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SubTitle: Vaterland
Posted by: rs on 11/24/1997@11:12hrs:
In Reply to: Re: Thanksgiving on Old SI posted by: DAN BLAINE on 11/24/1997@02:39hrs:
Yeah, Dan, they do. My Swabe classmate was a Klaus but there was more than one K. at Wagner.
Now the fellow you call "Freddie" seems to be my good friend Manfred. He was a fellow lifeguard at Midland Beach one summer and always kicking a soccer ball during breaks. So I started kicking and passing and dribbling along with him. He says Wagner is rebuilding the soccer team come September, so I wind up on the team. Think we lost thirteen games in a row. His dad led the aerial invasion of Norway, later arrived SI and became brewmaster or chief engineer at the Piel's Brewery in Stapleton, where I was given the grand tour one day. Those guys didn't take coffee breaks, let me tell you. More like huge tankards of whatever potion they were brewing. They made varietal beers for in-house use beyond the generic product they shipped. I was W. Class of '62. A number of kids' parents were on the wrong side during WWII. The father of one lovely was a U-boat captain, and another insisted it wasn't the SS who did all those bad things, but the SD. Her father was in the SS, of course. I'll never forget one friend who visited the beach with his mother from the old country, and a couple of friends. We got to talking about the old days. The mother had been imprisoned as a student for a doctoral thesis that sang the wrong tune. "Imaging being put in a concentration camp with all of those Jews," was her comment.