Bochum--The Final Six Months

The first day in my new city was not a positive one. My new "junior" missionary companion told me that they had just moved from their apartment, which was too expensive to one they could afford. We walk into an attic room converted by some slum lord into a room. There was no electric light in the room. The were some hot plates, but they had no electrical cords, and since there were no outlets in the apartment, they would not be anything more than door stops. My new junior did not appreciate my sense of humor when I asked him if they worked on faith. But I was not smiling when I said it. There was no bathroom or toilet in the apartment. You had to leave the apartment, go down four levels in the stairwell and exit the building to find an unheated bathroom in a large courtyard. There was no water plumbed into it, so you had to take a bucket of water with you. After standing on top of the toilet fixture, you poured the water into a tank four feet above you, and then you could flush the toilet. Winter was coming, and I knew this would not work. I complained immediately, so the landlord let us use the unrented toilet next to us for a short period of time. I have no idea what he intended on doing after he rented that. There was no shower or water in the apartment. Access to water and a bucket was available, but I don't remember where we found a water tap. And to make matters worse, the city bath was closed for one year.

My first companion in Bochum is in the top picture at the far right. He was my junior, but he really resented the fact that I was his senior companion. After his return home and a few years of teaching, he became a building principal. In my life, I liked principals just a wee bit less than Canadians.

He disliked a personality trait of mine I developed on the farm. I couldn't help the fact that on a rare occasion when someone slammed a door in my face hard enough to rattle my teeth and wiggle my ears, the words dirty bastard would come out of my mouth. I did not talk like that, and I only slipped twice in response to a sudden situation like that, but he really disliked that. Within a short time, he became a district leader, and I received another junior companion--one who had only four weeks or so left on his mission. He told me occasionally that his parents made him fill out his missionary papers, his bishop made him submit them, his stake president made him go, and I made him work every day. This one really hated me.

Just before he went home, he began buying a large number of souvenirs, although he was getting $50-$75 less a month than I was. Economic times became tough in the 70's for Americans living in Germany after about 1973. There never seemed to be enough money to get by with basic needs, let alone buying things like expensive porcelain, wood carvings and pewter glasses and mugs, but he was doing it. I began to notice money seemed to vanish, and then one morning the ultimate thing made me realize what was happening. I had had a 100 DM bill in my wallet that I placed on a night stand before I went to sleep for the night. The large blue bill was gone the next morning. I fixed breakfast. I savored the rage. And then with the most quiet and sensitive voice I could muster, I told him--as one of those door slammers--that I would kick his a$$ if that bill did not reappear in my wallet in the next five minutes. Magically it reappeared.

After a situation in Dortmund that I described in another blog where burglars broke into the house where he lived in an apartment, I had opened a post office bank account that I used briefly, and after the new experience in Bochum, I began using it again, leaving no more than just a little bit of cash in my wallet at any given time.
This picture shows the building in the courtyard that had a toilet in that first apartment in Bochum without electricity, water or anything else. Some of the windows in that old building where the toilet was were broken out, and the condition was very poor. We went back to the previous apartment's landlord that afternoon, and she was excited to see us. She lowered the price, and although it was still a lot of money at the time, I accepted it. She let us live there for free for the first month that we had to pay for the pathetic room. The new place had four rooms, a shower, a stove and a refrigerator. And the room was heated too.

