Going to the Movies with My Brother

Brother #1 and me, a couple of years before we started going to movies together.

I have a vague recollection of being taken to a drive-in movie by my mother and one of her brothers when I was 6 or 7, but my first real memories of going to the movies go back to 1956, when we moved to the Hainerberg housing area in Wiesbaden. Our apartment was on Mississippistrasse, which may have been close to the outer edge of the housing area at that time. My memory is that it was at the top of a hill with the PX and Post Theater at the bottom of the hill. About halfway down, there was a Bread and Milk Station where I was sometimes sent on errands for my mother.

The hill is long and steep as I look back on it, but it really probably wasn’t that bad, since Brother #1 and I could walk down and back by ourselves to go to the movies. (Yes, we were free-range kids!) Fifty cents would buy both our tickets and leave twenty cents over for candy. I don’t remember ever getting popcorn; I guess we just preferred candy.

When we started doing this, Brother #1 was five and I was eight. I’m sure we always went to matinee performances, but I don’t recall any specifically-for-kids movies except for Walt Disney’s Song of the South. My parents must have exercised some oversight over our choices, since, while I recall seeing trailers for The Rose Tattoo, Tea and Sympathy, and The Bad Seed, I never saw the actual movies. But here are some of the ones we did see: Beyond Mombasa – my brother loved movies about Africa, and for some reason this title stuck in my head, but I’m sure we saw several others like it. We also saw Something of Value – which I suspect would not get a PG-13 rating nowadays.

Bundle of Joy – Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher in a comedy about “unwed motherhood,” 50s-style

Tammy and the Bachelor – more Debbie Reynolds, but I had forgotten that “the Bachelor” is played by Leslie Nielsen!

Friendly Persuasion – Indiana Quakers in the Civil War, with Anthony Perkins and Gary Cooper

Kismet, The King and I, and Oklahoma – three of the great movie musicals. My brother still tells of being snookered into going to see Oklahoma because “It’s about cowboys.”

The last time I can remember going to a movie with my brother was in 1964, and again, it was at a Post Theater – this time at Kelley Barracks in Stuttgart-Moehringen. We hadn’t been there very long and the theater was showing The Longest Day (starring my pre-teen heart-throb, Fabian!) There was a long line to get in, and standing near us was a middle-aged buck sergeant who told us he wanted to see the film because he had been in the D-Day Landings himself (after all, it was only twenty years in the past then). He explained his low rank by having spent some years as a civilian before returning to the service. Ah, Sgt. Gnospelius, where are you now?

Now that my brother and I live near each other again, perhaps we should make a date to take in a movie together once more; I bet we’ll have just as much fun as we did 50+ years ago, but I know it will cost a lot more.

A Few Summer Memories from Germany

In the mid-50s a lot of building was going on at the U.S. military bases in Germany, and we were beneficiaries when we moved into new or nearly-new family housing on Mississippistrasse on the Hainerberg housing area sometime in summer 1956. More about that another day, but first a few summer memories.

I can’t really remember anything about it, but I’m sure we had a car – bought from someone returning Stateside and sold again when we “rotated” in 1957. Although my father was busy with his military duties and often had to be away at the firing range in the scarily-named Todendorf (“village of the dead,” I always thought), we did do some sight-seeing. The two events I most remember are a visit to what I can only call “catacombs,” and a Rhine River cruise.

The “catacombs” – and I have no idea where they are, but probably not far from Wiesbaden – were underground chambers where the walls were crammed with the bones of deceased Hessians. It seems to me they may have been monks, and the “catacombs” were just the most memorable part of an abbey or monastery tour. Alas, I have no further information.

The Rhine River day cruise may not have been quite as long as the one Onkel Hankie Pants and I took later on (see last Friday’s blog), but it probably also started out in Mainz, and here I must digress. My father was prone to singing snatches of song or quoting bits of verse that had caught his fancy – usually just one line. I’ve tracked down some of the songs and continue to search out more. One non-musical bit of doggerel he used to quote was:

”Me and the old lady and my pal Heinz

Hopped on the Fahrrad and headed for Mainz.”

I suspect there was more to it, perhaps not suitable for children?

Anyway, back to the Rhine. Our trip definitely went past Burg Katz and Burg Maus, the two castles on opposite sides of the river near the Lorelei; and we also saw the Mouse Tower of the wicked Bishop Hatto of Bingen. You can read the story of the Bishop here, and Longfellow’s poem which mentions him (doubtless familiar to my parents, who both went to school in the Brunswick area at a time when classic poetry was part of the curriculum) here.

