My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Epilogue

 

Front row, L-R:  Chris, Judy, Annie, Hank
Back row, L-R:  Tom, Lance, Bill, Susan

                                                                  Time it was, and what a time it was!  It was 

                                                                  A time of innocence, a time of confidences.

                                                                  Long ago (it must be), I have a photograph . . .

                                                                                                      -- Paul Simon

There were nine of us traveling around Europe in that Morris minivan:  two adults – a married couple serving as leaders and chaperones – plus three girls and four boys all high school age.  Each person had their quirks, but we got along well, even in the close quarters of the minivan.  After we returned to Oklahoma, however, we went our separate ways and never really kept in touch.

So as I was writing my stories about the trip, I was curious about what happened to everyone afterwards . . . and where they are now.  Thanks to the internet, I found information about seven of the other eight travelers.  Here’s what I learned.

Tom and Kay Dudley, our adult leaders

Tom was a maxillofacial and oral surgeon in private practice in Oklahoma City; he was 35 years old at the time of our trip in 1966.  He was active in the Republican Party on the local and state levels; a member of the OKC Rotary Club for over 50 years; and at some point after our trip he switched denominations from Methodist to Baptist and served as a deacon in his church for over 40 years.  He died in 2010, age 79.  

Kay was a pediatric nurse and at the time of our trip was 31 years old.  She, like Tom, became active in local politics as a Republican.  In 1986, twenty years after our trip, she was elected to the Oklahoma State Senate, where she served for four years.  From 1995 to 2003 she served as Director of Appointments for Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating, and for the last six months of Keating’s term served as interim Secretary of State.  And she, like Tom, volunteered many hours in their church.  She died in 2022, age 87.

Hank Comby

Henry “Hank” Comby III was from Chickasha, OK.  He did his undergraduate work at Northeastern State University and earned his masters and doctoral degrees from Oklahoma State University.  He became a professor of sociology and anthropology at Tulsa Community College.  He taught TCC’s first Honors Program class in 1980, and his memory is enshrined in the Henry B. Comby III Prize, which recognizes the most outstanding graduating Honors Scholar of the year at TCC.  He died of a heart attack in 2007, age 58.

Annie Dotter (now Ann Shurtz)

Ann was from Okeene, OK, and was already an accomplished pianist at the time of our trip.  She graduated summa cum laude from Oklahoma City University in biology and music, and earned a Master of Music degree from the University of Oklahoma.  She has four daughters and maintains an active Suzuki Method piano studio with about 50 students (including four of her grandchildren) in Mechanicsburg, PA.

Bill Ford

Bill is a long-time family friend of mine from Lawton, OK, where we both lived and attended the same Methodist church and same high school.  He went to college at Oklahoma State University and had a long career as a registered professional engineer doing insurance and pre-purchase structural inspections of residential and commercial properties.  He’s now retired and living in Broken Arrow, OK.

Chris Herndon

Chris and Hank were classmates in Chickasha.  Chris went to medical school at the University of Oklahoma and became a board-certified family medicine physician practicing in Duncan, OK, about 40 miles south of Chickasha.  He’s still practicing two days a week.  One of his daughters is an OB-GYN in Duncan and the other is an Episcopalian minister in Yukon, OK.

Susan Stevens (now Susan Parks)

Susan was from Ada, OK, but I have been unable to find her.  I only learned her married name from her mother’s obituary.  My attempts to contact her through a couple of her siblings went unanswered.

Judy Wheeler (now Judy Purma)

Judy was from McAlester, OK.  She went to Oklahoma State University, and taught special education for 24 years.  She and her husband moved to Missouri where they raised two sons; she now has five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.  Since our Europe trip she has traveled to China, Thailand, New Zealand, Spain, Belgium, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Mexico.

I'll close the book on this trip with one more photo of the group in London . . . I'm not in it 'cause I'm taking their picture, of course!

L-R: Bill, Hank, Judy, Tom, Kay, Chris, Susan, Annie

                                                                                        Not farewell,                                                                                                                   But fare forward, voyagers! 

                                                                     -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 17: Reflections

                                       Certainly, travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on,                                                                     deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.

                                                        --  Miriam Beard, Realism in Romantic Japan (1930)

                                        You are not the same people who left that station
                                        Or who will arrive at any terminus, 
                                        While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
                                         . . .
                                        You are not those who saw the harbour

                                        Receding, or those who will disembark.

                                                       -- T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, “The Dry Salvages” (1941)

                                        How you gonna keep 'em down on the farm                                                                                                                            After they've seen Paree?

