Kaiserslautern

I was on assignment for four months in Kaiserslautern Germany. My heart and mind were open to absorb the culture of this new experience. It was 1973 but for this ‘war baby’, Nazism and WWII memories were not that far removed. My first month managing a crew of German electricians fell short of expectations. The translator was actually running the show. I enrolled in a language class but progress was too slow to resolve the workplace control. I enlisted new recruits with some English knowledge and progress at work was in the offing.
From that point, my interaction gave me a personal depth of involvement with the crew. Morris Weinberg was a veteran SS soldier that was captured by the Russians. He was quick to raise his arm and show the scar where his SS number was cut away as a POW. Morris pushed my interpretation of an American coffee break into a 10 am beer break. Most of the crew handled it well but Morris failed to function very well beyond two in the afternoon. The small bottles jingling in his shop coat, he said were medicine. I knew of Jagermeister and accused him of being a drunk. His German pride was hurt. A turnabout left his drinking habits to later in the day and the rest of the crew became more responsible.
Lutz Fruenel was a good electrician and always had a joke to tell me. The content line always seemed to have a tricky English word that resorted to sign-language and a guessing game. One such thing concerned an organ grinder at Notre Dame, he waved his hand above his shoulders and I guessed – a monkey on his back? “No. No. No”. It turned out to mean the Hunchback of Notre Dame but that was irrelevant. Waving a hand above the shoulders always evoked a hilarious laugh. We took a weekend together to visit his wife and family near Dusseldorf. The joke after that trip was my contortions to see the Castles of the Rhine. Lutz came here to visit me in 1986 from his work in some mining camp in Liberia Africa. This was part of the company's benefit to send him once a year to wherever he wanted to go. His wife had left him so he would not go home. Our goodbye salute was to wave a hand above our shoulders.