawned their clandestine flower business. While father Tony was otherwise occupied, the boys would clip choice specimens of zinnias, gladiolas, and asters from his abundant flower garden and then offer bouquets to various neighbors for a modest price. Any earnings were exchanged for scrap lumber purchased from the neighborhood’s most generous lumberyard proprietor who surely sold the boys far more merchandize than their nickel or dime actually afforded. Once he even gave them a bag of nails, which saved them hours of arduous labor, straightening used ones. One of Claire’s carts even took advantage of the rather impressive spring and summer winds that would blow through the flat lands of South Gate. Attaching a sail to some two-by-fours mounted on wheels, the boys could pick up quite a bit of speed as they sailed down the dusty and almost always empty San Carlos Avenue.

Of all the various modes of transportation that were quickly evolving in the first half of the twentieth century, however, flight was the one that enthralled the boys most completely. Besides building make-believe fuselages in which to experience hours of imaginative flight, they also got the idea to try their hand at actual aeronautics. Having rescued an impressive sheet of thin wood from a packing crate, the boys set about building a frame, which they covered with the plywood, ultimately crafting a wing spanning over six feet. They attached webbing through which a brave pilot could slip his arms and quickly nominated Claire to be that brave pilot. Surveying the various runways available to them, the boys decided upon Freddy’s slope-roofed garage, which was deemed perfect for their initial challenge to gravity’s relentless law. All Claire had to do was take a running leap and surely, like the hapless Icarus before him, he’d soar! And so, with arms stretched under the expanse of wing, Claire ran and then dove head first off the garage, hoping its seven-foot height would give him the time and air space he needed to ascend. It didn’t, and soon his chest and chin plowed through the newly planted grass in the sandy loam below. For their part, Freddy and David were certain that just before he crashed, the audacious aviator was gaining altitude! That said, they were never able to convince Claire to give it another go.

Summer of 1929

Southern California in the mid to late twenties was as good a place as any to grow up in and far better than some. A few weeks before David was born in late August of 1923, then president Warren G. Harding had died suddenly at the young age of fifty-seven of what was presumed to be a heart attack, although the exact cause of death remains a mystery, to the point of possible scandal, to this day. His last public address, made on his “Voyage of Understanding” tour, was to a lukewarm crowd at Husky Stadium on Seattle’s University of Washington campus...David’s would- be alma mater some eighteen years later. Harding’s untimely death in San Francisco left the terse, retiring vice-president Calvin Coolidge at the helm of a prosperous nation, where his laissez-faire approach to government as well as business allowed for the “boom” in the boom and bust cycle of capitalism to prevail. And so it was that Coolidge, with his the chief business of the American people is business approach to leadership, was just barely sworn into an office he had never coveted as David was being born in Everett, Washington. He would reluctantly remain president for the first part of David’s childhood, publicly supporting the biggest controversy of the day – Prohibition – all the while privately opposing it. Young David, for his part, would find much childish humor in the one-liner, “Repeal the Eighteenth Banana,” not quite understanding its societal significance. The glamorous world of the speakeasy and the dramatic rise of organized crime that abounded in places like Chicago in those days dubbed The Roaring Twenties were all beyond young David’s purview and were more than likely not part of his parents’ reality either. While in her later years Marguerite Wolter was known to imbibe on a predictable basis, as a young wife, mother and wage earner in the 1920s she adhered to a strict Christian Science practice, one which her husband came to share as well. Like most converts to a cause, it was Tony who would wax fanatical about his faith, a faith that his sons came to recognize and later reject as cult-like and rigid to the point of irrational. Even so, David recalls that his father would indulge in a beer when they’d go to the horse races in the 1930s, perhaps expressing his German heritage that couldn’t possibly consider beer real alcohol.

By the time David and Freddy Hunziker met and bonded on that dusty road in South Gate, Republican President Herbert Hoover had taken over where Harding and Coolidge had left off, promoting his notion of the Efficiency Movement in the then prevailing Progressive Era, a position that held that a technical solution existed for every and any social and economic concern. This notion was to be severely challenged and ultimately foiled in the face of the Great Depression that loomed less than eight months after Hoover’s inauguration in March of 1929. At age six, David was only tangentially aware of the social and economic stresses that surely added to the strain upon his parents’ already troubled union. Again, it was a clever quip that typified the era for the boy – “Scott Tissue hits bottom…thousands wiped clean!”

The challenges of the period were so pervasive that there seemed an almost noble dignity in the degrees of despair that so many shared as the nation and ultimately the world slid into what surely must have felt like an inexorable decline to the adults who sought to cope with making a living. Young David recalls periodic visits with Mr. Smith, an elderly gentleman friend of his father’s, who resided in what was referred to as a “poor farm” – a kind of communal living arrangement for older citizens who’d lost their retirement savings and were forced to pool their talents, adhering to the concept that a shared burden is a lessened one. Invariably Mr. Smith would present the boy with a dollar – a fairly impressive sum at the time, advising him to invest wisely, which to David’s way of thinking meant ninety-nine cents worth of penny candies! On other darker days David recalls sitting around the family dinner table with his mother and brothers, passing the time, as they awaited their father’s homecoming, in prayer that he might have earned enough that day to supplement the rice their mother had cooked. Still, as is the way with childhood reminiscences, the desperation of the epoch is not what remains when memories are shared. This was a time of concentrated creativity and ingenuity, not only on the part of the adults who made ends meet, but also on the boys who continued to scrounge supplies with which to build dreams.

