We had bought a used 1971 VW bus while at Westover, I am glad it was it was still in warranty, we had of plenty of problems with it. It had air conditioning and on every long trip we took we had problems with the engine, on two separate trips to Florida from Westover to visit Disney World and my parents place I had to have the engine serviced, burned valves were usually the problem. On our Christmas trip in 1973, the VW dealer at Clearwater admitted the type 3 engine was not up to pushing the box down the road and running an air conditioner at the same time, so they offered me a deal I could not refuse, trade in my 71 VW bus for a 74 bus that had the new type 4 engine that could handle the load. The
exchange was less than $1500, and yes maintenance was much reduced. That left us with a 1970 Beetle and a 1974 bus both pretty good cars. We had purchased our first VW from Jacque Lelew in 1956 at Laon and we have owned more than 20 VW’s over the years. So taking a VW back to its place of birth was not a bad idea. I should mention that trip to Disney World was especially nice because we got reduced price tickets through the recreation office at McCoy AFB where we spent the night and we stayed at Disney World to see the fireworks and then drove on to my parents place in Largo. It had been a super long day and we were all super tired but also super happy, a great day I remember it well and I suspect that the children do too. Mom and Dad were probably not too happy with us showing up about midnight, but it did not take long to get us into bed. It was one of those memorable times. There was a fairly long waiting list for on base housing at Hahn but there was plenty of off base housing so we sent the bus on ahead and then shipped the beetle at our expense just before we departed from Maguire AFB. We had spent a few nights with my sister and brother in law in Lansdale, PA and had got caught up on all the latest family affairs so it was time to go on to our new adventure in Germany.

The flight from Maguire to Frankfort was uneventful as was the bus ride
to Hahn, of course we were tired but we went to the O club for supper
Nelly took the children back to the quarters which was a block or two
away I stayed behind because there were a couple of my flying school buddies there and we were catching each other up on what all had happened in our careers. Both had flown F-4’s in Thailand during Vietnam one was flying F-4D’s the fighter bomber, the other was flying F-4E’s in the intercepter Squadron. Yes, I stayed too late so I slept in the next morning and the family accused me of missing half of summer. The bus was already at Bremerhaven so I traded rides with a fellow that was taking his car to the port, he took me to the port I brought him back to Hahn. We picked up Nelly’s car at Rotterdam several weeks later. With a car we could explore a bit and do some house hunting. It did not take long the housing office had a list of rental houses with dates they would be empty. We just visited all the houses and picked the one that suited us best. The one we chose belonged to Helmut and Regina Klingle it was in Lauferswiler a village about four miles south of the base. The Klingle’s house was near the street and ours sat at the back of the lot next to a good sized garden. Helmuts mother “Omar” lived with them she was the one with the green thumb, she kept us well supplied with fresh vegetables. We became very good friends with the Klingle’s. We decided that we would stay there even if base housing became available, it simplified our life. Phone lines were hard to get at that time so I did
not even try for one, it would only mean that the base could contact me
more quickly and I did not want do them any favors so we remained phone free. Our kitchen window looked out upon Ederkompf, a conical mountain several miles to the south west. Many mornings its peak would be enshrouded in fog, but it was still a beautiful site. Laon was about a
five hour drive and we made the trip about every six weeks, after a few
practice runs Nelly would take Natalie and they would go to her parents
for the weekend once she took Regina, that was the first time that Regina had been out of Germany, she was thrilled. Robin and I joined the German-American glider club at the Traben-Trabach,
and he started taking lessons almost immediately and I got checked out
again. I liked to fly the Ka-8 a lot but the cockpit was pretty small
for me so I flew the Ka-7 two seater most of the time, it was free if
they had sold a glider ride to one of the many visitors. We spent a good
bit of time at the glider club, they had both a winch and a tow plane
but we used the winch most of the time. We had brought our R/C equipment and enough extra model building material to build replacement models for those that we left behind, over the winter we built one model and took turns flying it in an open field a few hundred feet from the house. Hand launch, fly and belly land, was our mode of operation. Robin was coming up on his 14th birthday and we had scouted out the French glider club at Thionville. The French have a youth flying program that was subsidized by the government, it was almost free. Robin and Natalie have dual citizenship and he qualified to attend the summer glider flying camp, so we bought him the camping gear he needed paid all the fees drove him over to the Thionville/Yuts glider field and dropped him off, they told us to come back in two weeks he would be ready to solo. He was learning to camp, fly and refine his french all at one time. We came back two weeks later and he soloed that afternoon, boy was I proud of him, still am.