Bochum, like all of the other cities where I worked as a missionary, was another industrial city in the Kohlenpot. However, the Ruhr University was also there. Photographs from a tall building showing construction is of that school. The large univeristy building from where I took the picture also shows how flat the land was in Bochum, just like the other cities where I lived. During those two years, I occasionally found small hills, but for the most part, the horizon showed only smoke stacks, water cooling towers, and coal mine equipment that raised loads of men and coal from mines below the surface. In the picture below, you see the coal tower equipment or Zeche and a smoke stake. The horizon shows many more.Bochum was a city of 250,000 people, and there was not a chapel or meeting room there. In fact, only a few active members lived there. We traveled to Herne each Sunday for meetings, the chapel located on the border between the two cities, not far from our apartment in Bochum. I saw no baptisms in my last two cities, but unlike the experience in Essen where we could not find anyone who wanted to talk to us, we taught a large number of people in Bochum. Our district led the mission in teaching almost every month I was in Bochum, in spite of some of the problems that I mentioned. Only in December did the teaching begin to slow down. And by Christmas, it almost stopped all together.
My third and best companion in Bochum was from the Provo area, and he worked very hard with me. He was my first new missionary or "greeny," and by the time he arrived, I had become so acclimatized with German culture and had become so intent on working hard until the last day I was in Germany, I had to have been miserable to be with at that time. I worked very hard, and I cooked German dishes that were easy to make. We did not spend a lot of time worrying about meal preparation, and because of the large number of people we taught, we were "on the go" all of the time. Suddenly he became sick in the first few weeks. Two of my mission friends told me that I had to relax a bit, so that I would not discourage him. I think I did that, although I continued to work hard, and I started making things like pancakes and spaghetti instead of the German goulasch and rice dishes. As soon as he found out why I worked hard, we became good friends. My every moment was about the work I needed to do. I refused to think about home, because I knew I would become homesick and ineffective.
One afternoon on an unseasonably warm day, we were working some three-story apartments that had large open outside entry ways after exiting the stairwell. I heard a whistle from a soccer field. For an instant, I suddenly thought to myself about football practice, even though it had been years since my high school playing days. It was like someone hit me over the head with a club, and it took days to "shake it." But I kept working, and everything was all right. When I told my mother once that I became homesick only twice on my mission--once as just mentioned and the other seeing someone sitting in a car listening to the radio, she became angry with me at the thought that I only missed football and music on the radio.
The Herne Ward was interesting. Sunday was Christmas Eve in December of 1973, and after meetings that day, the bishop stood up and told members to invite missionaries into their homes that evening. There were only eight to ten of us in the Ward, and considering how many members there were, it shocked me to see the reaction. At sound of "Amen" after the closing prayer, it was like a stampede. People practically locked shoulders getting out of the chapel doors. It made me angry. I only had a few weeks left. My new companion and I returned to our apartment for Christmas Eve dinner. After putting a pan on the stove and cutting in a few potatoes and other vegetables, I was just ready to add some more things when the door buzzed. There was an intercom that allowed us to question anyone entering the building before climbing he steps to our fourth floor apartment. It was Brother Huppert, a member in Bochum who enjoyed having us for dinner occasionally.

He came up the steps and entered the apartment. After telling me that he came to get us for dinner, I told him we were just preparing the meal, and he asked me what I was having that made it impossible to accept his invitation. I told him I had soup. He went to the stove, looked into the pan and looked at me briefly before pouring the contents into the sink. "I guess you're not having soup," he said to me in German. A smile spread across his face, and then we both laughed. Hupperts had two small sons, Sven and Carsten. On an earlier visit, one boy had found a bicycle chain with a lock on the street. It was like new, but it was locked tight. The little boy kept it. His dad smiled and said he would throw it away when his son lost interest in it. I asked him if I could look at it. I the numbers one way and then another, locking each of the four or five sets into place while listening to the lock. Brother Huppert laughed and called me a former safe cracker. I pulled it and it opened. The boys were ecstatic. Dad was amazed. I was too, but Brother Huppert always teased me about my potential criminal talent after that.

Christmas Eve was fun. There were two trees, one for the presents and one in the dining room with candles. I had never seen a Christmas tree lit with candles before. We began eating, and Brother Huppert had a pan of water on the table. He was a practical joker, so I thought he would throw it on someone during the meal. He lit the tree, and fifteen minutes later, I saw a bright flash. A branch of the tree caught fire. Brother Huppert put it out with the pan of water and returned to the kitchen for more water. He comes back and sits down after placing the pan next to him. My heart is pounding in my chest. Ten minutes later, he lights the tree again. The tree caught fire three times that night, and he put it out three times. And then we went into the other room with the smaller tree and the gifts.

We sang Christmas songs and played games. The two small boys, one five and one three, were so excited that night, and their dad teased them. At one time they were crawling under a large rug on the hardwood floor. You could see the boys crawling while their dad chased and teased them. The boys moving under the rug made half circle tube-like shapes that looked like gopher trails in a lawn, and their mom sat embarrassed. She had no idea how much my mission companion and I enjoyed watching everything.