In that summer of 1929 Claire and his crew of two built a boat which they christened the Bozo II – in honor of Freddy’s bull terrier, but also in recognition of the raw materials supplied by Fred Sr. from his auto shop. The Bozo II was constructed rather expertly from drawings that nine-year-old Claire had made. Its wood frame was covered with canvas donated by father Fred and then painted over several times with more contributions from Hunziker Auto Repair so that, in the end, it was more or less waterproof. Freddy’s amiable mother, Thelma drove the boys and their boat down to the water at Long Beach where they launched the Bozo II on her maiden voyage. Because her hull was basically round, she immediately capsized, but here again, Fred Sr. saved the day by attaching vulcanized inner tubes to Bozo II’s gunnels so that when fully loaded, she would float with the assistance of the car tire tubes. David recalls playing with Freddy, Claire and their boat for over two years in the Long Beach bay created by the horseshoe-shaped pier’s breakwater. It was there, too, that Freddy and David, ages six and seven, learned to dive and swim after a fashion. They’d craft kick boards out of pine and spend the day, or as much of it as an impressively tolerant Thelma would donate, thoroughly engrossed in water play. Thus began David’s love affair with swimming, one that he pursues to this very day with his frequent plunges into Lake Washington’s waters, often in the company of several generations.

Chicken Little

The early summer of 1929 found David playing in the pit gravel road in front of his house, inventing a game he called “Chicken Little” involving those ever-popular dirt clods that little boys can’t seem to resist, vertical tosses and a sky that was perpetually falling. There he was joined one day by a smaller boy with dark hair and a tanned complexion, a boy destined to become the little brother and best friend David had yet to realize he wanted or needed. Freddy Hunziker, the beloved only son of Fred Sr. and Thelma Hunziker, had moved into the newly completed rental house that old man Martin had recently built in the lot directly across from the Wolter family on San Carlos Avenue. Fred Sr., a jack of all things mechanical, moved his small family from the Boulder, Colorado area in order to open his garage on LA’s Hope Street – an aptly named location for what would become a going concern, specializing in the then popular Reo car line. In addition, he was an accomplished pilot and had an interest in a fixed base operation –a flying school at Mines Field, now Los Angeles International Airport.

And so it was that David met his childhood compatriot Freddy. Just as Tom Sawyer enticed onlookers to help him whitewash his Aunt Polly’s fence, David attracted Freddy, almost exactly one year his junior, with his “Chicken Little” reenactment. The boys hurled clods of dirt high into the air and then ran away yelling, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” Neither at that early point in time had any premonition of how, less than a decade and a half later, the sky would really fall – or more accurately – how they would both fall from it. Eventually tiring of this sport - but not before they were thoroughly covered in clod fragments and dirt dust, they sat down on the curb to become acquainted. Soon-to-be-six year old David told soon-to-be-five year old Freddy all about his older brothers, Gene and Claire and described his menagerie of pets headed up by Terry the wonder dog. This prompted Freddy to introduce his beloved Bozo, a bull terrier who soon, along with Terry, became indispensable in the boys’ shared world of make-believe.

That first summer cemented David and Freddy’s friendship as they pooled their imaginations to create any number of hair-raising, high stakes adventures. Terry and Bozo played pivotal roles in several of the scenarios. Harnessed to the handle of the wagon, they became the beasts of burden that pulled the supplies through treacherous terrain, right up until the moment they tired of such servitude and ran off to greener pastures or at least more neutral turf. Then they became the sharp-eyed, sharp-eared hunting dogs in the darkest jungles of Africa, as David and Freddy pursued the ever-elusive ape man of Saturday matinee fame – the humanoid the boys dubbed the “Ah-ooh Man” after his distinctive vocalizations that they mimicked in hopes of luring him with their guile and then immobilizing him with their spears made from sturdy weed stalks.

The sandy loam earth of South Gate made the digging of countless tunnels and caves almost effortless, while the maintaining of tunnel roofs and cave walls proved predictably problematic. The engineering skills of older brother Claire came in very handy as he showed the younger boys how to shore up walls with firewood and lay scrap planks across the top of their hand dug ditches for ceilings. Soon enough the boys became willing lackeys for Claire, playing brawn to the older boy’s brains. As Claire envisioned and then constructed any number of amazing contraptions, David and Freddy would pull the nails from old apple crates and then carefully pound them straight for Claire’s reuse. In this manner, Claire constructed a rather intricate airplane for the boys in the Wolter’s front yard, with wings made from Marguerite’s ironing board and a fuselage formed from the rescued fruit crates. David and Freddy, alternating between pilot and co-pilot, spent many an afternoon recreating the exciting aeronautical feats of their hero, Charles Lindbergh, as well as masterminding a few of their own that surely rivaled “Lucky Lindy’s” solo transatlantic flight of 1927. Sixty-three years later on a visit to Salesches, France – the country that had welcomed Lindbergh fifty-nine years earlier, David would introduce his grandson and Freddy’s namesake to the thrill of make-believe flight using lawn chair cushions as impromptu wings and inviting Madame Berthe Lefebvre on board to form an international crew.

Accurate Aim

Raised with two older brothers and a somewhat shy and perpetually busy mother, David had no ready access to or advanced understanding of issues of gender difference. Unlike my own third child, Freddy, born knowing more than he might ever have wanted to about girls, thanks to his two older sisters, little David was awash in ignorance and misconceptions when it came to the opposite sex. Once playing naked in the sprinkler with a young neighbor girl, David was shocked to see that she’d lost her penis. He recalled feeling quite sorry for her until his mother Marguerite succinctly informed him that girls neither had nor required such appendages. Later, in discussing the family’s pet yellow canary with his mother, he alluded to the bird’s feminine gender.
“What makes you think that Peetie’s a girl, David?”
“Because she’s got no ears…girls don’t have ears.”
David was again shocked when his mother gently drew back her hair and showed him her ears! Who knows? Perhaps these early forays into gynecological attributes set the stage for future professional pursuits.


