In 1933–34 I was a junior at Smith College taking a year to study German literature and medieval art at the University of Munich. I lived with the Count and Countess von Armansperg and their son and daughter.
The count had been a page in the kaiser’s court and was now one of Hitler’s generals. Like so many other Germans, he hoped that the new chancellor would lead their country out of its financial mess.
Both the count and countess were thoughtful, well educated, and charming people, but thoroughly German. Every now and then they would have Hitler, Goering, Roehm, and all the rest of them over for tea. I was often invited to attend.
As a nineteen-year-old blonde, blue-eyed very naive young girl, I was just the type Hitler liked.
As a nineteen-year-old blonde, blue-eyed, very naive young girl, I was just the type Hitler liked. He had, I must admit, a great deal of teatime charisma. Of course, everyone courted the chancellor’s attention.
One afternoon I caught his eye, and he invited me to have dinner with him at his home the following Saturday night. I took one look at the little fellow with the funny mustache, thought of the handsome intern I was going with, and promptly answered, “Thank you for asking me, but I already have a date.”
The count and countess nearly fainted. One didn’t turn down an invitation from the chancellor of Germany!
But that was that: my brush with history. How grateful I am it was just a “brush.”
—Mary A. Saalfield lives in Hudson, Ohio, and was the first woman president of the Akron Art Museum Board of Trustees.
MOSCOW—SAN JACINTO
It was July 14, 1937, and my family was staying at Soboba Hot Springs and Resort in the mountains east of Los Angeles near the sleepy town of San Jacinto. We visited Soboba frequently; our parents took mud baths at the spa, and my little brother and I spent lazy days at the pool.
That July day we walked into the dining room for breakfast to find the staff and guests buzzing with the news that a Russian airplane had landed in a farmer’s cow pasture outside San Jacinto. After a hasty breakfast my family got into the car and drove down to see for ourselves. Sure enough, there was a big red and white plane, gleaming in the sunlight. Nobody could imagine what it was doing there, and seeing it made our astonishment grow. It is hard to remember, but there was no television then to flash the story around the world with instant explanations and commentary, and the U.S.S.R. was a closed and somewhat forbidding society operating under the dictator Stalin.
We eventually pieced together the story. Early that morning a newspaperboy had seen the plane bounce to a landing. He had run across the pasture to it, and the Soviet pilot, whose name turned out to be Mikhail Gromov, handed him a note written in English before the plane had left Russia: “We are Soviet airmen flying to America from Moscow across the North Pole. Please inform the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, the local authorities and the nearest flying field that we have landed safely.”
The next year the Soviet government honored the three fliers who made the trip with a postage stamp showing the sky blazers and a map of the air route between Moscow and San Jacinto. The flight of their single-engine Tupolev ANT-25 patrol plane proved the Soviets could repeat the feat of flying the transpolar route to the United States; their first flight had landed earlier that year at Pearson Army Air Corps Field in Washington State. Both flights were a wake-up call to United States military authorities that polar flights were not only possible but feasible. The flight into a Southern California cow pasture not only established a world distance record of 6,262 miles but set the stage for today’s polar air routes.
Dad paid the farmer twenty-five cents so we could drive onto his field to see the plane. It seems to me the bargain of a lifetime.
—Babbie Bogue Stull is a freelance writer in Hartville, Missouri.
BUTCH CASSIDY AND THE KARMANN GHIA
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid had just blasted into our local theater, and it was the most exciting movie I had ever seen. I was seventeen years old, and my horse was a ’59 Volkswagen Karmann Ghia.
It wasn’t an ordinary Karmann Ghia by any standard, and to me it was extra special. Well before the hopped-up Volkswagen craze of the late sixties and seventies hit my native Connecticut, this slim model sported tall, fat rear wheels and tires beneath flared fenders and an aerodynamic tail with spoiler and round red lenses à la Corvette. Inside the crowded rear engine compartment, these body cosmetics were rendered legitimate by a Porsche engine breathing fire through twin Weber carburetors and an independent dual exhaust system. The front wheels would easily jump up from the road when I shifted too hard from first to second gear. Through savings from my job at the Clam Box and a small loan from my father, I had obtained the well-used car in unfinished form. I used my limited mechanical knowledge to “mint it out,” and I did a decent “shive job,” as we called it.