Suddenly it was time. The Hupperts told their sons that they were to go into the dining room. We shut the doors. The adults pulled the curtains shut and held a blanket to make it impossible for the boys to see. My misson companion and I helped Brother Huppert place toys and presents under the tree. When we finished, he had a bell that he rang. Everyone lowered the rug, and the children burst into the room. They told them the Christ Child had visited. It is the Christ Child who brought toys. Santa visited in early December and brought candy to fill shoes left at the door.

Christmas there was incredible.

While in Bochum, I often yearned for the country, so I found several areas that I enjoyed. There was an area in the city called Stiepel, a small area once ruled by a king during medieval times. There was a small church that was extremely old, built in 1008. It is difficult for me to comprehend that the building is now a thousand years old. The building was still in use for church services, and one day while we took pictures, the pastor let us take pictures of the wall murals. I only wish all had worked. There was one that showed a Knight Templer fighting a dragon that spread the length of an outside wall. We taught a lot of people in that area, many of whom were very interested in our message.

In another area south of Bochum with large grain fields, my mission companion and I spent time occasionally tracting there. There were large stands of wild black berries near where we walked. One evening I met some people who were shocked when they saw me. And their reaction was even stranger when I said I was an American. They wanted to know where, and when I told them I was from Idaho, they went back into the house, leaving the door open and the two of us standing there. They soon returned with a tiny Bible, a small hole bored into the upper corner. The husband gave it to me and asked me if I please would return it to the owner. Clearwater, Idaho was on one side, and on another were the letters C.H.S. I always assumed that the initials were for a high school there. The man told me that the small Bible had been in the pocket of a coat in a medical facility in Travamunde, a city in Northern Germany in May of 1945. As guilty as the man seemed to be, and knowing how desperate times were in Germany at the time, I think the man possibly stole the coat.

I hunted for years to find the owner, asking the American Legion to help me, but nothing helped. One afternoon while doing research on the computer in 2005, I found a site for Clearwater. I wrote and told about the experience I had and asked if any veterans had served in the war from Clearwater. A short time later, I heard from a woman who identified it. The letters were her uncle's initials. He passed away in the mid 70's, never having really recovered those effects of the war, but I will always feel a sense of satisfaction about finding the owner of that Bible.
I left Germany for home in early 1974, around January 9th. Two weeks before I left, I received my travel information. It was a disappointment. Christmas was my dad's favorite time of the year, and I wanted to be home for him, and besides, although I left on my mission with a determined date of return set to coincide with the beginning of the Winter Semester in 1974, the university changed the date to early January. There had been very little if any teaching at all during the holidays, but it didn't work out like I wanted.

They moved the travel plans for me, and at that time, missionaries were not to contact their parents by phone at any time during their missions. I had to call home to tell them about the change. As silly as it seems, it took me three days to remember the number, and then it came to me one morning. My mission companion and I went to the main post office in Bochum, and I gave an official the number. Five minutes or so later, they told me to report to a booth. I could hear other people making calls in various languages, all of them screaming. When it was my turn, I went to a sound-proof booth, picked up the phone, and I began the conversation. I realized why people were screaming. It was the day of Transatlantic Cable. You had to scream so the people you were calling could hear you at all. Hearing my family's voice was something that shook me a bit.

One of my first baptisms was Schwester Müller, and she wrote and asked to travel to Bochum to see me before I left. There was a connection that she had with me and with my friend and former mission companion Craig Walker. She was like a grandmother to us. She spent an afternoon with us in Bochum. I purchased an Uher reel to reel tape player, and I taped our conversation that afternoon, and like an idiot, I recorded over it several years later. I will always regret that. When you are young, you don't realize how valuable it is to hear the voice of old friends and loved ones.
In early January, there had been a family that refused to talk to us if we persisted in talking about the church. They told us never to return, unless we wanted to be their friends and talk about current events or sports or weather or skiing. I never returned, and then one evening I was in that area checking two appointments. Both times we found nothing but darkened houses. I had a feeling to visit that family, but I hesitated. It was cold, very cold. And I thought I was just wanting to find a place out of the weather. The feeling wouldn't go away.