My most favorite story dating from this era, however, has to do with a five-year-old boy, a rock, a windshield and a sailor suit. San Carlos Avenue, in the days around 1928, was in a state of near constant repair. As crews with horse-drawn steamrollers worked to repave the street after laying sewage pipes, the area in front of the Wolter’s bungalow amounted to temporary rubble, which provided David with ample inventory in the form of loose rocks with which to practice throwing. He was getting quite good at it when one of the few cars that ever passed that way happened by. “Wouldn’t it be fun to throw a rock and hit that car?” David thought without a hint of foresight. Sure enough, his practice paid off as his missile landed squarely on the hood of the car, bouncing into the windshield with a disquieting crash. As the startled driver got out to survey the damage and pursue the perpetrator, David took off running down the hedge between his house and the lot next door, entering the residence through the back porch. It’s debatable whether criminal minds are born or made, but his next move seemed to suggest the former. David hot-tailed it into the family’s bedroom where he found a pile of freshly folded laundry. Quickly casting off the blue homemade sailor suit he was wearing and kicking it under the bed, he donned a clean white one, just in time to hear a persistent knock on the front door. As he fiddled with the last button, he heard a man’s voice address his mother at the other end of their small house. David shyly sidled up to his mother’s skirts in time to hear her say, “Well, that could have been my little boy…what did he look like?” The man, who hadn’t gotten a good look at the culprit, returned, “He had on a blue suit.” Looking down at her angelic son as he figuratively polished his halo, Marguerite intoned, “This is my little boy…”

“No, he didn’t have on a white suit…I’m sure it was blue.”

David found himself flooded with an unsettling mixture of guilt and relief, as the perplexed man turned and left, and his mother returned to her sewing.

Sixty-five years later his own grandson, at a similar age, would commit a similar crime, throwing dirt clods through a neighbor’s trailer window. Freddy would not be as cunning in his own defense however and would suffer the consequences of an accurate aim, consequences that his grandfather had cleverly avoided.

California Here We Come...

Upon their arrival in Southern California in 1924, Tony established his young family in a small, one bedroom house on San Carlos Avenue in what would become South Gate, a dusty little burg which an adult David described as “a poverty-stricken gulch,” years later to be swallowed up by Los Angeles’ urban sprawl. There the Wolter boys set about the business of growing up.


Young David’s preschool days were spent playing with various pets in and around the family’s goat barn. Long since vacated by the goats, this ramshackle structure lent temporary shelter to any number of stray animals, which David would nurse back to health, foreshadowing his future as a physician. A lucky Airedale, found starving and neglected, made such an impressive recovery that Mac, the milkman, offered it a home on his dairy farm down the street. It was only fitting that he should get first dibs on the dog, for it was his leftover milk products that had fattened up the patient. Later a less fortunate hound, found abandoned in rubble from the 1933 earthquake, made a more modest recovery. It would drag its paralyzed hindquarter out to the street, waiting in vain for its family to retrieve it, and was finally given away.

As David waited for his older brother, Claire, twenty-two months his senior, to return from first grade and guide him in more structured pursuits, he allowed his lively imagination to run free and carry him where it would lead. The front porch easily transformed into an ocean pier much like the one down the way at Long Beach. From it, little David would fish for the family’s pet terrier, aptly if not a bit unimaginatively named Terry. A bamboo rod with string and an alluring rag attached proved tempting bait, which Terry took each and every time it was cast his way. Fighting like the sword fish he became in David’s imagination, he’d alternately shake and pull the pole, putting up a valiant struggle that ended only when the rig would unravel or something more interesting would catch his canine fancy.

The ocean loomed large in David’s fantasies. One day as he played with his tin boat and bits of wood in an impressive puddle left by spring rains, he became completely engrossed in the idea of boats on the ocean, so much so that when brother Claire came home from school, David convinced him that he had been to said ocean and had seen said boats. What’s more, he was confident that he could easily show Claire the way, and so off they went, with a neighbor’s toddler in tow. The blocks of Long Beach Boulevard added up as David regaled Claire with tales of playful sailboats dodging in and out among more business-like steamers. Finally when they found themselves at the Four Square Gospel Church, easily three quarters of a mile from home, Claire grew both suspicious and weary. By now David was waking up from his reverie as well, and while he never quite admitted that he was dreaming, he did admit that they might be lost! Their toddler friend could not manage another independent step and so, to add insult to injury, big brother Claire had to give him a piggyback ride as they retraced their wayward tracks.

That tin boat got little David in even more trouble – trouble of an almost fatal variety. On a Saturday afternoon in summer the family took one of its fairly frequent trips to the ocean…for real this time. They stopped at a favorite beach, some six miles south of Long Beach, where the surf was modified by man-made breakwaters composed of large rocks. David was thoroughly engrossed with his painted tin boat, marveling at its ability to stay upright as it bravely rode the small waves created by the surf’s action against the rocks. As tin boats are wont to do, the sturdy craft floated beyond its owner’s reach, so David waded in a bit to retrieve it when suddenly all around him glistened a bright blue. He’d happened into the surf just as a wave pulled him down and through a tunnel under the breakwater, a passageway probably created by one of the many large seals that called that part of the California coast home. In David’s memory, some eighty years later, the mesmerizing azure water was, soon enough, replaced by a circle of bare legs spinning around him. Picnickers on the other side of the breakwater had spotted him floating feet first and fished him out. Resuscitation measures mercifully revived the child, and he was left with nothing more than a vivid memory and a wicked thirst that even the sulfur water from the fountains at Bigsby Park – usually deemed too foul to drink – couldn’t quench.