The car became infinitely more attractive when I was informed that “the Butch Cassidy guy” also owned a VW conversion and was an avid racer. I was sure that one day I would also be in auto racing. My interest in Butch Cassidy grew, resulting in several more trips to the movies before the film stopped showing.
Not long afterward, my girlfriend and I drove to Maine, where my father had a camp on the coast. During the trip the car’s starter developed a problem, and on the long ride home the exhaust system leaked. I waited for the weekend to make repairs.
The old guy (probably thirty) from whom I had bought the car had a complete shop in one of his barns and let me use it for repairs. I went there early Saturday morning; every push on the accelerator produced a noise like the ripping of heavy canvas. The “old guy” was already at work on another VW; I was careful not to run over the legs that stuck out from under a car up on jack stands as I backed into one of the bays.
I got out, producing my meager tool kit; I knew that mechanics were not fond of sharing tools and hoped I would have to borrow as little as possible.
“Good morning,” I said to the legs.
“Morning,” I heard over the sound of the workbench radio.
Knowing that the exhaust work would be more complicated than the starter job, I began at the manifold to remove the spaghettilike pipes, the signature of a “tricked-out” VW. Excited about the driving I had done in Maine, I launched into a monologue at my captive audience beneath the other car. The coastal roads were beautiful, I explained, smooth and winding. Behind the wheel they would be the closest thing he’d see to a road-racing track. He should go there one day; I’d be happy to go with him.
Engrossed in his repairs, he mumbled in polite agreement. Except for the radio playing songs like “Ode to Billy Joe,” silence overtook us as we continued with our work. I almost had the entire exhaust system ready for removal when my shop partner spoke.
“Hey, can you give me a hand under here?” I heard over the music. “I’ll give you a few driving tips when we’re done.”
What? Give me driving tips? Didn’t he know I was a natural? Why else would I have bought his hot Karmann Ghia? But he was letting me use his shop, so I kept my teenage mouth shut and slid under his car. I think he had been installing new brake lines or converting drums to discs. As I slapped wrenches into his outstretched palm like an operating-room nurse, it was only shop etiquette that prevented me from laughing at his grease-stained face, unrecognizable behind protective goggles. The job done, he thanked me, and we both crawled out, picking up tools. Maybe now he’d give me a hand with my exhaust and forget the driving advice. No such luck. He had his back to me by the bench as he removed his goggles, wiped his face with a clean rag, and began saying, “If you’re really interested in road racing, forget the roads and work toward getting yourself on the tracks.” But I was stupefied, for he had turned around, and I realized I was looking at Butch Cassidy. I had helped Paul Newman work on his car! Paul Newman was giving me driving advice!
Apparently the “old guy” was a friend of Mr. Newman and had given him the same shop privileges he had me.
I bumped into Butch Cassidy once again at the shop a few months later, but he was busy with several other men installing an engine, and we didn’t speak. Weeks turned into seasons and then years. I never got my car on a real track, but I continued to follow auto racing and spent some time racing motorcycles.
Several years later, well after I had traded my Karmann Ghia for a high-mileage Shelby Mustang and then that for a Mercury station wagon, I was eating at The Deck, a little restaurant that hung over a tributary to the Housatonic River in West Cornwall, Connecticut. I was with an older, different girlfriend, when I noticed that Paul Newman and his entire family were there too. My girlfriend also noticed and began to coo quietly. And, oh God, look at Joanne Woodward!
“I know him,” I said to Robin. “I’ll introduce you if you like.”