                                                      -- Words by Sam M. Lewis and Joe Young; music by Walter Donaldson (1919)

When responding to the stories about my 1966 Europe trip over the past few months, some readers have asked what effect the trip had on my life.  The same question occurred to me many times during the writing.  So here's my lengthy attempt at an answer.

First, some context . . .

I began Chapter 1 of this memoir with a quote from Martin Buber:

             All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. 

The “secret destination,” of course, is not a place, but a state of mind, a Weltanschauung that evolves through experience and reflection.  Sixty years later I have the luxury of being able to look back, try to remember how I viewed the world at age 16, and perhaps only now be able to perceive the “secret destination” of how the trip to Europe enlarged and enriched my worldview.

I should say at the outset that for me the trip to Europe was not like Dorothy Gale being transported in a tornado from the black-and-white world of Kansas (or, in my case, Oklahoma) to the Technicolor world of Oz . . . although there were a few “We’re not in Kansas anymore” moments along the way:  see Chapter 5, “On to Paris”; Chapter 7, “Milan to Venice”; and Chapter 13, “Dachau.”  Nor upon return did the trip immediately change how I behaved during my senior year in high school or how others treated me there.  Most of my peers never knew I had been gone over the summer, and I don't think I was vibrating with the pulse of transformation running through my veins.

Thanks to family vacations, by the time I was 16 I had traveled quite widely in the U.S., visiting museums and battlefields, cities and cemeteries, casinos and national parks in 22 states (counting Oklahoma), plus Washington, DC, and very brief forays across the borders into Mexico and Canada.  Seeing new places and people, learning about their history, eating local cuisine – all of that was in the realm of “normal” for me.

But Europe was more than an order of magnitude different in so many ways:  historically, culturally, gastronomically, linguistically, geographically.  I had, in my 16 years, developed a modest mental framework for interpreting all those things domestically, but the sheer volume of new experiences in Europe was exhilarating and occasionally overwhelming – the classic “drinking from a firehose” experience.  I look back now and realize how much I learned from that trip about the world and history beyond the United States . . . and how much I failed to perceive due to youthful inexperience and lack of preparation.

So with all that in mind, now I'll answer the question that prompted this post in the first place.  The trip to Europe affected my life primarily in two ways:

(1) In the short term, it reinforced what my parents and all those family vacations had been preparing me for all my life:  getting out of Oklahoma.  The trip to Europe confirmed that there was a world out there so much larger than the world I was living in, a world with energy, history, education and cultural resources, and I knew I wanted more of that.  A year after returning from Europe, I left Oklahoma – family, community, and a girlfriend -- for college in Atlanta (Georgia Tech), and aside from various family gatherings, a few high school reunions, and one miserable summer job after my sophomore year in college, I never went back.

(2) In the long term, my worldview was enlarged exponentially. I gained an expanded awareness – but at the time only a limited understanding – of how complex and diverse, old (very old) and rapidly changing, huge and small, rich and horrible the world is.  Over time, however, that awareness and the concomitant quest for understanding have grown to inform what ultimately became my liberal politics and social consciousness.

How that all played out over the past 60 years is a story – actually, lots of stories – for another time.  For now, I’ll just conclude with another passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets which perhaps sums up best how my life was affected by my Excellent European Adventure:

                                    We shall not cease from exploration                                                                                                                  And the end of all our exploring                                                                                                                          Will be to arrive where we started                                                                                                                      And know the place for the first time.

Thanks for being part of my life's journey!

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 16: Heading Home

Our last day in Europe -- Thursday, August 11-- dawned with overcast skies, light drizzle, and temps in the high 50s/low 60s . . . a typical London morning.  Tom had returned our Morris minivan to the rental agency the day before, so I suppose we took cabs to Heathrow.  This time there was no cab driver in top-hat-and-tails to bid us farewell -- see Chapter 1 if you don't remember this character from our arrival at Heathrow -- but a bigger send-off surprise was awaiting us at the airport.

Trivia Interlude:  Heathrow Airport opened as a commercial airport in 1946, and was originally named London Airport.  To avoid confusion with two other airports serving London (Gatwick and Stansted), London Airport was renamed Heathrow in September, 1966 . . . one month after we departed.

In 1966, international airport security was virtually nonexistent by today's standards.  Terminal buildings were completely open.  Friends and family members—including non-passengers without tickets—could walk all the way through the terminal to the gate and sometimes even out on the tarmac to the plane -- there were no jetbridges from the building to the planes.  See photo above.