When I rang the doorbell, the mother and daughter came to the door. They acted surprized, shocked, happy to see us, and they asked us in immediately. They led us into the living room where the man of the house sat in a chair. He was very pale and emaciated. Doctors had told him that he was going to die in a very short time. He had not been able to eat for a long time. And he did not have the strength to get out of his chair. To raise his arm to shake our hand was very difficult. He asked us to give him a blessing.

We fasted and prayed for over two days before that blessing. My junior companion was still quite new in the field, only having been in Germany for a few months. We gave him a blessing in the early afternoon of the third day, each of us doing our part--the annointing and actual blessing. When we finished, he stood out of his chair and walked to the table. The moment was incredible. Friends and loved ones were there, and we sat and ate dinner with them. He was able to eat for the first time. We said goodbye, and I never heard from them again. The other missionaries told me they went back to see them, and although they were thankful for the blessing and the results, they still didn't want to hear anything about the church. Regardless of what happened, the event probably made my stay in Germany until the second week of January worth it, because for almost a month prior to that, almost no teaching at all had happened.

While in Bochum, I began shopping at a quality grocery store that gave stamps you could redeem at a certain point. In the final days, I cashed them in and bought four large and thick veal steaks. I have never tasted anything like that since. We had an incredible feast that night, and I will never forget how excited my mission companion was about that meal.

The last day in Bochum arrived. My companion and I worked until 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. A family let us into their home and wanted to talk to us. The mother told me how my eyes sparkled, and knowing she wanted to know how long we did our church service. I told her two years. Then she asked me how long I had been doing it, and I responded--two years. "When do you return home?" she asked. When I told her I was to leave my apartment the next morning at 6:00 a.m., she asked me if I had packed. I hadn't. She smiled and took my arm and led me and my companion to the door. She told us that she was doing a service for my mother--getting me ready to return home.

This is the last picture I took in front of our apartment at around 6:00 a.m., waiting for the streetcar to take us to the trainstation. We closed that apartment when we moved. The landlady was sad to lose us. But I was excited to return home.

Summer of '73 in Essen

Essen was, like Dortmund, a sprawling city. The church was easily accessible by bus and streetcar from our apartment. Being a farm boy from Idaho, any city with more than 50,000 people in it seemed very large. Oberhausen had 150,000 inhabitants; Dortmund had over 700,000; and Essen was probably closer to 500,000. I loved living in cities like this. And at this point, I could learn the entire transit system in less than a week.

Our one-room apartment not far from this Jewish synagogue, destroyed in the late 30's during the Nazi regime and rebuilt not only to serve as a reminder of those past mistakes but also to serve as a cultural center for the city.

My apartment was on Bismarkstraße. Similar to Dortmund, it was one room, but there was a refrigerator, and in my first few days in Essen, my mission companion and I were walking home when we found a small stove with an oven. We carried it the three or four hundred yards to where we lived, went to an electrical store to buy a plug for the cord, and had it working within days. We were finally able to have some better meals, even if we did them quickly.

And even better, we had access to a shower that multiple tenants could use.

Everything went well. I had a mission companion who was from Southern California, but although he looked very young, he was 29. He had served in the U.S. Navy, and after his discharge, he decided to serve a mission. He worked hard. He had a sense of humor. And he never complained. My companions from California were the best.

While in Essen, the area was just beginning to construct the subway system which would connect multiple cities of the entire Ruhr area. The construction site shows what a large project it was. The summer days in Essen were fantastic, although the humidity in summer was sometimes a burden. I had never experienced anything like it.

The area in Essen was difficult. We were unable to teach very many people there, but we worked very hard in spite of that.

The thing I miss about Germany of the 70's is the street car or Straßenbahn. In Essen, they painted them with advertisements. I never worked in a city that did not have a superior public transit system.

Within three weeks of arriving in Essen, we received notification that our apartment was going to go through major renovation. We spent a few days looking for another apartment, but we soon found out that the mission was about to reduce the number of missionaries in Essen. We both left for new cities.

My Moments In Germany in 1972-1973

The second city, where I served during my two years in Germany from 1972-1974, was Dortmund. It was a beautiful city, one I visited once during a conference in July of 1972. My first impression was very positive. I desperately wanted to live and to work there. The skies were relatively smog-free, unlike Oberhausen; the city was clean, unlike Oberhausen; the people were educated and elitist--three things I thought would make a great place to work. I would find out differently. Oberhausen had been a "blue collar" city, but it was where I saw the most success in terms of conversions.