That brought out a couple of chortles and a “Sure you do!” My honor was at stake. Robin refused to come when I headed for his table. She was sure I would play the joke to the end. I cautiously approached, and when there was a lull in the family conversation, I stepped forward, excused myself, and politely asked Mr. Newman if he remembered our meeting under his car. Well, of course he did, and would I care to pull up a chair and join them for a drink? After all, I had given him a hand back in the shop. I was flattered but glanced back toward my table, where Robin was staring at me open-mouthed. Pull up two chairs, I was told. For the next half-hour Paul and I talked cars while Robin chatted with Joanne Woodward. These celebrated Connecticut Yankees were very gracious.
Apparently the whole family had gone up to Lime Rock, where they watched Dad race. After we discussed how Mr. Newman and his associates had discovered that by rebuilding, they could squeeze more horsepower out of the VW engines than we used to get from the small Porsche power plants, Robin and I finished our drinks and made our departure. I was elated for the rest of the evening.
That was the last I saw of him, almost twenty years ago, although he still lives in Westport and I remain in nearby Fairfield. But I thought of him recently when he was in the news, and I smiled remembering how I had offered the man who just placed first in his class at Daytona the chance to learn some driving skills from me.
—T. Turk Leebaert is a landscape contractor and a correspondent for Travel World News.
MY DOCTOR
In May 1955 I went to work for the city of New York, first as a social investigator for the Department of Welfare and later, in 1957, as a probation officer for teenage girls deemed in need of supervision by court order. We city employees were enrolled in an early health maintenance plan—the Health Insurance Plan, known as HIP. I was allowed to choose a primary-care physician from among the eight or nine doctors in my area. I picked a Dr. Soblen because his office was near my apartment on West Seventy-sixth Street.
The first few times I went to see him, Dr. Soblen struck me as rather grim and unfriendly, but he seemed capable. In his late fifties, he was of above-average height, had dark hair turning gray, and was interesting-looking in a saturnine way.
When I went to see him about a fever, he took my temperature, gave me a thorough examination, and, after looking into my mouth, said, “You had better see your dentist. You have some little sores on your gum.” He wanted to give me a penicillin injection, but I was afraid of needles and refused.
Then I went to my dentist, who took X rays and found that my wisdom teeth were impacted and would have to come out, but he would not do the extractions until I had penicillin, for fear of spreading infection. Sheepishly I went back to Dr. Soblen, who said, “I told you so.” Then, perhaps to take my mind off the hypodermic headed toward my behind, he started to ask me about my job as a welfare worker. I told him about some of my clients: the old, ragged lady who would come to the office pulling behind her a small wagon in which her equally ragged cat rode; the young woman who was a recipient of the first experimental tuberculosis drugs, at Seaview Hospital on Staten Island.
Then there was the case one of my coworkers handled. This was a man in his late seventies, recently released from federal prison. He had been incarcerated for being a Nazi spy in World War II. He was frail and had no means of support, so his parole officer arranged welfare assistance. He used to show his caseworker a scrapbook filled with clippings about his wartime exploits. For some reason Dr. Soblen seemed amused by this story.
During future visits he seemed friendlier. In the fall of 1957 there was a severe epidemic of Asian flu. Since I had had to make home visits to housebound clients laid low by the illness, I succumbed and felt awful. When I went to see Dr. Soblen, he prescribed bed rest and gave me some medicine to ease the aches. He commented on the book I was carrying, Tolstoy’s War and Peace. “Oh,” he said, “that’s pretty heavy reading for someone so sick,” but he seemed approving anyway.
The last time I saw Dr. Soblen was in January 1959.1 was about to get married and went to him for the required Wassermann test. My fiancé was a resident in medicine at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. As the wife of a physician I would receive medical care at no charge. I no longer needed HIP.
One morning in November 1960 I picked up the day’s New York Times, and there, right on the front page, was a picture of Dr. Soblen—my Dr. Robert Soblen. The headline read, BROTHER OH SOBLK IS SKIZKD AS A WARTIMK SOVIKT SPY. Dr. Soblen, I discovered, was actually a psychiatrist at Rockland State Hospital and had evidently been serving as a conduit passing on information, possibly scientific, to the Soviets. Perhaps he used his Manhattan HIP office as a cover, as a place where people could come and go and not cause comment; I will never know.