Carry-on bags, briefcases, and checked luggage were not scanned or inspected for weapons or explosives.  There were no walk-through metal detectors; no X-ray machines; no routine body or bag searches.  Passengers could carry items like pocket knives, tools, or wrapped gifts onto the plane without restriction.  I carried on a full-size souvenir épée with a blunt tip (Why did I buy that??) and one of the girls in the other group brought a switchblade she had bought in Italy (illegal in the U.S.) tucked into her underwear!

Besides for historical perspective, the foregoing is intended to explain (in part) what we encountered at Heathrow.  As we walked into the ticketing area to check our bags and get our boarding passes (printed on paper with a little tear-off stub with your row and seat number on it), the place was swarming with teenage girls . . . hordes of them running back and forth like a murmuration of starlings.  And in the boarding gate concourses, the same phenomenon . . . hundreds of girls excitedly running everywhere.  It was weird.

At our gate, the doors to the tarmac were locked and guarded, and when we were escorted out to the plane, only passengers were allowed out.  As I walked out, I looked back at the terminal building and the observation decks were totally jammed with people.  On board the plane, we asked one of the flight attendants what was going on with all the girls swarming the airport.  The answer:  the Beatles were at the airport that morning to depart for their final North American tour.

Beatles departing for the U.S. from London Airport, August 11, 1966

See -- I am not making this up!!  The Beatles' flight left after ours did, so we never came close to seeing them.  But still . . . once again, we were there on the day!

I have faint memories of the rest of the trip.  Flying west, at one point the pilot came on the address system to announce that people on the righthand side of the plane could see Greenland out the windows.  This is what it looked like; kinda hard to tell . . .

Over the next 48 hours, we retraced our outbound itinerary:  London to Montreal by air; Montreal to Chicago to Oklahoma City by train.  The Beatles' first shows in the U.S. were August 12 in Chicago (an afternoon and an evening show).  On the train out of Chicago there were people who had been to the afternoon concert; in conversation with them we nonchalantly mentioned that we had been at the London airport the previous day when the Beatles left.  

In any event, it was a long, boring, restless train ride home, and it took some time to recover and adjust to U.S. Central time.  Nevertheless, I had had a truly Excellent European Adventure!

As I have been posting these stories, a number of people have asked what long-term effects the trip had on my life.  I'll share some reflections on that in my next post.

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 15: Swingin' London

 

Time magazine cover, April 15, 1966

Nearing the end of our European Adventure, we skipped a scheduled overnight on the Continent and spent it sleeping in our van in Canterbury (see previous post, "Chapter 14," below this post) so that we could have a full day in London before heading home.

Our primary objective for that extra day wasn't the British Museum, the National Gallery, or the V&A Museum.  It was someplace more compelling and top of mind for a group of American teenagers in the mid-1960s:  Carnaby Street.

On April 15, 1966, less than three months before we set out on our trip, Time magazine published its cover story on "London: The Swinging City" (see photo at the top of this post.)  Here are a couple of excerpts from the article:

In this century, every decade has had its city. . . . Today, it is London.  In a decade dominated by youth, London has burst into bloom.  It swings; it is the scene.

Perhaps nothing illustrates the new swinging London better than narrow, three-block-long Carnaby Street, which is crammed with a cluster of the "gear" boutiques where the girls and boys buy each other clothing. Nine of the shops for boys on Carnaby Street are owned by Designer John Stephen, 29, who last week took his tattersall shirts, Dutch boy caps, form-fitting pants and vinyl vests to Manhattan to put the fear of God into parents there. 

With hype like that, we had to go!

Carnaby Street looking NNW at the intersection with Ganton Street

Carnaby Street looking SSE toward the intersection with Ganton Street

When we were there in August of 1966, Carnaby Street was the epicenter of  British music and fashion that powered much of the cultural revolution of the 1960s.  The Beatles, The Stones, movie stars, models . . . all came to Carnaby Street and exported the Carnaby Street zeitgeist to the world.

Geographically, the Carnaby Street shopping district is only 3/10ths of a mile from Savile Row -- a 6-minute walk.  But culturally it was a world away from the ruling class custom menswear shop at  #1 Savile Row where I had bravely ventured in to buy a tie at the beginning of the trip five weeks earlier (see "Chapter 2" below).  I don't remember buying anything on Carnaby Street, nor did I see any rock stars, movie stars, or supermodels.  But I can say I was there when it was the cool place to be.