There was a bakery in the northern part of Witten, a small city we worked near Dortmund. We found the bakery one afternoon, just before returning to the apartment for lunch. I discovered their cherry cheesecake. After that, I purchased twenty-four slices once a week every Monday morning, which was the day we had free until 5:00 p.m. to do things like shop and do laundry. On my last visit, the two women who had waited on me for months became emotional when I told them I was leaving on a transfer to Essen. They had been so nice to me as a customer, and on that last visit the day before I left, I took an extra large order with me to my new city. I never have found anything that tasted like that since. The people in the bakery always enjoyed seeing me return each week. The liked the fact that I felt their pastries were the best in the area.

The church in Dortmund was a beautiful building. Ironically, it looked very much like the building in Snowville, Utah where my Annie and I would attend church in the early years of our marriage in the mid 70's. This church in Dortmund was a reasonable walking distance from our apartment, and it was at the edge of a large park.

This was the street where the apartment was, a small room with a hotplate. One couch was against eastern wall of the room, and another against the southern wall. Both couches made into beds, while not comfortable, were much better than what we had in Oberhausen--two creaky metal frames with wires stretched across to support four inch foam rubber mattresses.

There was central heating, an improvement from what we had in Oberhausen, and there was hot and cold water, but there was no access to a shower. Like in Oberhausen, we went to the city bath once a week, as allowed by our mission rules. A bathroom with a toilet was in small room as you came up the stairs to the second level. It was like a lone section between the first and second floor. Our apartment was in an area of the city called Hombruch.

As mentioned, there was no stove or oven like we had in Oberhausen, and there was also no refrigerator. Whenever we bought milk, we kept it on the window ledge. And we used it quickly. For cooking, we used H-Milch, something you didn't have to cool and something you never attempted to drink either. I only made one attempt. But it did work for cooking.

The neighborhood was beautiful, large trees lining the street in front of well-kept homes. We lived in the upstairs level of a nice Protestant family. They had two small daughters, a five-year-old and small toddler. The two little ones were both cute, but they sometimes came into our room during the day and made a mess. That was rare. Their father--who was a carpenter--made them a small puppet theater, and sometimes when we came home for lunch, the two girls would put on a small show for us.

This Lutheran church was across the street. It took me at least one or two months to adjust to the chimes that sounded all night long, with additional sounds each quarter hour. The experience probably explains why I still love hearing our clock strike the hour in my own home.

My European house guests never complained about our grandfather clock, but others, like some friends of my children, occasionally told us that the chimes were not the best situation for a good night's rest. And at this point in time, I not only have the grandfather clock, but Annie and I also purchased a large Black Forest clock during our last visit to Germany. I always avoided the "cuckoo clock stereotype" thing, but I had to have it for grandchildren. I have memories of the one my grandmother had in her home. I wanted my grandchildren to have memories like that too. I figure that when I start serving Sauerkraut and brats for breakfast, then I have gone too far. Until that moment, the clock is just fun for them.

The high rise apartments in the picture below kept us busy in autumn of 1972 and throughout the coldest part of the winter in 1973. It seemed strange for me to discover just how cold it could feel outside in a country with high humidity. Some mornings the wind would seem the sting your face and hands, although it was not cold enough to freeze water more than just a thin sheet on top of a puddle. Those North Sea winds were miserable during the winter and early spring.

I only remember snow a couple of times. Dortmund was much cleaner than Oberhausen, but within hours of a fresh storm, the dirt from the air would pepper the white covering, dusting it to gray. And then it would melt, rarely staying more than a day. But the weather was still very cold, especially in January. I had fur-lined boots and gloves. The apartment buildings below were a good place to work, because they kept us warm.

In spite of the beauty of the city, our area was in the northern industrial part, where sections of housing rose high into the sky, yet it was nice finally to see blue sky like in the picture here, because in Oberhausen, the air was seldom clear. Industrial soot soiled our white shirts hours after being outside. That was not the case here. There were steel factories and coal mines, but the air was much cleaner. I did not, however, see the success I found in Oberhausen. I was here for nine and a half months, and although we had two baptisms, there was no satisfaction in the success. Our newly found members quit attending church quickly, although he members in the Dortmund Ward were incredible.