Robin got a moped from one of his French uncles and we both tried our
best to make it a usable vehicle but eventually sold it to one of the
Germans that worked for me, he rode it to work proudly every day for a
long time and I still don’t know what kind of magic he had because I
thought I knew most of the tricks in the book of how to make mechanical
things run. We went to the big PX in Frankfort every once and a while
but the French PX at Treir had the best prices but also a limited
selection. But Michelin tires for about $12 for the beetle was a good
deal.

It was just one of those things we had to do. Drive through East Germany to Berlin, East Germany was so drab compared to West Germany I felt so sorry for those people living under communism. We were all moved by the Berlin wall, the guard towers, guns and binoculars pointed at you was disquieting to say the least. We went through “Check Point Charley” to a
near by restaurant and had a beer and a sandwich and got out of there
pretty quickly. Yes, we were not comfortable, no smiles, no laughing, no
cheerful colors, even the little bit of music we heard was not cheerful, East Berlin, to us, was not a pleasant place at that time. One of the
officers that we knew at Westover was at the US Embassy in Berlin at that time and when we called him, he said we just did not know where to go in East Berlin, but we had been so struck by what we had seen we did not volunteer to go back to East Berlin even if he would show us the nice places, we ended up going to the Officers club with them that night. I think we had a better time than we would have had in East Berlin. Any how we were very happy to be back in West Germany and back home, but there is no doubt that we would never forget what we had seen and experienced, it was a good trip.

We took another trip to Garmish, Bavaria, the military hotels had aged
and the service was not as impressive as I remembered it to be when we
were at Laon. Even the lady skaters at the Holiday on Ice were not as
young and beautiful as they had been in my youth, I’m sure that I was not as pretty to them either, what a difference 20+ years makes. We had
stopped for supper at a gasthaus in Kaufburen near one of the German AF training bases that I had visited when escorting the Base soccer team to some play offs held there, we ended up spending the night in the
gasthaus, as we drove away from Garmish we both said we should have
stayed at Kaufburen. It was quaint, clean, cosy, the food delicious and
the service impeccable. I almost forgot they had red checkered table cloths. Nelly and I had some how discovered that we always enjoyed the
restaurants with checkered table cloths. Yeah, we should have stayed
right there.

I was Field Maintenance Supervisor at Hahn and all the shops were pretty much set in the ways they did things and I was not looking to rock the boat because all the higher ups seemed satisfied with the way things were going. But one of the German welders came to me one day and suggested that we stop making “on airplane welded” repairs for cracks in the afterburners, he claimed that without perfect back up inert gas
protecting the welds each were doomed to crack again. Our mean time
between failures for afterburner cracks was about five hours and it was
just as bad at all the F-4 Bases. So I asked and was granted 10
airplanes that we would not make any “on airplane” afterburner crack
repairs, those 10 airplanes had their afterburners pulled and the welder
that had made the suggestion was given the task to overhaul each
afterburner, it took him a couple of days to rebuild each afterburner so
it took about two months to go through those ten airplanes. Our mean time between failures on afterburner cracks went up dramatically, from less than five hours to almost 100 hours and it kept improving as the welder got better ideas of how to perfect his technique. It was simple
mathematics that we were hurting ourselves by making expedient band aid repairs that did not hold up. Col Albrittin took me to Ramstein AB to
brief the maintenance staff there and I showed them the facts and figures and we got permission to do the same to our entire fleet. In a short time our welder got an award for his suggestion that I had written for him and he was soon running an afterburner overhaul school for all the F-4 bases in USAFE. On aircraft welding was forbidden and we fixed them correctly after that, no that did not make it into my OER soon enough to make any difference for a promotion so I soon got notification that I would be retiring.

I have already told you about Nelly’s and my trip to Spain so I will skip
that but on our way back from Spain we stopped by Aix le Bains a few
miles south of Geneva, Switzerland we ate at an Inn that had checkered
table cloths, the food was excellent and we spent the night. They even
served us breakfast in our room, I think they thought we were honey
mooners. We were having a really nice time. We went down to the lake
and fed the swans that stayed there, they were very graceful and pretty
but aggressive when it came to grabbing food out of your hand or fingers, they had become Olympic class moochers, little did we know. We got back home that evening and we all went to the O club for supper. It was a fitting end to a very very nice trip, but the children said they would have rather been left on their own than be supervised by the couple that Nelly and I had selected to keep an eye on them, apparently the couple were disciplinarians, so there were hard feelings. Sorry kids, we goofed.