Picnics often proved perilous for preschool David. On another occasion the family had gone on a Sunday afternoon adventure to the Santa Ana Canyon, a sandy terrain with little streams winding through forests and Eucalyptus trees. Gene and Claire had established themselves down by a riverbank and were busily doing whatever it is that boys do on the banks of a river. Three year old David was making his way from the parked car to his brothers, skipping along in his unbuckled sandals, practicing his newly acquired recitation skills: Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water… (Hmmm…What does ‘fetch’ mean I wonder?) And…Little Jack Horner sat in the corner…when suddenly he realized that he was not with the others. Rather he was in what could only be called the forest! In fact, he was lost! Soon enough he began to cry as he climbed over fallen logs and followed nondescript paths that led him deeper into his escalating despair. His unbuckled sandals soon came off and had to be carried along as little David roamed rudderless through the woods. After several hours – an eternity when you’re shoeless and lost – David could hear the voices of the posse that had formed to find him. Of course he didn’t have the sense to simply sit down and stay put, so they had to happen upon him as he wandered. His worried father Tony, among the group that finally found the boy, happily scooped his youngest son up in his arms, awash with relief. Eighty-two years later, David recalled feeling quite the hero! After all, he must be of “some importance” to have caused such an organized stir!

Yet another family picnic ended rather poorly for the four-year-old boy. The Wolter family was often joined by their friends, the Frolings, for picnic dinners at a nearby park. As the adults set up a rather elaborate spread, the older kids began a game of baseball. David, too young to play, was also too young to pay good attention. At a most inopportune moment he chose to dash across the playing field…home plate to be exact. As the older Froling boy swung, David placed himself in harm’s way – so much so that the bat hit him on one side of his head, while the ball hit him on the other! The picnic was over for the Wolter family who rushed an injured David a few blocks down to the local doctor’s house where he and his white-clad nurse administered an ether drip and sewed up David’s lacerated mouth. He bears the telltale scar to this day and still cannot tolerate drinking through straws, the result of weeks of sucking all nourishment through glass straws with fruit decorations on the end – a weak attempt to make them seem something more than tedious.

That emergency trip to the doctors marked little David however. Not only was he enthralled by the kind and pretty nurse in her crisp white uniform, but he also was taken with the procedures he’d experienced: the ether mask, the counting backwards, the tender stitches in his mouth and on his lip that his tentative tongue discovered and explored upon waking. Once home he led his brothers in a game of doctor in the hut they’d constructed out of firewood by the goat barn. Perhaps there is something to be said for the preliminary life skills practiced in children’s play. While a four-year-old David played at being a doctor, thirty years later I would pretend to be a librarian, marking the bindings of all my books and placing them in alphabetical order. Come to think of it, I still play librarian with the thousands of titles I’ve collected and scattered over several continents. David, for his part, retired after over forty years of playing physician and is still consulted on medical matters by family and friends to this day.

Grandpa Tony

If I knew my Grandma Marguerite but little, I knew my Grandpa Tony even less. I met him only once in 1963 when he came to visit my family for a short stay during our tour of duty at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. Until then and even afterwards, I could hearken back to only a few “over-heards” rather than any substantial stories about him. I knew that he had been divorced from my grandmother when my father was in his early teens and that as a devout, even fanatical, Christian Scientist, he eschewed modern medicine in general and disapproved of my father’s chosen profession in particular. It had even been suggested that Dad had been disowned by his father, but that claim was surely an exaggeration for I’ve come to understand that a parent needs to have a certain amount of assets in order to effectively disown an offspring. To his dying day, my grandfather Tony had nothing much to pass on, much less withhold. That said, he was better off in his later years, mainly because he went to work for the first time in his life, employed by his oldest son Gene in his successful tool and supply company.

Several vignettes of my grandfather’s one-and-only visit stand out in my memory now forty-five years later. For dessert after our first dinner together my mother offered everyone a bowl of vanilla ice cream. Grandpa Tony and I were the only takers, as I recall. He quickly finished his and then looked on as I methodically shaped, sculpted and scooped mine, taking my time as I savored my favorite flavor. All at once he pointed over my shoulder and called out, “What’s that?” I turned quickly to look in the direction he indicated and then turned back just in time to see him take the last spoonful of my ice cream, sliding it gleefully into his grinning mouth. I responded with a mixture of shock and pleasure…shock that he would be so forward when he’d only just met me and pleasure at being taught such an amusing ploy that I would perpetrate repeatedly on others in years to come.

After dinner my dad, Grandpa Tony and I took a stroll around the housing area comprised of carbon copy officers’ quarters. I say “Grandpa Tony” now, but at the time I was careful to call him just “Tony.” Even before he’d stolen my ice cream, he’d surreptitiously paid me a dollar to drop the Grandpa and refer to him merely as Tony. Knowing that such familiarity would not fly with my folks, I assiduously avoided calling him anything at all. As we approached a corner expanse of lawn, Tony suddenly requested, “Let me see you run!” When I did so, proud of my natural ten-year-old athleticism, he proceeded to give me about eight different pointers on how to improve my gait: where to place and how to push off with my feet, how high to raise my knees with each stride, what to do with my arms, how to hold my head…I recall glancing at my father just in time to see him close his eyes and shake his head almost imperceptibly. Needless to say, I could barely walk much less run, as I tried to implement all of Tony’s helpful hints.