Next post:  Heading home . . . and what we saw at Heathrow.

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 14: Racing Across the Continent

 

Nearing the end of our six-week tour of Europe, we were moving fast,​ trying to cram in all the places we wanted to visit​ while sticking to our planned itinerary . . . except for one risky change of plan that resulted in a very uncomfortable night in Canterbury.

From Munich we headed north to Frankfurt am Main, where we had an unique experience:  afternoon tea with the Methodist bishop of West Germany, Friedrich Wunderlich, in his home.  The visit was arranged by a friend of my family who was in the U.S. Army stationed in Frankfurt.

From Frankfurt we motored on to Cologne, with its iconic twin spire cathedral.

The next morning, before we left, I photographed the great cathedral.  It's so huge I couldn't get it all into one frame.  It seats approximately 4,000 people.

According to Wikipedia, "Construction of Cologne Cathedral began in 1248, but was halted in the years around 1560.  Attempts to complete construction began around 1814, but the project was not properly funded until the 1840s.  The edifice was completed to its original medieval plan in 1880."

After its completion in 1880, at 515 feet the cathedral's towers were the world's tallest building until the Washington Monument was completed in 1884.  When we visited it in 1966, the cathedral was the second tallest church building in Europe -- tallest was the Ulm Minster in Ulm, Germany -- and with the completion of the Sagrada Familia towers in Barcelona last year, the Cologne cathedral is now the third tallest.  It was declared a World Heritage site in 1996, and is Germany's most visited landmark.

Later that morning we drove to Amsterdam, where we visited the Rijksmuseum, and stared in awe at Rembrandt's "Night Watch" and other paintings from the Dutch Golden Age (1588-1672), the period when the Netherlands became one of the leading commercial and maritime powers in Europe.

Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The next few days are fuzzy in my memory.  From Amsterdam we traveled to Brussels, where I found that record shop I reported in the post before this one.  But I do remember that by this time we were so eager to get back to the U.K. we decided to leave the Continent a day ahead of schedule, even though we had no place to stay in England that night.

We took the ferry from Ostende back to Dover and then drove 16 miles to Canterbury in hopes that the hostel we had booked for the next night (and had paid in advance for) would have room for us.  They didn't.

So we spent the night in the van -- all nine of us -- in the parking lot of Canterbury Cathedral.  None of us slept well.  At some point during the night -- I think it was about 1:30 or 2:00am, but who knows? -- a Bobby knocked on the window and asked if we were OK.  Tom, our adult leader, explained our situation, and the Bobby told us we would need to leave at dawn . . . at least that's how I remember it.  

Canterbury Cathedral is located on the site of one of the oldest Christian structures in England.  It was founded in 597 CE, but over the centuries it has been destroyed, rebuilt, and enlarged many times.  Its history is far too long and complicated to be recapitulated in this post, so if you're interested, check out the information at Wikipedia here.  Nevertheless, before we left town I took a few pictures of the cathedral.

After Canterbury, we headed back to London, where we had a few more tourist-y objectives.  I'll elaborate on that -- and what we encountered at Heathrow Airport on departure day -- in my next post.

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Musical Interlude #2: I Saw Her Again

After the profound sadness of my previous post earlier this week, let's take a break with a lighter episode.

In the last weeks of my European Adventure, all of us were getting a little homesick.  I don't know how others in the group dealt with that, but I was looking for some sort of escape from Europe's rich and unfamiliar cultural environment when I wandered into a record shop in Brussels during the final week of the trip where, yes, they sold vinyl LPs and 45s.

The shop had private, soundproof listening booths where you could choose a 45 and listen on headphones.  I don't know why, but I picked "I Saw Her Again" by The Mamas & the Papas, which I had not heard before.  It had been released only a few weeks earlier in Europe as a follow-up to their #1 hit, "Monday Monday," released in March.

The story behind the song is interesting and very typical of the music scene of the mid-1960s.  According to Wikipedia,

      One of three songs co-written by the two male members of the group (the others being "Got a Feelin'" and "For the Love of Ivy"), "I Saw Her Again" was inspired by [Denny] Doherty's brief affair with Michelle Phillips, then married to John Phillips, which, combined with an affair between Michelle Phillips and Gene Clark of The Byrds, resulted in the brief expulsion of Michelle from the group. 

       While mixing the record, engineer Bones Howe punched in the coda vocals too early, inadvertently including Doherty's false start on the third chorus ("I saw her..."). Despite attempting to correct the error, the miscued vocal could still be heard on playback. Producer Lou Adler liked the effect and told Howe to leave it in the final mix.

