Mormon Missionary Me In The Kohlenpot

This ID kept me out of jail once when Rick Tew--a mission leader from Utah with relatives in Malad--and I were going "door to door" like LDS missionaries do. Someone called and complained to the police, the officers showed up in their cars, and I showed them this. They waited for us to exit the building, and as soon as they detained us and looked at our papers, residents began gathering around us. They wanted them to haul us to "the crowbar hotel." There was a time when I actually wished that I had been able to go to jail to experience an adventure, but now I realize that something like that would not have been fun. Some people say how felons behind bars have opportunities--television, education, relaxation, meals, recreation. These kind of people need to get out of their trailers and see a world that doesn't darken with the click of a remote, experience a life that helps them see things from a different point of view, find relaxation that forces them to think rather than recline on a couch or easy chair, taste food that doesn't have a container that fits into a microwave, seek entertainment that they can't control with a remote. They just need to "get out" a bit more. It certainly worked for me, realizing that a night in jail was not an appointment at the spa.

My first city was Oberhausen, a coal mining city in the valley of the Ruhr. The air was so dirty that soot blackened white shirts within hours of going outside. It would be two years before I could see stars at night again. The smog was overwhelming. I arrived in Germany with severe allergies, but I left with asthma.




The living accommodations were not great either. I lived in a large apartment that had no hot water and no shower or tub. We heated water on a stove or with a electrical contraption that looked like a water heater element that you plugged into a power outlet, but Elder Craig Walker from Riverside, California became a trusted friend. We worked hard and things went extremely well. In spite of the living conditions, I wish I could have spent the entire two years there, because the two of us found success because of our work ethic and dedication.
The address, located on a busy street between Oberhausen and Duisburg, was 498 Duisburgerstraße, and traffic started moving at 5:00 a.m. or earlier.

This apartment was in a building built in the 1700's according to the owner. It had massive thick walls, and the temperature inside was always cold--spring, summer, fall and winter. Before I left on a transfer to Dortmund in late August of 1972, we left a carton of milk on the kitchen table. It was a solid cube the next morning. I was there in the spring, and it was unbearably cold. Winter and late fall were two seasons I luckily did not experience there. It was, however, occasionally pretty there. And on this particular day when we went to city hall to complete required paperwork, the sky was actually blue. That was a rare occasion when haze didn't cover all of the sky except for a thin covering of smog directly above your head.

The city hall had this old elevator that is rare to find now in Germany. There are no doors, and the elevator has a series of cabins that rotate on a continual basis. You step into it when it is even with the floor. It never stops. No door opens or closes. I have seen them occasionally in old movies, depicting Germany as it was before World War II.

The building at the left actually was once a Wasserschloß, a castle with a moat. In a city like Oberhausen that never had tourists, old buildings always developed practical purposes. They transformed it into a dairy. In other cities in the area, they preserved them as a spot for people to see them. I would never have recognized what it really was if I had not been in Hamm as an exchange teacher and seen other castles like this.

There were no steep hillsides in this area to keep invaders from breaching the walls, so medieval times required you to do what the area could provide for security. In this entire area with a high water table, they used moats.

Mülheim was a city next to Oberhausen, and we also worked in part of that city. In the southern part of the city there are some woods near the Ruhr River, where I pose for this picture. I wish the entire area had looked like this, but it didn't, and I was not there at that time to hike in the forest, although it was nice to do it that particular day.

Toward the end of my stay in Oberhausen, we found this area that was near Essen, another city where I would eventually work. To get there, we passed an area of train tracks and factories. The steam engine was fun to see one day when we were working there. You can also see the bus stop signs, which a German would call a Haltestelle.
I never saw another locomotive like this one again in Germany, and in the United States I only saw one once too. Ann and I road it one day in October from Pocatello to Idaho Falls. The train was on its way to a permanent exhibit somewhere in the Northwest, and people could purchase tickets to enjoy the ride. It was fantastic. This train was fun to see too. I long trail of smoke trailed behind the locomotive pulling a long line of cars loaded with coal from the mines in Oberhausen.

The bridge we stood on to take the picture of the train showed the factories in the area, and it showed the smog that existed there too. For me, it was interesting for a farm boy to be in an industrial German city. The blue collar mentality was familiar with my farm background, but the massive numbers of people was at times overwhelming. Oberhausen had about 200,000 people at that time, and in an area of 40 or 50 square miles, the Ruhr Valley had 18,000,000 million people at that time. In the 90's when I was in Hamm as an exchange teacher, a German took me back to Oberhausen. It had two McDonald's restaurants. I was sad to see that. When I lived there, there was this incredible Balkan restaurant that had German food with Eastern European influences. However, a massive tree planting campaign as well as shutting down old factories that polluted the environment heavily made the skies clearer than I ever experienced. I could no longer smell the strong odor of steel manufacturing from smelters in Oberhausen and Duisburg and other nearby cities.
In the northern part of Oberhausen was an area called Buschhausen. At that time in Europe, they were closing streets to traffic in the city center and making them available only to pedestrians. The idea, according to one German I met, originally came from Sweden but spread across Europe. They called the area a Fußgängerzone. From this spot we worked a "street board" once every few months. Eventually we had to stop. There was a hospital in the area that treated North Vietnamese children injured in American bombing raids during that war in Asia, and they would occasionally parade them through the streets. We automatically became targets of anyone who felt in an extremely bad mood that particular morning.

