Getting Ready to Go

Sometime in the spring of 1965 my sister and I were told that we were moving to Germany.

My parents claimed that dad had been offered a corporate VP job there. I honestly don't know who came up with that story but I'm certain it was BS. Dad had been out of work for so long and we had run up so much debt that we had simply run out of options. The plan was that my mom, sis and I were going to stay with mom's 3 sisters in Puetzchen (outside of Bonn) while dad sold the house and wrapped everything up. He'd be there as soon as he could. At least that's what I was told - who knows what the real plan was...

It wasn't until after my dad passed away that I found out he had told everyone that mom "left him"... I guess it's possible he saw it that way - like I said, I'm not sure if he really intended to follow us to Europe or not. But I can say with absolute certainty that if mom was "leaving him" she was totally unaware of it at the time :-) Heck - I still have the letter from dad telling me how wonderful mom was and how I needed to be extra good for her - not exactly the kind of stuff you say about a woman who just left you...

But I'm getting ahead of myself :-)

At that point I was looking forward to a change - I was actually rather excited - mom could make anything seem like it was going to be great fun... So we got our passports and my sister and I got "conversational German" books to start studying up... And I told everyone I was leaving - friends, classmates and the scout troop... Someone would invariably say "East Germany?" (a communist country at the time). Then everybody would laugh - it got old pretty quick :-)

Then there was all my stuff... I ended up giving my Lionel trains to my friend Robert because they were just too big to ship to Germany - I'm still in touch with Robert and AFAIK he still has them... At the time international flights limited total luggage weight (checked and carry-on) to 40 lbs. - so I had to think really hard about what to take with me. My parents didn't approve of some of my choices but I held firm on most of them:
In addition to the usual clothes and toiletries I took some of my Stan Musial memorabilia, a few Beach Boys LPs, a car model I had just finished (custom '23 T-bucket), a "paint-by-the-numbers" picture of a collie (also recently completed), my trusty Dymo label maker and my Boy Scout uniform. Everything else was left behind...

I spent the last Friday night at my friend Robert's house. On Saturday we headed to the nearby woods with his brothers and some neighbors to play "War". This was back when kids actually invented their own games and the local variant of "War" had an amazingly detailed set of rules. E.g. - there were various objects you could find in the woods that qualified as "grenades" and if one landed within a certain distance you had to freeze while you counted to 60 - stuff like that... I don't really recall there being any notion of winning or losing - the fun was in playing the game.

Now I have to interject here - I still remember Robert's childhood address and phone number from 45 years ago and I just checked online. His folks are still there (and have the same phone number). Amazing... The weird thing is I remember it being pretty far away from us but it was barely over 2 miles... Heck I could've walked if my mom had let me... But back to the story:

An hour or two into the "War" game I was running down a narrow path when I tripped over a tree root. As I tried to get up I discovered there was a pointed stick jammed into my left ankle. (It wasn't a trap or anything - just bad luck.) I screamed for help and after convincing everyone that it wasn't a trick they gathered around staring at the stick in my ankle. Robert's oldest brother Fred calmed me down, told me to take a deep breath, grabbed the stick and yanked it out.
It didn't bleed much but I was in a lot of pain and limping badly so mom came and took me home. We went to the doctor on Monday and I found out that I had badly sprained the ankle.

So I had to make the trip to Germany hobbling around with a cane...