According to the article, and subsequent ones, it seemed that he and his brother, Jack Soble, had been born in Lithuania and recruited by the Soviets in the 1930s to be involved in European espionage. It is possible that they had agreed to spy in the United States after World War II, in exchange for their parents being allowed to leave.
Dr. Soblen’s story ended tragically: He always denied his guilt and, sentenced to life imprisonment, he managed to flee to Israel, claiming the right of return. The Israelis, at the request of the United States government, deported him to England because they did not have an extradition treaty with the United States but Great Britain did. Seized by FBI agents, Dr. Soblen took an overdose of barbiturates, and died in a London hospital.
It was a sad end for an intelligent, capable man. Now I can understand his grimness, his interest in my story about the spy on welfare and in my reading War and Peace. He remains in my mind a good physician, trapped by circumstances that twisted him.
—Suzanna W. Stern lives in Rego Park, New York.
THE PREMIER’S FRIEND
Cautiously our driver worked the cab between trucks unloading yellow barriers on the street outside the downtown Royal, considered in 1972 to be Copenhagen’s finest hotel. A polite soldier stopped us to apologize for the inconvenience, although he volunteered no explanation for the barricades.
In that early evening the lobby was crammed with people. Suddenly, out of nowhere, came an assistant manager who pounced on our luggage and deftly ran interference for my wife and me to an empty, back elevator.
Inside our ninth-floor room he handed over the key, and, graciously refusing a tip, told us that someone would be along shortly to answer questions. I assured him we had a few.
With surprising ease I reached Potters, a friend at the U.S. Embassy, who had made our reservations. “So far,” I told him in the Russian we both spoke and enjoyed using on one another, “your influence has been incredible.”
“Thanks be to God, and also to the Kremlin,” he chanted in Church Slavonic. A sharp Kremlinologist who liked to create Russian crossword puzzles, he sat behind a desk overlooking a splendid nine-hole Danish golf course offering an unobstructed view of the Soviet Embassy only about a six iron further.
“Your room,” he went on, “is beneath an entire top floor reserved for Alexey Nikolayevich.” He meant Kosygin, the Soviet premier.
“He’s here?”
“Expected about midnight, they say, to avoid those unhappy demonstrators.” Refugees from the U.S.S.R. and other communist venues, he said, were having trouble understanding why the new sovereign, Margrethe II, needed to invite Kosygin for a state visit so early in her reign.
“Have you had dinner?” Potters asked.
“On the plane.”
“Good. Stay put, Clem, and we’ll do business in the morning and maybe nine brisk holes in the afternoon.” I was in Copenhagen to buy Danish furniture at diplomatic prices for our embassy in Budapest.
By dawn the barricades seemed ample for heading off any rash charges at the hotel doors. A fabulous breakfast arrived at our room at seven. Wilma, my wife, was pouring coffee when there came a polite knock. In my pajamas I eyed the neatly attired, softspoken Dane—a Captain Ewald, he said—who apologized for intruding as he handed over the morning paper featuring Kosygin’s likeness just beneath the front-page fold.
“We are obviously not dressed to travel,” I complained.
“No, no,” he said. “You and Mrs. Scerback may stay undisturbed. As a matter of fact, you are the only guests remaining on this floor.”
“And the Soviets are above us?”
He nodded. “Thirty of them. But you may come and go as you please.” “They know we are here?”
He smiled. “To be sure.” Suddenly switching to Russian, he said, “Your telephone is, of course, secure, Mr. Scerback.” Handing over my shined shoes, he added, “We have our own lines to several embassies—including yours.”
“Almost like overkill.”
“Not at all, sir. Do not expect our friends upstairs to believe a Russian-speaking American diplomat is in Copenhagen only to buy furniture.”
“But he is,” I said.
“Simple things are difficult for them,” he admitted.
Ewald’s Russian pronunciation— proiznoshenye—was impeccable, I later remarked to my wife. Many of us may speak Russian well, though relatively few sound Russian. “If he were indeed a Dane,” Wilma mused.