I spent my first "German" Christmas Holiday in Dortmund. The Weihnachtsmarkt or Christmas Market was a great experience. Whenever walking down the crowded pedestrian zone or Fußgängerzone, you could smell the roasted almonds. The sights and sounds were incredible, but there was never the time to enjoy anything like this at the time.

The people in the city were very gracious. A non-member family invited us for Christmas dinner. It was the only time in my life I ever had roast goose. It was an incredible meal, and the people were so nice. Christmas in Germany is for families. The fact that they included us as "outsiders" is amazing to me now. For New Year's Eve a family in the Dortmund Ward called the Hobohm Family invited us to dinner. Both holiday meals were a welcome break from our attempt to cook anything at that time. I will never forget New Years. At midnight, people began lighting rockets that shot high into the sky, and the heavens lit up--almost like daylight. On our way home, there were eight inches of paper debris from the firecrackers and rockets. The Hobohm family invited our entire district to dinner that night. There had to be at least eight of us there.

It was in front of this church, the St. Reinoldi-Kirche, where we worked street board and talked to people while passing out pamphlets and other materials. The church was in the center of the city, and it was a city landmark.

Before I left Dortmund, a bizarre thing happened one night. My missionary companion and I returned home to a darkened house, something that did not happen very often. We assumed the family was out, and when we climbed the stairs and entered our room, all our books and belongings were in a large pile in the middle of the floor.

I was a bit angry, because some pages of some of my books had been damaged after being flung to the floor. As I put them away, I heard a noise on the stairs. The father came into our room. He asked us how long we had been there, and we said we had only been there for five or ten minutes, just long enough to begin cleaning up the mess. I assumed the two little girls had done everything. The police arrived immediately. My mission companion and I had frightened away robbers who had broken through the back entrance we never used. And they had been in their children's room next to ours on the top floor when we arrived. We had frightened them away before they could take anything or harm the children. He and his wife had left that evening briefly without getting a baby sitter. The children had been asleep, and they knew what time we would arrive, which we did. They did not intend on being gone very long that night, and they knew the sleeping children would not get into any mischief. And they knew they would be safe with us.

In the 90's I did a foreign exchange with a school in Hamm, not far from Dortmund. One Sunday, the German cooperating teacher drove Ann and me to the city. We knocked on the door, and the father answered. He was glad to see me. He became emotional twice: once when I asked about his first wife who had died years earlier from cancer, and a second time when I told him about the break-in. He cried. And he thanked me for being there that night. The German Police had told him that the robbers were in the room with the sleeping children when we arrived and frightened them away. I never knew that the burglars had been in the room like that. When it happened, I assumed that the intruders had entered and left, but obviously they had been there longer than that, and although no harm had happened to the children who remained sleeping the entire time, it was a dangerous situation.

During that visit than Ann and I made to Dortmund, we attended church there and met a Schwester Kruger. I injured my knee severely in Dortmund, and I could not walk on it for a week. She brought me something every day. The Kruger family had invited us to eat once, and I raved about her cheesecake. She brought me a treat every day while I recovered, cheesecake one day and hazelnut cake the next. I had a picture with me that day from the time I was in Germany in the early 70's, and although she didn't recognize me, she remembered bringing me the treats. She smiled when I told her about how I gave that recipe out to my students in my German classroom and how much they enjoyed it. It truly pleased her to know that.

The recipe I received while I lived in Dortmund, although I substitute cream cheese for quark, is here:

Frau Krüger's Käsekuchen

Pastry:
2/3 cup flour 1 egg—beaten
½ teaspoon baking powder 1/3 cup margarine or butter
1/3 cup sugar

Sift baking powder and flour into a bowl, and then push it to the sides forming a hole in the middle. Add the beaten egg and sugar in the hole spreading the margarine around on the flour in clumps. Knead ingredients together until a ball can be formed. If the ball of pastry tends to stick to your fingers after being well kneaded, add more flour in small amounts.