The song's lyrics -- the singer's ambivalence about his relationship with a woman -- had no personal significance for me.  Heck, I didn't even have a girlfriend at that point in my life, much less one that I might have had ambivalent feelings for.  That sort of thing would come a few years later at the end of a complicated relationship.

But the song's driving rhythms, with multi-layered vocals and instruments, were pure American sound . . . the sound of home for me.  And for 3 minutes and 10 seconds I was back in familiar territory.

You can listen to "I Saw Her Again" by clicking here.  The false start mixing mistake (mentioned above) happens at 2:42 into the song.

Enjoy!

My Excellent European Adventure 60th Anniversary - Chapter 13: Dachau

 

                                                               Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things.

                                                                                      -- Terry Pratchett, in I Shall Wear Midnight

In January, 1933, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and the Nazi Party took control of the government.  Two months later, March 22, 1933, the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Dachau, a town founded in the 9th century CE about 12 miles northwest of Munich.  In its operation it served as a prototype and model for all other German concentration camps that followed.

The camp was established on the grounds of a munitions factory abandoned after WWI.  It was originally used to intern political opponents of the Nazi Party, which consisted of communists, social democrats, and other dissidents.  Soon, however, it was enlarged to imprison Jews, Sinti and Romani, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, immigrants, Germans, and Austrians that the Nazis regarded as criminals, and finally prisoners of war from countries that Germany invaded or occupied, including Poland and the Soviet Union.

When a contingent of SS soldiers arrived in May, 1933, to operate the camp, their commander gave a speech, leaving no doubt as to the purpose of the camp:

Comrades of the SS!

You all know what the Führer has called us to do. We have not come here for human encounters with those pigs in there. We do not consider them human beings, as we are, but as second-class people.  . . . The more of these pig dogs we strike down, the fewer we need to feed.

This is an actual photo of the SS commander giving the speech above.

By Bundesarchiv, Bild 152-01-16 / Friedrich Franz Bauer / CC-BY-SA 3.0, CC BY-SA 3.0 de, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5420179

Dachau was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, and others, but during the 12 years of its existence, over 32,000 died there, mostly through disease, malnutrition, and suicide, or were murdered by forced labor, torture, and execution.  Thousands more deaths are undocumented.  When the camp was liberated on April 29, 1945, 10,000 of the 30,000 in the camp were sick.

Dachau prisoners at liberation.  Photo by unknown author - United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Photograph 45075, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=542805

We entered the camp in silence, generally aware of the history but unaware of the horrible details of how people were treated, and not really capable of processing the enormity of the evil that was committed on the land under our feet.

I took color photographs, but for this post to convey something of the emotions I felt, I have intentionally processed all but the final two images in black-and-white, with all the dust spots, scratches, and blemishes that have accumulated since 1966.

The barracks in which thousands tried to survive had all been removed . . . only the outlines of the foundations remained.

Here's what they looked like in 1945:

By T/4 Sidney Blau, 163rd Signal Photo Company, Army Signal Corps - U.S. Holocaust Museum photograph #37255 (also here)Credit: SC 206310, Credit NARA, College ParkSubject Classification: MAJOR CONCENTRATION CAMPS 1940-45 -- Dachau -- LIBERATION -- Views -- GeneralKeywords: DACHAU, CONCENTRATION CAMPS, BARRACKS, VIEWS, SURVIVORS, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=542794

Below is the Maintenance Building, which housed workshops, equipment storage, laundry, and kitchen facilities.  It was also where incoming prisoners were processed and humiliated by stripping them naked, shaving their heads, and collecting all personal items.  The large open space in front was the roll call assembly area.

With so many deaths, Dachau had a crematorium, not as large as the ones in the death camps, but still . . .

But not far away, there were two memorials with messages for all of us.  The first is a statue called the Statue of the Unknown Prisoner:

The inscription on the plinth says ""DEN TOTEN ZUR EHR / DEN LEBENDEN ZUR MAHNUNG," which translates as "To honor the dead, to admonish the living."

The other memorial is the Jewish memorial, with a menorah at the top and the Star of David inscribed in a circle:

 

The marker at the front of the memorial, in German and English, says "Grave of Thousands Unknown."

But what you can't see in this photo, inscribed on the horizontal bar below the circle with the Star of David, are the words in German, Hebrew, and English:

                                                                  DO NOT FORGET

I will not forget.