During the day while Dad was at work in his clinic, it fell to Mom and me to entertain Tony. My three years of single-minded supplications had finally paid off that summer when my parents agreed to buy me a horse, which I boarded at the base stables. At my dad’s suggestion, we readily engaged Tony’s expertise as we sought to build a shelter in a barren pasture so that my jet-black gelding could escape the hot summer sun of south Texas. Thrilled to have not one but two able adults working on my behalf, I was completely unaware of how close my grandfather came to meeting my vivacious mother’s dark alter-ego. Later that night I could only catch snippets of the mostly muffled tirade sifting past my parents’ closed bedroom door…phrases like hard-headed German and pompous ass made no sense then, but cause me to chuckle now.

It was during that visit as well that I was taught the first German I ever learned. Knowing that my family and I would soon rotate – the military term for relocate – to Wiesbaden, Germany for a tour of duty, my grandfather took it upon himself to introduce me to the German language. Ich und Du, Müller's Kuh, Beckel's Esel…der bist Du! (I and you, Miller’s cow, Beckel’s ass…that’s YOU!) At first he refused to translate for me, but then thought better of it when he imagined me repeating his little rhyme to an actual German in the near future! Just as I regret never learning to sew, I also lament never having had the occasion to actually converse with my grandfather in his native language. Before I could return to the United States with my newfound fluency, he would be dead.

Grandma Marguerite

By the time my father, David Frank Wolter, was born in late August of 1923, his mother Marguerite was certainly aware that her life would not be an easy one. Raised in a distinctly feminine household with a younger sister, a dominant if not domineering mother, and a self-effacing father, her adult life would see her surrounded by males. In 1917 she married Anton Ernst “Tony” Wolter, a Gold Bar, Washington grocery store proprietor eight years her senior, and was destined to become the young mother of three active sons. Gene, born in 1918, was followed predictably by Claire in 1921, followed inevitably by David in ’23. My grandfather Tony had been raised in a German Baptist colony in North Dakota and grew fluent in English only after managing to escape what he termed the “hardships” that constituted farming life in such a stark and unforgiving environment. To his dying day he spoke with a hint of a German accent and stayed as far away from manual labor and cold climates as he could reasonably justify. Under Father’s Occupation on David’s birth certificate stands the vaguely pretentious notation Inventor, and indeed, at the time of his youngest son’s birth, Tony might have almost substantiated that grandiose claim. In his spare time, when he wasn’t at work in the Everett, Washington shipyards, he had invented and patented an oil cap that he sold to the Ford Motor Company for ten thousand dollars, an impressive amount of money in those days. This event prompted him to uproot his young family and relocate to what was then the west coast’s epicenter of all things innovative: Southern California.

Children require very little to survive and even thrive, which is a good thing, for natural tendencies and socio-economic circumstances converged to insure that Tony would never manage to make much of himself or realize the promise hinted at by this early financial windfall. To label him a ne’er-do-well would be, at once, unkind and accurate.
Thus it was that my grandmother Marguerite found herself, through no conscious choice or empowered desire of her own, thrust into the position of primary breadwinner for the family. She’d inherited a talent for needlework from her mother Pearl who had surely practiced and perfected various decorative cross stitches as she and her family laboriously made their way west from Springfield, Missouri in a covered wagon. Pearl’s father, Jonas Heltzel, a rather austere-looking man with an imposing beard that hid from the photographer’s lens any semblance of warmth or humor, had spent much of his active duty with the Indiana Cavalry interned in Andersonville, the infamous Civil War prison, which he claimed to have survived thanks to the advantageous size of his German farmer’s hands. As he told his youngest grandson David many years later, he’d receive a ration of cornmeal in one hand and sugar in another, and because of their relatively large size, he made it. Ironically, David would inherit his great-grandfather Jonas’ hand size, which would ultimately prove more of a hindrance than a help as he sought to find surgical gloves to fit over his stout fingers.

I remember hearing much made of my Grandma Marguerite’s prowess as a seamstress. She later metamorphosed into a successful professional tailor with her own rather swank shop, employing a busy bank of seamstresses on Seattle’s upscale Fifth Avenue. It was even rumored that she was one of the first women admitted to the American Tailor’s Union, and she boasted a discrete list of celebrities among her loyal clients. Names like Anne Southern and Frances Farmer were hinted at, but impossible to confirm. As a child I would sometimes visit her shop as my family passed through Seattle in route to or from one of our many military assignments. I have recollections of overstuffed mohair couches in which clients would luxuriate as they waited to be measured or fitted, often served coffee by Bill Graef - the second of Marguerite’s ne’er-do-well husbands. A consummate business woman by necessity if not by nature, my grandmother would deftly run a yellow cloth tape measure down the back and around the middle of a client, as I watched and marveled at her almost magical ability to envision sartorial masterpieces.

But she didn’t start out this way. Rather Marguerite paid her dues, along with her family’s bills, as an apprentice to two Jewish tailors in the Los Angeles area – one Mr. Klein and then Florenz, the proprietor of a pleating and button business. Throughout the Depression years, these men kept her steadily employed and effectively taught her everything she knew.