The die was cast, I was retiring in a few months and we had saved up a
few extra thousand dollars so I asked the family, where they would like to go for one last vacation in Europe. I suggested, the Nordic countries,
the Greek Isles, the British Iles, a tour of Spain and Portugal or Italy,
plenty to see on any of them. Almost at the same time Both Robin and
Natalie asked if we could go to Russia, it had just opened to tourism and
tours were being advertised. I said I don’t know but I will check. Nelly and the children had no problem with a visa but my job title gave the embassy a challenge so they shortened my title to “field supervisor” it went through and in a couple of weeks we where on our way. From Frankfort to Helsinki to Stalingrad, now St Petersburg, for several days, we toured all the museums and visited the palaces of the Tzars and went to the Russian Air and Space museum where I learned that I had been duped
by the Air Force that the Russian Airliners could be quickly converted to
bombers, that was an out and out lie there was no way those airliners
even with glass noses could be easily converted to bombers, I was
bewildered that there was no zipper in the belly that would allow quick
modification, it was a sham, my government lost some more credibility. Then it was on to Moscow, Felix Dorough that had been intelligence officer in the 822nd, was a foreign service officer there and he and his wife Jean made us feel welcome. We tried to balance our time between the tour and Dorough’s wanting to entertain us, we did go to the embassy store where I bought several cartons of Winstons that I traded for cold beer each time we came for a meal at the hotel. Robin and I took a ride on a Moscow subway, it was an adventure, their alphabet is so different we were trying to figure out which station was next and we would be saying things like backward or double p’s and such trying to spell what we thought would be the next stations name, we got home all right but I got scolded by one of the communist enforcers for having long legs and not keeping then out of the way. It was just another experience. I did buy a Russian 500 mm Ring mirror lens for my camera, at the embassy store I got it back to the states, never used it and in a few months a pro cameraman talked me out of it, yes I made a profit but I still felt like I was deprived of some photos that would have been memorable. Oh well just
another disappointment of life.

We went on to Warsaw, Poland, during our city tour we met up with a US senator that was showing tears at the location of the Jewish purge that
had occurred in the ghetto, we exchanged pleasantries but went on our
separate ways, there was some vibrance in Poland, flower boxes adorned many window sills, colorful cloths were in view, there were night clubs
and I asked a street vender how much for a rose for Nelly, when I paid
with a dollar she gave me the whole bunch and I had enough to give every one of the ladies in our group a rose with some left over. Our guide was a racing fan and they had begun to have some regional road races. The cars had about 1000 cc displacement and by modern standards were pretty tame but he was so happy that they could again race cars, yeah, communism was showing its weakness and free enterprise was starting to emerge, Natalie had brought a bunch of chewing gum with her and she traded some of it for Russian soldiers belts and other similar items, Robin wore Levi Jeans and jackets and was willing to trade but nothing they had to offer was worth the trade. I exchanged a Zippo Lighter for a trinket of some kind, I just wanted them to have an item that might make a difference. After Warsaw, Prague was a downer, drab, dreary and generally un inviting, Robin and I took a walk around the area near the hotel but we did not see any thing interesting, we did not stay there long and it is just as well we were running out of steam for our east European trip. We were glad to be back on the other side of the iron curtain and even more happy to be Americans. Yes, there were signs of the Iron Curtain weakening, barter and black markets were evident, capitalism was emerging but there was also the presence of the communists enforcers still around and some times communication just stopped apparently a non trusted person showed up and no further words were exchanged, a couple of times the person I was trying to talk to would just walk away. It took me a while to catch on to what was happening. Yes, we saw the seeds of the demise of communism as they were developing and we also saw the strict dogma of the enforcers, It must have been hell to live under those conditions.

All in all we had a nice but a very learning trip, I know I will never forget
the experiences, and I for one was over joyed when President Reagan said ” Mr Gorbachev Tear down this Wall”. I was more joyous when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own bureaucratic weight. But now we have new challenges and I am not sure we will have peace in the world. That was basically the end our European tour and we went off to civilian life and I will tell you more about that later. Bob