Besides the glorious freedom of summer play for a kid in the unscheduled 50s, I had one organized activity – Brownies, and in summer, Brownie Day Camp. Here’s a picture showing approximately what my Brownie uniform looked like (there were slight changes made between 1955 and 1956); of course, I wasn’t blonde. Mrs. Larsen was our troop leader, and I remember being in the Larsens’ back yard making sit-upons from oilcloth and the Stars and Stripes newspaper, as well as hot dog/marshmallow toasting sticks – we made papier mache insulating handles for the straightened coathangers. I don’t remember where the day camp took place except that it was woodsy; my chief memory is of the songs we sang: Vreneli, “Hand on myself, was ist das hier?”, and of course, Make New Friends. We sang a verse that I have seldom encountered elsewhere (the Internet turned it up as a “toast”):

New-made friends, like new-made wine,

Age will mellow and refine.

I suppose many people would not think this appropriate for 7-year-olds to sing, but to our Swiss leader it posed no problems.

That’s all for today, as I have some reviews to write, some reading to do, and oh yes – laundry, cooking and dog-walking.

Further Memories from Sartoriusstrasse

It’s November 1st, and the beginning of NaNoWriMo, when we are encouraged to write a 50,000 word novel. Not gonna do it. But I am going to try to blog every day, and I’ll start out with some more memories from my family’s first sojourn in Germany.

It was over 50 years ago that we set off on the journey to Germany. I remember getting shots – we got lots of them throughout our childhood, courtesy of the Army, and I don’t think any of us fear them to this day. I believe my mother’s eldest sister accompanied us on the train to New Jersey, where we would board the MATS (Military Air Transport Service) plane for a 19-hour flight to Rhein-Main Airport. There was at least one refueling stop (Greenland?) but I can’t remember whether we got off the plane there. I, and probably other children my age (7) and older, got to visit the cockpit and were given little winged flight pins.

Since I’ve already discussed our stay in Bad Schwalbach a few weeks ago, I’ll start with a few more things about our time on Sartoriusstrasse. Although the Occupation had officially ended a few months before our arrival, West Germany was not yet the prosperous nation it would soon become. There were still areas where the effects of wartime bombs could be seen, but the biggest effect was on the people. (For a really good book about displaced persons in Germany after the war, seek out a copy of Margot Benary-Isbert’s children’s book The Ark.) Since we were in a small American enclave in the city of Wiesbaden, we had people occasionally coming to the door to beg, and more often, to pick through our garbage in search of anything usable. (For some time afterward, we children would insult each other by sneering “Garbage picker!” Dumpster Diving was not yet cool in the 1950s.) German schoolchildren would walk by on their way to and from school, carrying their battered school satchels and often holding hands (both of which were new sights to us), and I have a vivid mental image of one of them. She was bare-legged and even at 7, I could tell that the fabric of her dress was nothing like the sturdy cottons from which my mother made my dresses.

For the most part we bought our food at the Commissary and most other things at the PX. The commissary’s dairy products all came from Denmark (which was still true in 1972 when I was stationed in Berlin). We were warned not to eat ice cream from street vendors for fear of tuberculosis. My mother tried some German recipes that our maid Hilda taught her, including Rotkohl (red cabbage – which I would encounter again when I married into a Danish-American family). I don’t recall that any of them made it into her permanent repertoire, though.

As I’ve said, our housing came furnished, but the PX was a source for decorative items. I believe that’s where we acquired the brass bas-relief plates depicting Anne Hathaway’s cottage and Shakespeare’s birthplace – Brother #1 has them now. A very popular item that my father scorned was the camel saddle. I have a memory of someone else we knew who had one that was coming apart and how smelly the stuffing was! European and British items of all kinds were available at the PX. Candy was not something we had constantly around the house, but I remember fancy tins of Quality Street candies at Christmas time

And at least once, there was an industrial-sized (to my eyes anyway) can of Jordan almonds, a favorite confection of my mother’s.

We also had a Sears Roebuck catalog, although I don’t know whether we actually ordered from it while we were in Germany. (This is the best photo I could find from the 1955 catalog.) My best memory of the Sears catalog is that I would come home from school and Brother #3 would just be waking from his nap (he was about 18 months old). I could keep him amused for a while by looking at and talking about the layette pages, which at that time were illustrated in the margins with drawings of babies doing cute things.

School was General Hoyt S. Vandenberg Elementary (now Hainerberg Elementary), which was a very modern building compared to Coombs School in Bowdoinham, whence I’d come, which had been fairly old even when my mother went there. My teacher for second grade was Miss Pieruki, who in my memory is very young and pretty. I wonder if teaching in Wiesbaden was just a short, adventurous interlude for her, or whether she made a career in the overseas schools? I suppose I learned the usual things in second grade, but what I chiefly recall is that I sat in the last row of desks next to a boy named Bernard See. On the back wall of the classroom hung a phonics chart, and it was when I couldn’t read the chart from my seat that Miss Pieruki discovered I needed glasses. I still remember the excitement of coming home from the optician’s with my first pair and being able to read the letters on the German advertising signs for the first time.