Like Potters, I, too, found Russian culture fascinating as I probed the language. Wilma told me it even showed in my attire, and this morning I must have laid it all on: dark suit, white shirt, red tie, black dress boots, and one of those squarish knee-length top-coats from Munich that made the wearer look like a black refrigerator.
The hat, a furashka, was the final touch, causing her to sigh, “You really look like one of them.”
Leaving her in the shower, I rode down to the lobby for a quick look: almost deserted except for obvious local-police types posted around the corners. Muted crowd sounds filtered in from outside through the revolving doors where I positioned myself. It was coming on nine o’clock with no Ewald in sight, but I had the feeling that something was about to break.
With a bang it did. All five elevator doors surged open, simultaneously discharging a company-front phalanx of Soviet brass heading in my direction. In the middle was Premier Kosygin.
One alert bodyguard immediately zeroed in on me as they neared. Then Kosygin also caught my eye, an expression of recognition lighting his face. At that moment I recalled the many times all over the world that I had been mistaken for someone else. My gut reaction was to speak colloquially, using the familiar form of address: “Good morning, Alexey Niklayevich.”
Visibly pleased, moving closer, he extended his hand, mumbling something about not having seen me in a long while.
That was enough for the bodyguard. Throwing me a murderous look, he sharply jabbed his elbow into Kosygin’s side, virtually pushing the startled, and utterly confused, premier toward the exit. Clearly audible was his fierce admonition to the premier:
“On nye nash! On nye nash!” (He’s not ours!)
Both Potters and Captain Ewald, the latter having enjoyed the incident immensely from behind a newspaper, agreed to score it as a linguistic holein-one.
—Clement G. Scerback, a former senior diplomat with the United States Information Agency, lives in Florida.
THE DINNER PAIL
In the years since I have had to use the services of a baby-sitter, inflation has hit this little business. I was amazed to find that the rate per hour has more than doubled. My grandchildren are baby-sitters, and they make a lot of money. Listening to one of their conversations, I discovered that accompanying fringe benefits are important to them and are carefully considered before they accept jobs: large color televisions, for instance, and families that leave out lots of snacks.
I couldn’t resist a lecture on how tough things were when I was young and how lucky they were to be able to earn money so easily. I had a different way of earning money, and memory came flooding back as I described it.
I was born in Fall River, Massachusetts, a hilltop city overlooking Mount Hope Bay, an arm of Narragansett Bay. These deep blue waterways were carved out by the same glacial activity that forged a chain of long, narrow lakes east of the hill, which funnel into the Quequechan River. With the force of the lakes behind it, the river descends rapidly with a fall of 130 feet in onehalf mile before it joins the waters of the bay.
As early as 1700 gristmills and iron-works were standing along its banks, and when a few decades later the spinning jenny made such improvements in the weaving of cloth that what had been a cottage industry moved into mills, the swift Quequechan proved an ideal site for them. Eleven mills were strung along the banks of the lakes in 1872, and there were forty-three by 1876. By 1900 Fall River was largely given over to the weaving of cotton cloth.
The mills were enormous affairs, three stories high, built of the granite that was abundant in the area. They were insatiable in their demand for workers. Sometimes whole families labored in them, and what long hours they worked! The starting whistle summoned them to the job at seven o’clock and, except for a toot at noon, didn’t blow again until five-thirty, with no coffee breaks and only a half-hour for lunch. The short lunch break posed a problem in getting these hardworking people fed. It was before the days of company cafeterias, and there wasn’t time enough to go home. This is how my friends and I earned our spending money. We carried dinners to the mills, either for our parents and relatives or for families whose children were grown.