The photograph at the right is also from that area. A woman there whom we taught about the church liked us to visit occasionally. I had never tasted German cheesecake before meeting her, and she soon noticed how much I liked it. After that, she had one ready for every visit.

And my life-long passion for cheesecake began in that spot in Oberhausen. I would never pass a German bakery without thinking about Käsekuchen. In Bochum, there was a bakery we passed every day on the way to a bus stop. The cost was five German Marks, and carrying a five mark coin in my pocket became a good luck symbol, until I almost gave the coin to a store owner in American in the late 70's. "What are you trying to pull here?" he said. After I explained to him the whole thing about it being my good luck charm, and after he noticed the coin was a silver coin, he wanted it back. It was worth far more than 50 cents, both sentimentally and monetarily.

When I took Cles with me to Germany after he finished the sixth grade, I did the same "coin thing" with him. I gave him a five mark coin to keep in his pocket, both for luck and for him to use. I didn't want my high school students making fun of him again about asking me for money.

Housing was also interesting. Stone was the main part of every building, and only the roof had any wood at all. Once a roof was finished, builders traditionally would place a fir tree on top for a few days. It was for luck. Even as a teacher of German for 25 years and having traveled there as often as I had, I never really learned the entire story about this tradition. Originally, they used a real tree like one you would use at Christmas, but even that was an artificial tree made mostly of plastic. Wood was a scarce commodity and therefore very expensive, so builders did not use it as much.
I took this picture of the main train station or Hauptbahnhof in Oberhausen while waiting for a bus on a summer evening, and I did it as a joke. Train stations are always sleazy areas, but with the exception of the 24 hour adult theater that entertained a size-able portion of the male population of the Turkish ghetto there, Oberhausen's was simple and mostly free of vice. Years later when I was an exchange teacher in Berlin, we would arrive and leave from Bahnhof Zoo, a main train station in former West-Berlin. It was how I picture hell--junkies, prostitutes, and criminals. I hurried high school students through the area like a drill sergeant, because it was dangerous. The people who were there were highly unpredictable. This Idaho farm boy found Oberhausen's train station to be a modern sanctuary of vice in the early 70's. I was naive. It's good to be that way when you are young, as long as being that stupid doesn't get you into trouble.

Oberhausen really had some old buildings that were pretty. When I arrived in Germany in March of 1972, it was one of those nasty springtime events. Rain began in early March and continued through June with cold and damp weather. It didn't take me long to realize that real men used umbrellas. I didn't want to look like Mary Poppins. That notion lasted one day.
This picture, taken during a mission conference on a street in Düsseldorf, showed everyone in our district at that time. Elder Croxford is at my right. Utah State recruited him to play fullback before his mission, and afterwards, I unfortunately lost track of him. Elder Rich Frandsen was the tall elder at the right at the back. He was as bright as he was tall, and I lost track of him too. Elder Craig Walker is immediately behind me.

The picture below shows me with my first mission companion, one that was difficult to appreciate. I was from Idaho, so he called me spud. He liked to say things in a voice that imitated someone mentally handicapped when he said the word spud. I wanted to hit him in the face at least three times a day, really hard. But I didn't, and amazingly, we had a good deal of success.

Wolfgang Richter--at least that is how I think he spelled his name--was our fist baptism. His sister Delia Pohl's baptism was two weeks later. Elder Alan Jennings is in the light blue suit.

Sister Müller was the third baptism. She lived on the top floor of one of the apartments in a large housing complex in Mühlheim-Styrum. She looked at Craig and me as her "sons" and looked forward to seeing us as often as we could. Before I returned to Idaho in January of 1974, she traveled by train to visit me in Bochum, the last city where I worked as a missionary at the time. I tried to write after returning home, but life gets busy. The last time I saw her was when I was a German teacher and did one of my early student exchanges in the 80's. I was in Marburg with students for a few days, and early one morning, I traveled to Mühlheim to visit her in a nursing home where she stayed. Unable to recognize me with a beard, it took hearing my voice before she knew who I was. The visit lasted a few hours. Like Craig and I had done when we were in Germany, I read with her from the scriptures for a time. There was an extra copy for me, and she used a magnifying glass to see hers: the same way she read when Craig and I first met her. I never saw her again after that visit.

I have all of the letters. I have the memories, especially the one where she made a train trip to Bochum to see me before I returned home to Idaho.