As I think back on her now, I find myself regretting that I didn’t make more of an effort to get to know my Grandma Marguerite better. Nothing about her encouraged much inquisitiveness on my part, which I now recognize as much more my failing than hers. In my immediate world, populated by “Type A” people, Marguerite was most definitely a “Type C,” if there is such a thing. When I’d visit her periodically as a child, she came across as calm and unflappable, almost to the point of disinterested. Slowly inhaling one of her long Salems, she’d look at me with one eye partially closed in response to the smoke column that lazily rose from her cigarette’s tip, a vague, almost enigmatic smile on her lips that caused me to wonder if she was actually listening to my exuberant chatter. The most animated I ever saw her was in response to a spur-of-the-moment prank I played on her – pretending she’d slammed my fingers in the car door when she shut it. Once she was convinced that no physical harm was done, however, she quickly resumed her emotional inertia, leaving it to my mortified mother to roundly reprimand me for perpetrating such a wicked ruse.

In 1970 my father retired from his military career and went into private practice on Mercer Island, Washington, which finally afforded me a greater opportunity to get to know my grandmother better. Still I didn’t move in that direction until a dream suggested that Grandma Marguerite might have something to offer me. I had a favorite pair of dress slacks that fit perfectly and made me feel particularly good whenever I wore them. One night I dreamt that I had a pair of these pants in every imaginable color. Upon waking, it occurred to me that my grandmother, now a retired tailor and a widow to boot, had both the time and the talent to help me realize that dream. Rather than blatantly request that she offer me her services, I slyly suggested that I’d really like to learn to sew…slacks, in fact! Her phlegmatic response was neither encouraging nor discouraging. “Bring your pants over and we’ll see what we can do.”

Thus began a series of weekly trips to West Seattle where Marguerite did, indeed, oversee my initial forays into the garment industry. Much as I had as a child, I marveled at her ability to look at a piece of clothing and then recreate it without a pattern or even much measuring. She taught me to make a “sham” – the first time I’d heard this word mean anything other than fraud or charlatan – basically a muslin “mock up” of the item to be created, which would then be fitted, formed and refashioned if need be, later to serve as the prototype for my slacks. I drove her to the local fabric store where she helped me select suitable material for my array of trousers – black, maroon, beige and brown to complement the original navy blue pair. Once back at her place, she explained how it was always more efficient to make two of anything, a logic which fit my purposes perfectly. She then proceeded to make one pair of pants while I made the other, patiently instructing me at every step. She allowed me to learn on her ancient-looking, industrial Singer sewing machine, a relic from her Fifth Avenue shop. I was in awe of its ability to unhurriedly sew at a relaxed pace that allowed me to anticipate each hesitant stitch into being and soon enough, my confidence grew along with my wardrobe. As I think back on it now, I realize that Grandma Marguerite was a talented teacher, inherently knowing that the only true way to teach something is to create an environment in which the learner can experiment and experience without undue repercussions. She also introduced me to a handy little tool that readily removed errant stitches and imagined with me how many wayward threads she had cut in her seventy years of sewing.

Each sewing session ended with lunch at her kitchen table, a lunch that I more often than not had to choke down, my stomach turned by the ubiquitous black dog hairs that made their way into everything she prepared. Her beloved black Cocker Spaniel – Beauregard, “Beau” for short, was hands down the most unruly, obnoxious dog I’d ever known. My father was convinced that he was brain-damaged and only found it mildly amusing when I referred to the pedigreed pooch as “Uncle Beau” – so complete was Grandma Marguerite’s love and approbation for her pampered pet. Once when she rose to retrieve something from the counter, Beau took it as his cue to leap up on her chair and slobber all over her lunch before I could chastise him. “Oh that’s alright...” she opined, and then proceeded to tell me that a dog’s mouth is actually far cleaner than a human’s. Yuck.

Marguerite’s lifelong love for animals served as a segue into one of the very few stories she did share about my father’s childhood. She described a favorite incident that never failed to amuse her in the several times she told it to me as her memory began to falter. One day little David decided to give the family’s white angora cat a bath. Forcing it into a soapy sink, he was horrified to see its size shrink under the influence of the suds. In an effort to quickly dry the poor animal and return it to its original condition, David held it over the gas heater, a procedure that seemed to work fine until, in what seemed but a moment, the cat went from damp, to dry, to scorched. Responding to the commotion, mother Marguerite found a whimpering David sprawled on the kitchen floor, still gripping a most disgruntled, brown-singed cat. Seeking to soothe her stricken son, Marguerite consoled, “It’s OK David, her fur will grow back…” Tearfully David stuttered, “W…w…will it grow back before Daddy gets home?”

Sad to say, those few sewing sessions were the only occasions that afforded me any one-on-one, quality time with my grandmother Marguerite. I was a self-absorbed, college-bound teenager, and she was a quietly independent woman who had never seemed to request or require my attention, so I allowed our budding connection to whither without even realizing it. I also never sewed another stitch, thus missing out on both accounts. By the time I slowed down enough to even remember that I had a paternal grandmother, she had already lost her mental faculties, so much so that on one visit to her rest home with Dad, she introduced me to her son, the doctor.

My seventh grade math teacher, Mr. Stokes, suggested something that comes to me now as I reflect on Grandma Marguerite. On one of the many occasions when we predictably got him off-track, he mused about the great loss our country was incurring through the countless casualties in the then raging Vietnam War. He likened each soldier’s skills, knowledge and ability to a card catalog of experiences that necessarily died with the individual. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could will your life’s card catalog to someone so that it could continue on after you?” Marguerite’s card catalogue would have extended far beyond couture. It would have included tutorials on quiet patience and long-suffering perseverance. It might have revealed her recipe for raising rambunctious boys into responsible young men who picked up the slack created by her dreamer of a husband’s inability to test reality. Perhaps it would have explained her live and let live approach to everyone and everything that crossed her path in her eighty-nine years, an approach that was often read, and perhaps even misread, as nonplussed, I fear. It surely would have revealed riches that only she was privy to and I can only guess at so many years later now.