Fall River has been called the City of the Dinner Pail. Although I haven’t seen a dinner nail in many years, I remember it well. It was made of galvanized tin, had three nesting compartments, and a bail handle. A hot drink in the bottom compartment kept meat and potatoes warm in the smaller compartment above. A still smaller compartment on top held dessert, and a tight-fitting lid covered the whole thing. Thus this ingenious pail carried a whole dinner. The meals were prepared at home and carried by us children to the mills. The school day was broken up into two sessions, with a two-hour break in between, so at eleven-thirty hundreds of schoolchildren poured out of my school, rushed home to pick up the dinners, then set off for the mills, hurrying to get there before the noon whistle blew. There was no lingering to talk with friends on the way, but coming back I could saunter along if it was warm. If it was cold, I wasted no time getting back to my own warm dinner. I remember walking through snow up to my hips and through drenching rainstorms that made it feel as though my journey was a long one. But it couldn’t have been very far if I walked to the mill and back, ate my own dinner, and got back to school by one-thirty.
So it was that I began my working life at the age of seven. We were very poor but weren’t aware of it since all the families we knew were poor too. There was nothing unusual in women going to work as soon as the youngest child was in school. So when my younger sister started school, my mother went back to her old job as a weaver, and I was considered old enough to bring her lunch. After all, my grandmother, who had been born during the Industrial Revolution in England, had actually worked in a mill from dawn to dusk when she was just a year older than I. All I was asked to do was carry a pail. I felt capable of it and proud to be “carrying dinners” along with my friends.
The weavers worked in a downstairs room. To get to it, I opened a heavy door at the top of a flight of brass-bound stairs that led to another heavy door at the bottom. I was so short that the bottom of the pail bumped on the steps as I went down. The handle was not rigid, and the pail tipped perilously at each bump. The brass bindings were loose, and I was terrified that I would trip on the step and spill the dinner pail’s contents. Each trip down was a nightmare as I made my way, step by step, until I reached the bottom and struggled to open the other heavy door. Only then could I relax my viselike grip on the pail and breathe a little more easily as I crossed the spinning room: rows and rows of spindles where that marvelous spinning jenny quietly twisted the yarn into thread.
On the other side of this room was the door to the weaving room. I always hesitated before opening this door; the noise from the clattering looms, combined with the hot, oily smell, was a blow in the face, and I hated to go in. Hundreds of looms were lined up here, each working away with a life of its own. I would watch fascinated as the shuttle carrying the warp flew back and forth between the two rows of thread, while the heavy harness banged each row taut. It always looked as though the harness was trying to catch the shuttle in mid-flight, and I would wait nervously for the disaster to happen. But in spite of appearances, the looms were well under the control of the workers, who paced back and forth between the rows, changing bobbins and watching for imperfections in the woven cloth, each one tending from two to six looms. Spoken communication was impossible, but the workers became adept at carrying on long conversations in sign language. I couldn’t understand all of it, but I watched with admiration as they talked. A woman told my mother of a telephone call she had had, and the motions of her hands described the conversation perfectly.
The end of my journey came as I delivered the pail to my mother, its contents intact. At twelve o’clock the looms stopped, and the weavers were free to enjoy their lunches in the deafening silence.
We were paid twenty-five cents a week for this work. It doesn’t sound like a demanding job; the pain was in the doing of it every day. Many children carried two pails in each hand, and I remember one enterprising boy who used to load six or eight pails into a wagon. For a while I carried dinner to a supervisor who thought it beneath his dignity to be seen carrying a pail home at night. He paid me an extra ten cents a week to carry the pail home for him.
The job began to seem to be beneath my dignity, too, as I neared the end of grammar school. After struggling through a particularly heavy snow-storm, I told my employer not to expect me if we had another one. My days as a dinner carrier came to an inglorious end when I didn’t appear after the next storm and was abruptly dismissed. I can’t believe my own callousness in not thinking of the poor soul who missed his dinner!
Naturally, my grandchildren thought this was a pretty hard way to earn twenty-five cents. Looking back on it now, I can see benefits other than the money. The walk to the mills in all kinds of weather strengthened our legs, and the fresh air sharpened our appetites. It isn’t the long walk that I remember most when I think of those days. Rather, it is the rattling of loose brass as I crept down the steps toward the pandemonium and my mother’s smiling face.
—Alice Grinnell Killam recently moved from Massachusetts to Concord, New Hampshire, where she is pursuing her master’s degree in English.
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