Memories of Sartoriusstrasse

In Friday’s post I talked a little about our family’s sojourn on Sartoriusstrasse in Wiesbaden, Germany. Today I’m going to tell some more of what I remember; hoping that perhaps, through the magic of Google, someone else with memories of those days will be in touch.

We arrived, as I mentioned before, in late October or early November of 1955. The American, British and French occupation of West Germany had officially ended only in May of that year, and Germany was still rebuilding from the war. Probably because we had a large family of five children, we were assigned quarters in a requisitioned town house in the center of Wiesbaden, on Sartoriusstrasse. I did not realize until I looked at this map that we were only a few blocks from the main train station in Wiesbaden! In my researches, I’ve been hampered by not knowing the exact address where we lived; of course all our mail came to the APO address and was picked up by my father at work. A nearby hospital has been enlarged since we lived there, so it’s possible the building has been torn down; but I did find this photo of 29 Sartoriusstrasse, which looks very similar to what I remember. Our quarters, as best I recall, was the middle house of five. My parents later reminded me that the basement was common to all five houses, so that all the children could play there on rainy or cold days. The back yards had, I think, stone fences separating them, but that did not stop us either.

For the six months preceding our trip to Germany, my mother and we children had been living in our little house in Maine – four rooms and an attic, with an outdoor privy. I know that at one of the times we lived there,  we also got water from the neighbor’s well, but possibly we had some kind of running water, at least from a pump, by this time. In any case, living in this rather fancy house in Wiesbaden was a big difference. There were three floors, with a bathroom on each. At first, I had my own room on the third floor, but at 7 I was a little too young to appreciate that so I soon moved in with my 3-year-old sister on the second floor. In addition to a living room and dining room, we had a playroom, I think on the first floor, which must have saved my mother a few steps when we needed supervision.  The house came furnished with heavy, dark furniture and even china – Brother #1, I believe, has the slightly chipped gravy boat that we had to buy from the Army when we moved because we had chipped it. It’s white with a dark red stripe like some church dinnerware, but more delicate. My sister has a souvenir of the furniture – a tiny scar on her forehead where she slid under my parents’ bed during a chase.

Our previous homes had certainly had no more than three bedrooms or two stories, and there were still many Germans looking for work. So, for the first and only time in her life, my mother had household help. Our first maid was Magda, who was younger (well, under 40 anyway) and skinny. We children thought she was mean, too. I’m not sure if she quit or was fired, but then we got Hilda, who was stout and jolly. She taught my mother to make some German dishes, and was happy to help me with my school German although her dialect was not the Hochdeutsch we were being taught.

My father, who was a Master Sergeant at the time, was First Sergeant of A Battery, 63rd AAA Missile/Gun Battalion. (I’m not sure exactly when it changed from Gun to Missile.)  As a First Sergeant, he had some responsibilities for the men in his battery, beyond simply their work performance. I benefited from this responsibility when one of his men came to him for help – he had signed up to buy the Book of Knowledge for his infant child and couldn’t really afford the payments. My father bought this great children’s encyclopedia from him and I (and quite a few other family members) got years of enjoyment and education from it.  I remember too that we did a lot more entertaining of people from work than at any other time in my memory – extra people at Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners, for example. 

In the house two doors to the right of us lived the Larsens. Larsen Sr. was some kind of Naval officer (I don’t remember his rank but probably a Lt. Commander), who was most likely attached to the Rhine River Patrol. My memory is that he was actually from Norway, but I wasn’t then as knowledgeable about Scandinavian-Americans as I am now. His wife, however, was Swiss and was my Brownie leader. Their two elder daughters, Karen and Esther, were in the troop as well. There was one son, Larry (Lars or Lawrence?) and two smaller girls –- I think one was named Astrid.

Right next door to us were the Mellingers, an Air Force family. They had a lot of children – maybe as many as eight? More than five, anyway. The eldest, Yvonne, was about 14 and I think Butch, the oldest boy, was a couple of years older than I, but still young enough to join our play.

For some reason I can’t recall the name of the family who lived on the other side of us or really anything about them. Perhaps one of my siblings will remember. The last house was inhabited by the Toms family, and I think Mr. Toms was a civilian employee of one of the services. There were two older boys and a girl, Rae Liz, who was my age. She had a fantastic dollhouse. The other thing that I think I recall from the Toms household was that they put angel hair on their Christmas tree. Angel hair was, I think, made from fiberglass (ouch!) – it looked really pretty, though. (I’ve linked to a site where you can actually still buy it, which claims that the angel hair it sells is not like the rough, scratchy kind I remember. I still wouldn’t use it around pets or small children, though.)

For some reason we don’t seem to have any photographs of those years in Germany.  This seems odd to me, as we have photos and even slides from the years immediately preceding them. My hope is that photos were taken and sent home to Maine, and that perhaps there are some in an album or shoebox at the home of one of my relatives. Later this week, after a visit from SonShineIn’s inlaws, I’ll write a bit more about our time in Wiesbaden.