Twice Told Tales

Time is not a line, but a series of now-points. (Taisen Deshimaru)

I’ve heard it said that we are the stories we tell, and while I sense a deep truth in those words, in that thought, I also wonder if there might not be more to it…more to us. Could it be that, in addition to the stories we tell, we are also made up of the stories that are told to us? Much like the DNA our parents pass on, the stories they tell us surely must amount to something more than mere musings – more than simple comparisons of their lives to ours. How really can you know yourself, if indeed that is your goal, without knowing something about where you come from…about whom you come from?
For whatever reason, such inner exploration has always seemed vital to me, and thus I have listened intently whenever an elder…any elder…but most especially my elders have shared their stories with me. In this manner, I have grown to know them more fully and through striving to know them, I have met myself. Again and again and again.

I recall a fall evening in Anchorage, Alaska - close to fifty years ago now - when, as a child of seven, I begged my father to tell me a story before seeing me off to sleep. Tired from what surely must have been long hours “on duty” as a young obstetrician and gynecologist in a busy military hospital, he sat down on the edge of my lower bunk bed and began. “Once when I was a little girl…” More alert than he, I immediately caught his error and exclaimed, “Daddy! You were never a little girl!” We both laughed at his absurd blunder as he continued on with his tale, surely eager to see himself enjoying the slumber that he sought to coax me into embracing. So many years later now I don’t recall the story that followed, but I vividly recall the imaginative leap that those words of his – misguided as they might have been – encouraged in me. In the days that followed I told anyone and everyone who would listen about how my dad had started his story with Once when I was a little girl… reveling in the absurdity of such gender-bending as I enjoyed sharing what felt like a good joke. Now, looking back fifty years later, I’m not so sure. I’m not so sure that it was as much a joke as a subtle, ‘nigh incomprehensible truth.

Wasn’t it Blaise Pascal who mused, Le coeur a ses raisons, que la Raison ne connait pas…The heart has its reasons that Reason does not understand? With those weary words, perhaps my father was unconsciously sharing something beyond a passable bedtime story. Perhaps he was addressing a deeper reality that speaks of connection beyond reason, a connection of the heart. Perhaps he was inadvertently inviting me to join him at that intuitive place…in that psychic space where his reality meets and melds with mine. It’s an invitation my father has generously offered and I have gratefully accepted repeatedly over the fifty-five years we’ve shared on this planet, in this lifetime. I have been graced with my father’s stories – stories that have somehow become my own, not only through the retelling but also through the receiving. My father’s stories have become so much a part of me that I have reached a point where I can now say, “Once when I was a little boy…” and almost mean it. Permit me now to share a few with you…

Who taught time to fly?

I’ve been rather remiss with my blog entries, I fear…mainly because I’m so busy REALLY writing! Yes…I have begun…and it’s about time! While I’m only about five single-spaced pages into my project (not counting the photos I’ve embedded) I am completely engrossed in the process. I find that my creative energies resemble a vessel that’s full until I slowly drain it…then I must wait until it magically refills again. Because I’m not merely making up my story (but rather seeking to remain as faithful as possible to the facts), I spend quite a bit of time reviewing the four hundred plus pages of transcriptions from the interviews I’ve conducted over the past thirty-five years. That then gets me proofing those pages for the ubiquitous typos, crafting spreadsheets of dates/names/places…all time-consuming distractions that effectively keep me from more original writing!

In between spurts of productivity, I ride my bike all over the beautiful Bavarian hinterlands or take walks down to the Lech River. The weather is typical for this region. In any given day we’ll have bright sunshine with the accompanying Bavarian blue skies, wind, rain and even hail…and of course, the famous thunder and lightening storms that are all part of living in the shadow of the Alps.

I make it a point to visit a bit with my German neighbors – um mein Deutsch zu üben! Interestingly enough, even though I’m mainly speaking with myself on any given day, I find that I tend to think in German as I putz about. (yet another German word...from the verb “putzen” – to clean, though I haven’t done much of that!!) My neighbors – the two Annies, Hubert and Meta, Frau Reid and the rest of them – allow me much leeway and never interrupt me, yet are always very friendly and inviting when I venture out.

In the evenings I’ve been watching segments of Ken Burn’s series, “The War” on my Mac computer…and I would HIGHLY recommend it (both the series AND my MacBook Pro!) He has created a six DVD documentary that truly personalizes this dramatic era. His recreation of the 8th Air Force’s campaign against Nazi Germany has the ability to make me feel some of the claustrophobia and panic that surely accompanied those missions. I marvel at my young B-17 copilot father – only twenty years old in 1944 (as evidenced in the photo above) – and his crew’s ability to stay calm under the relentless pressure of anti-aircraft flak exploding on all sides of them as well as the persistent pursuit of Folke-Wulfs and Messerschmitts (German fighters), which sought to knock them out of the sky…and eventually did!

So yeh…I’ve been busy! Speaking of which, I’d better get back to it…Auf Wiedersehen bis später!

Mittwoch...Gewitter!

