I packed my stuff, grabbed my dumbass bicycle, and headed to the quaint, meek train station in Blaubeuren, hopped on a D-Zug and headed to Ulm. From there I took an intercity train up to Bonn, the then capital of West Germany.
Remember, Folks, we’re talking late November 1981. Just a few days before American Thanksgiving. Ronald Reagan was president. Helmut Schmidt was West German Chancellor. Erich Honecker was at the top of the East German regime. Leonid Brezhnev was General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. And, Deng Xiaoping was widely regarded as the country’s “paramount leader”, even though he did not hold the formal head-of-state title.
My mother, Laura, was only fifty-one years of age. My stepfather, Don, was fifty-seven. Thea, the oldest in the family, in law school. Frank, the oldest brother, and his wife, Mary, were expecting their first child. Tim, a year and a day older than me, was working as an English teacher. Bob, two years younger than me, was a college student in Philadelphia. Tom, the youngest in the family, was still in high school.
Our father, Frank, had passed away only seven years before, on November 19. Heart failure. At the age of forty-four. The first massive heart attack was in 1965. He was thirty-five. A self-employed consultant. With six children. In Detroit on business. My mother had to fly up from Philadelphia. Then, two years later, in 1967, the second massive heart attack. Again on business. Far from Philadelphia. In Toronto. Mr. Heidt, one of our neighbors drove my mother two hours up to JFK Airport to catch a flight to Canada. No direct flights from Philadelphia.
1967. No cell phones. No Internet. No speaking directly with physicians or nurses. “How is he doing? What’s his current state? How massive? Will he survive? Will I make it in time? Can I speak to him?” None of that. Instead, prayer.
My mother, born in 1930, was raised a Roman Catholic. Mass every Sunday. And on holy days of obligation. Immaculate Conception Church Jenkintown, outside of Philadelphia. Her parish. Catholic elementary school. Notre Dame High School for Girls. Then Chestnut Hill College in Philadelphia. All-women and Catholic. Run by the “Joes”, the Sisters of St. Joseph order of nuns.
Growing up saying the rosary every evening after dinner. Eight children around the kitchen table. With their mother, my grandmother. A widow at the age of thirty-seven. My grandfather had died a few days after an automobile accident. Otto Hentz, born 1899, in Covington, Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, where my grandmother, Martha Grogan, was born in 1900. Martha, with seven small children, and pregnant, a widow. At the height of the depression. My mother was seven when her father died. She would never quite fully recover. Nor did the other seven.
Back to West Germany. November 1981.
It was a different world back then. Wait. Was it different? Different in what ways? No Internet. No modern China. No Putin. No decade-long wars in the Middle East. No Trump. Wait. Are those really differences? In the larger scheme of things. Human nature. Does it change? Has it ever changed? I’m neither a philosopher nor a theologian. My understanding, my sense, however, is that human nature does not change. At least I’ve heard that, I’ve read that, hundreds of times. “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Isn’t that a famous saying? Passed down through the ages.
We all, every one of us, has things about ourselves, about our character, which are not so positive, not so nice, no so endearing. If we are fortunate, we become aware of them. If we are even more fortunate we have the courage to investigate them, to understand them, to try to figure out where they come from. And, if we are still even more fortunate, we develop ways to anticipate how they operate in us, to hold them down, to fight them. “I see you. I see what you are trying to do. I’m on to you. It won’t work. I’m prepared to do battle with you. You will not win. I’m keeping you in check. Move on to someone else. You’re wasting your time with me. I’m prepared.”
Anyway, arriving in Bonn train station was Mr. Kelley, father of Ingrid and Colleen. He was an American diplomat, stationed in the U.S. Embassy in Bonn. He lived with his German-born wife, Eva. They had a lovely four-bedroom house in the Plittersdorf section of Bonn, with an Anliegerwohnung, a separate apartment in the basement. Interestingly, just around the corner from the Papal Nuncio, Rome’s ambassador to the West German government. Also just around the corner and down the street was the Rhine River.
(I’m writing this post on Saturday, January 17th, in 2026, forty-five years later. I’ve lived in Bonn now since early 1991. The Rhine. I know it well. At least here in Bonn.)
Mr. and Mrs. Kelley agreed to take me in until I could find a German family to live with. That was the plan. Get a job. Pay my bills. Live with a German family to get better at German, and to experience how Germans live.
Mr. Kelley got me a job in the embassy. Nothing important. Organizing the move of the library in the American community into the embassy. Then, in early January we found a German family in Oberwinter, a few miles south of Bonn, who also had an Anliegerwohnung, and a daughter in the twelfth grade that needed help with English.