Filling:
2 packages (8 ounce) Philadelphia cream cheese
1 cup milk 2 egg yolks
1 cup sugar juice of a lemon
2 teaspoons vanilla 4 Tablespoons cornstarch
2 stiffly beaten egg whites 1 teaspoon baking powder

Mix cheese and milk until creamy. Add sugar, vanilla, egg yolks, lemon juice and mix well. Stir in baking powder and cornstarch and mix well. Fold in egg whites.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease two round cake tins. Divide pastry dough. Press it evenly over the bottom of the cake tin, allowing some to be pressed a bit up the sides. Use a fork to make ventilating holes in the pastry. Pour in the cheese filling and form it with a spoon or spatula to a mound in the center. Bake low in the oven for 45 minutes. Make sure that the cakes brown well before you take them out. Cool before eating.

(By the way, there is a machine from a site called the German Corner where you can make your own German quark. It not only works well in German recipes like this one, but it tastes great on bread or bagels.)

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.

More Memories Of October

And how can I talk about memories of October without saying something about teaching in a place where the school had an extended holiday for deer hunting. In fact, next to Christmas, it was the longest break we had during the year. Both holidays involved decorating something.

At Christmas we decorated our tree, and some people decorated their houses and yards, but during deer hunt, you decorated your car by strapping a deer carcass across the hood, roof or trunk. Of course pick up truck decor was much simpler, merely requiring you to toss the thing in the back and leaving four legs pointed skyward.

Although I occasionally stayed in Malad whenever we could not afford to make the trip, in which case I helped my father on the farm with last minute things before snow storms, there were not many years we didn't take advantage of those October holidays to visit California. I never liked the taste of deer meat, and my dad didn't either. There was also the guilt I felt for hunting something merely for the horns.

Each trip had the same ritual. We would pack the '81 Mustang the night before, leaving only the cooler inside the house. I would pick up Ann and the kids immediately after school, and after placing the cooler in the car, we would begin the fourteen hour trip, and we drove straight through to Disneyland.

It was different during those early visits. Interstate 15 was not complete through Southern Utah, so it took more time. The speed limit was between 55 and 60 miles an hour, although no one ever obeyed it between Vegas and the California border. And since seat belts were more of an option rather than even a strong request, we would have the three kids dress in pajamas and sleep in the back under a blanket, after we lowered the seat of the car and left a flat surface which surrounded them with suitcases and a cooler. Doing a Brittney Spears with unbelted children in a vehicle would land parents in jail today.


There were no Cd players at that time, so we had cassettes for music, and Ann would fed the tape player, until she was too exhausted to stay awake. I drove straight to Disneyland after stopping only for gas on the way. The Mustang, in spite of its small size and very small engine, was only able to manage 25 miles per gallon at best, so there was more stopping, and it took extra time too.

After filling up in Malad, we stopped in Ogden or Salt Lake, Cedar City, Vegas and at least once somewhere in California. The Jetta we drive now stops once every 500 miles, usually once in Cedar City or St. George and once in Vegas. I get there on a tank and a half now, and although I only need a tank and a half of fuel, I fill a couple of times. Whether it is habit or just the fear of driving across miles of nowhere needing diesel, I make sure that my tank never reaches a quarter full until I am almost there.

When we did the trips with our kids in the 80's, restaurant food inside Disneyland was cheaper than eating fast food outside the park. That changed. Now instead of a huge parking lot, there is another large area of rides called California Adventure Park. That changed things too, and it changed in a good way. The new park is fantastic. Bear Country Jamboree no longer exists. The submarine ride disappeared for a long time, and then Disney Company recreated it as the Finding Nemo ride. The motor boats no longer are there, and even the small ponds are now gone. At one time, they were rides that Cles loved to do. That is all unfortunate, but we at least have the memories of being able to ride them when they were still available.


Things are all different now, but even in spite of the negative things, I enjoy the trip, and now with a combination of a higher speed limit and fewer people observing it, the trip takes less time, even though we are another 90 minutes away than we were in Malad. Having Interstate 15 finished the entire way certainly helps too. Vegas is nine hours away, and three more gets us to Anaheim on a good day.

On those early trips, we would leave Malad at 3:30 or 4:00 p.m., arriving at Disneyland just in time to enter the park. I did it without sleep. The first day was rough. Ann and I were exhausted, but the three kids had enough to have fun and inspire us too. The second and third days were cream.

Now we seldom make the trip without spending at least five days at Disneyland and California Adventure Park. We have the old memories, but we make new ones each year.