Past Perfect Participles, part 1

When I was a little kid, we lived in Germany. Whenever I tell people this, the first thing they always ask is, “Do you speak German?” Well, no. I was a little kid, living on an American military base, attending an American school. How would I have learned German? Seriously. But I did see a lot of Germany, not to mention Switzerland, France, and England. So what I can say is that I spent my “formative” years in Europe, surrounded by European architecture and European art and European stores and European scenery. This is the time in my life when my world view was being formed. My world view has, therefore, always been predominantly European. I am a Europhile.

We were stationed in Darmstadt. We lived – and my dad worked – on Cambrai-Fritsch Kasserne. My old man was in the Air Force (yup…I was a brat). He was a Russian linguist in the United States Air Force Security Service (currently the 25th Air Force). A branch of NSA, USAFSS was a little known, highly secretive, and tight-knit group of airmen who monitored, collected and interpreted voice and electronic communications from our Cold War enemies. Not that I knew that at the time. I was an adult before I had any clue what my dad had done when I was a kid. All I knew was that he put on his blue uniform in the morning, walked out the door, then walked back in after I got home from school. From time to time, he went away for longer periods – sometimes 3 months, sometimes a year and a half.  Those 18-month absences were when he went to Turkey. He first went to Turkey right after I was born. Didn’t come back until I was two. He went again when I was 10 and didn’t reappear until I was 12. As for what he did when he was away, I had no idea. He just said he flew a desk. I didn’t ask. I can, however, tell you where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated – in a movie theater on a military base in Germany. The movie stopped, the lights came on, a man in uniform walked out on the stage (yes, movie theaters had stages back then) and told us the POTUS was dead and we all had to go home. My old man disappeared for six weeks. Such was the life of a “spy kid.”

Spy Guys at the 6910th Security Wing

Anyway, we went to Darmstadt in 1962 – when I was 2 – and didn’t come back Stateside until 1966. In the beginning, we lived in an apartment in town, on the upper floor of a house owned by a Polish family. One of my earliest memories is looking out the window of that apartment and seeing the next door neighbors slaughtering a pig in their back yard. Funny what sticks with you. It took about six months for us to get an apartment on the kasserne. When we did, we lived in Jefferson Village, an apartment complex on the hill up behind the main kasserne. The whole camp was on the side of a big hill. In fact, for years I thought that my parents called going to Darmstadt “going down town,” because we had to drive down the hill to go into the city. Then again, I also thought that doors got “jammed” because someone for some reason had smeared strawberry jam all over them. Ah, the literal mind of a child. But I digress.

Jefferson Village apartments consisted of six long, 4-story buildings, each containing 16 apartments on two stairwells. We lived on the first floor at the left end of the building at the end of the road coming up from town, which meant that from our windows you could see all the way down the hill, past the dispensary and the main gate, to the city below. It was a large, 2-bedroom apartment, with big windows, hardwood floors, and a built-in breakfast nook in the kitchen. There was a dark and scary boiler room in the basement of the building, where the “boiler man” worked. We kids were terrified of the boiler man. Every time we saw him, we would run screaming in fear. Truth is, we would sneak down there to catch glimpses of him in his smoky, fiery domain, just so we could be scared. I found out years later that he was one of the sweetest men in the world, and it was WE who terrorized him. Poor guy.

Up on the hill behind the apartments was an old stone watch tower called Ludwigsturm. We would sometimes walk up there on summer days. You couldn’t get into it, but the tower was still fascinating and romantic for a little kid. It contained so many possibilities, which are immensely important to a 5-year old. Across the street from our building, surrounding the main kasserne, was a fence. It was made of stone columns with chain-link fencing between them. A convenient hole in the fence allowed us kids to get to the post theater without the need to schlep all the way down to the main gate. As kids, we would go to the movie theater every Saturday morning to watch old Roy Rogers movies. That’s right, folks, kids – little kids – 4, 5, and 6-year-old kids – walking by themselves to a movie theater, with no adult supervision. It was a different time, a different place. No missing children on milk cartons yet, no Amber Alerts. No worries. We played outside all day long, unless it was too wet or too cold. Our parents didn’t worry about us. People had our backs. We bloodied our knees and our noses quite often, but we usually kept right on playing.  I recall going home one day, and my mom finding dried blood in my hair. “What happened to you?” She asked. “Doug threw a rock at me,” I replied. “Why didn’t you come in and let me clean it up?” I came back with the simple but honest truth, “I wanted to play with Doug.”

Movie Theater where we watched Roy Rogers
and learned of Kennedy's assassination.

There were a few serious mishaps, of course. Like the time I got all of my fingers crushed. I was four. We were playing ball in the street (yeah – out in the street), and the ball rolled down the storm drain. Since none of our arms were long enough to reach the ball, someone had the brilliant idea that we should lift out the grate. So we all grabbed onto this cast iron storm grate and heaved it up out of the hole. The ball was victoriously retrieved, and we replaced the grate. Only it didn’t go so smoothly. As we were lowering the heavy grate back into the hole, all of the other kids let go of it except for yours truly. Little fingers don’t stand much of a chance when 100 lbs. of cast iron lands on them. That was just one of my many trips to the dispensary, which was fortunately only about 100 yards from our apartment. I still have faint scars on my slightly crooked and arthritic fingers.

Then there was the time when I was five that I got hit by a motorcycle. All of us kids were riding our bicycles out in the street (there it is again). I had just gotten my training wheels off, and I was proud of myself. I was pedaling up and down the street on two wheels, just like the big kids. I had reached a point directly in front of my apartment and was turning around to pedal back to the other end of the street, when something slammed into me. A man had come down the street on a motorcycle and T-boned me on my bike. I flew about 20 feet through the air, my flight being abruptly halted by an obliging telephone pole. I came to my sense lying on the ground, bleeding, and immediately began to wail. Kids were screaming. People were running. Parents appeared. Some man kept yelling, “It wasn’t my fault! It wasn’t my fault!” Got some serious hospital time out of that one. I was lucky though – only concussion and two ruptured ear drums. The real bummer was that A) everyone blamed me, not the idiot on the motorcycle zooming through a residential area, and B) my bike was destroyed. I didn’t get another bike until I was 12.

The Gate House, where I ate chocolate.

I also – I must point out – used to run away all of the time, not because I was some budding juvenile delinquent, but because of the candy. See, it was a game I played, with the complicity of my dad and the Military Police (MPs). I would “run away” down to the kasserne, where I would be “found lost and wandering” by the MPs. They would put me in their jeep (quite a thrill), take me back to the guard house at the main gate and call my dad, who would stop and pick me up on the way home from work. While I waited for him, the MPs would feed me candy bars, and let me wave cars through the gate. It was very important work, and you had to remember to salute the officers. Why none of the men involved never got busted for allowing a little kid to hang out at the guard house of a military post that housed a top-secret communications group, I do not know. I guess it was because it was a small community, and everyone knew everyone else, and even as a 4-year-old I was already a well-known fixture on the kasserne.

To be continued….