I've had a bit of an odd/off day for no other reason than I've had a terrible case of the "drowsies" from about 10 a.m. on! It was a lovely morning, so I walked down to the Lech River around 6 a.m. ( jet lag makes me feel virtuous!) and sat there for a time...just being.  I even beat the morning fishermen who arrived as I mused at the water's edge!  Then I came home to breakfast and some journaling out on the porch.  The sun burnt the morning clouds away and it was so lovely that I couldn't justify sitting inside in front of my computer - rather I took my book (a poorly written and even worse edited WW2 first person account of the 8th Air Force) and sprawled out on the chaise longue, moving from time to time to avoid direct sunlight.  My immediate neighbor, Frau Ried and I connected...leaving only Annie Epple for me to stumble upon.  (I have two Annies as neighbors - I call them my stereo Annies - one in front and one in back!)  A phone call from Dirk Dyckerhoff telling me that he'll visit me here from August 6th through 8th brought me back inside, after which I flopped on the couch to watch "Father Returns to Auschwitz" and the beginning of "Shoah" before I realized just how sleepy I was.  I fought it for a time and then thought, "Whatever!  I'm going to take a nap!"  Two and a half hours later, I was back at work on my "Center Compound History" (from Stalag Luft III) transcription...I added about twelve pages to my growing document.  I'd thought to take an evening bike ride as the day was so lovely, but about 6:30 p.m. the skies darkened and one of those famous Bavarian weather fronts rolled in - spawned I'm sure by our proximity to the Alps.  Thunder, lightening, wind, dramatic hail followed quickly by buckets of rain insured that I was in for the night!  On any typical day here one can experience a wide array of weather...making Carpe Diem an immediate necessity rather than an idle suggestion!

Early Morning Bike Ride!

The rosy skies of a sunny Bavarian dawn literally lured me out of bed this morning and onto my trusty “robust” bike for my hour ride over hill and dale, through the neighboring countryside. How virtuous I felt, breakfasting out on the patio before 7 am – with an hour’s ride behind me! Along the way I encountered the usual activity – the occasional early commuter zipping down the country roads and a troupe of cows changing pastures. I filmed one reluctant bovine matron who found me as curious as I found her amusing! I’m sure her care-giver, who can be heard calling, “Komm! Komm!” was mildly exasperated with the two of us!

Once home, I jumped right into my work…the transcribing of some four hundred pages of the original “Center Compound History” from Stalag Luft III. It was one of several priceless finds that I stumbled upon during my research at the U.S. Air Force Academy’s Clarke Special Collections. While the word-for-word transcription is a bit on the laborious side, it’s an invaluable way to retrace the activities and familiarize myself with the camp routine and nature. Also, it’s a valid…if not creative avoidance…from the task of this summer: to begin writing!

[Note:  I'd wanted to add several photos and even a short movie of said cow, but I'm finding that the time to upload on our archaic dial-up internet connection isn't worth the bother...so I'll add the visuals once I'm back to the land of wifi in mid-August!]

Ich bin angekommen! (I have arrived!)

As I sit on the evening of my first full day back in “Middle-of-Nowhere, Bavaria”…aka Apfeldorfhausen…my twenty hour trek to get here is quickly becoming a distant memory. My two flights – Seattle to Atlanta and then Atlanta directly to Munich – were uneventful – which is a good thing! After retrieving my two large suitcases in the Munich airport, I proceeded to “P7/Ebene3” where it was rumored that our trusty Volvo station wagon would be waiting for me. I found it right where Darcy and Bill had left it after their March visit, and then proceeded to cross the next hurdle: trying to start the engine after three months sitting idle. The Volvo has a slight battery drain which we haven’t been able to locate…usually we disconnect the battery when the car’s going to sit for any period of time. David had forgotten to alert “the kids” to this procedure, so I was fully expecting to have to try to jump-start the car or if need be, yell “Hilfe, hilfe!” to the airport’s support staff! Mercifully however, there was just enough juice to enliven a momentarily sluggish engine, and so after paying the 210 Euro fee for three months’ parking, I was on my way down Autobahn 96, direction Lindau!!

I found the house in good order...thanks to friend and “groundskeeper” Wolfgang who stays here and maintains the place when we’re away. I forced myself to unpack my two suitcases before succumbing to the need to nap and then made sure that I rose after only a couple of hours, so as to adjust to the time change sooner rather than later.

I took delight in greeting my Bavarian neighbors: Annie, Christian, Meta, Hubert…and called good friend Adelheid (Wolfgang’s Austrian mother) with whom I’ll get together on a regular visit during my six week stay to continue our English lessons…with some German practice for me thrown in!

To pass the time until it was reasonable to turn in, I flopped on our couch and finally was able to watch Tom Brokaw’s “The Greatest Generation” – a documentary presenting the lives of several World War II veterans – detailing how they’d been forever marked by their war experiences and analyzing how that affected the raising of their families and influenced their world views as well as life choices. As I watched, an amazing coincidence presented itself. On the flight from Seattle to Atlanta I’d observed an elderly gentleman making his way down the aisle. What struck me about him was the light blue ribbon with a distinctive medal attached to it that he wore high under his necktie’s knot. I don’t think I ever would have thought of it again had not I watched “The Greatest Generation” later that very same LONG day! About midway through the program, Tom introduced one Robert E. Bush, a Congressional Medal of Honor recipient from South Bend, Washington…and SURE ENOUGH…there stood the self-same man I’d encountered on my flight earlier that day! What are the chances?

An idea!

It occurred to me that I might keep an online journal of my days spent in Apfeldorfhausen ...documenting my progress on my World War II story as well as outlining my daily activities for those who care to know! To that end, I've established this blog which I'll seek to both access and maintain while in "Middle-of-Nowhere, Bavaria!" I depart for Germany on June 29th and will return - reluctantly I'm sure - on the 13th of August!

I've lots to do until then...so "bis später!"