Our Engagement, Marga knew I would not come back, Braunschweig 1956
Front row: Klaus and Lilo Lattmann, B. and R, Marga and Father Lattmann
Back row: The Grosses: Dieter, Christine, Gerhard, my Mother and Father.
Barbara
1956-1976
More
Pictures and Stories on
Rolf's
Website
Göttingen-Braunschweig
1956
Our
Engagement, Marga knew I would not come back, Braunschweig 1956
Front
row: Klaus and Lilo Lattmann, B. and R, Marga and Father Lattmann
Back row: The Grosses: Dieter, Christine, Gerhard, my Mother and
Father.
I met Barbara in February 1956 at a Fashingsball at the Nansenhaus in Göttingen. I knew that night that I was going to marry her – although I learned her full name only three days later. I proposed to her – even more certain of my intention – 3 weeks later, and she accepted another 3 weeks after that..... There were several hurdles to overcome – you can read the full story on my website - but in July her father gave his permission and we got officially engaged at a dinner party in Braunschweig. - In December 1956 I sailed on the Maasdam to New York. Barbara would come 6 months later in July 1957.
New
York and Cambridge, MA
1956-57
I
arrived in Manhattan on an early December morning 1956
Cambridge,
Mass
August 1957
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After a week's “honeymoon” on Cape Cod we got married at the Harvard University Lutheran Church in Cambridge. The Oldenbergs, long-time friends of Barbara's mother's family, gave us and my new friends a wedding reception, and left us their house for the next 3 weeks.
Konrad,
Cambridge
1958-59
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I worked as a research assistant at
Harvard and was not enthused about Barbara’s greatest wish to have
a child. However, she got pregnant right away, and Konrad was born on
11 April, 1958.
We had very little money from my assistantship and
Barbara worked at the hematology lab at Mass General Hospital in
Boston until her 8th month. From the beginning I gave her my Harvard
check and left our finances to her - she was very good at that –
and still is.
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On our way to a vacation in the Oldenberg's cabin in New Hampshire, on 16 August 1959 we had a car accident. The car flipped and Konrad flew out of the rear seat - dead.... We buried him at the village cemetery in Passaconway, NH. To her great consolation Barbara was pregnant again.
In the following months I had troubles with my thesis committee at Harvard. Eventually I took a job offer at Douglas Aircraft Corp. in Santa Monica and left Harvard. We flew to LA in one of the first Boeing 707s, rented a house in Pacific Palisades – and turned into barefoot Californians.
Pacific
Palisades
1960
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On Mother's Day, 8 May, 1960, Susanne was born. She was a strong child with her own mind from the very beginning. A great pleasure for us.
Barbara
at 25, 1960
To compensate for the abstract learning at Harvard I began making jewelery for the beautiful woman in my life. The amethyst necklace, my first piece, resembled one we had seen in New York. The pearl ring, my first gold piece was made to celebrate Susanne's birth, and the gold necklace was originally intended for the bride of a friend, who thought that the $75 I had asked for it, was exorbitant. We lost the friend, and I gave the piece to Barbara for Christmas. It acquired its name only in 2000 from the heroine of my first novel.
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Return to
Cambridge
September 1961 – 1965
My thesis advisor at Harvard persuaded me to return to Cambridge and start a new thesis subject and get my degree. We sold everything and drove – barefoot - in our little blue VW, Susanne in back, a tent on the roof, across the US to Cambridge.
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Finishing the new thesis took 4 years of student life in a sequence of Cambridge apartments, which Barbara mastered in great style. She sewed her own dresses – one of which I designed - and together we learned to cook French dinners for our many friends and to appreciate great French wines under $5 the bottle. On the weekends we indulged in California living, barefoot on the Massachusetts beaches.... The De Cordova Museum, the dunes at Crane's Beach, and an old house at Wingersheak Beach were among the favorites, especially in Winter.
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In May 1965 the PhD thesis got finished. I never picked up he diploma. We fled Cambridge with the next flight to LA, where I had found a good job at Aerospace Corp. - After three aborted pregnancies Barbara was pregnant again. To keep the child, her gynecologist had sewn up her uterus. She looked gorgeous, and John Friedmann took 2 rolls of portraits of her....
Pacific Palisades
for the Second Time
1965
This time Aerospace paid for the move of our meager belongings and the car. We flew. With our last money we rented a house on Albright St at the corner of Embury in Pacific Palisades. Cornelius was born at Santa Monica Hospital on 15 September, 1965.
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We had met Anik and Marc Girard and their 3 children in Boston in the Winter of 1964. They had moved to the Salk Institute in La Jolla, and we saw each other often. Eventually they returned to Paris, and in the Summer of 1967 we rented an old farmhouse with them in Masclat, Dordogne. We borrowed Marga's VW and drove all the way from Dettenhausen to the Dordogne.
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Mandeville Canyon
House
1967-1969
After
our return from France 1967 we rented from the Hoffmans and moved
into their wonderful dream house in Mandeville
Canyon,
where we would live for 2 years.
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Susanne had made friends with Marge Lewis the neighbor's child. In the Summer of 1968 the Lewis' invited her to stay with them at a camp in the High Sierras. We decided to pick her up and spent a few days at Lake Tahoe. Later that summer we drove to Julia Euling's Island in Lake Michigamme where Barbara and the children stayed for 2 weeks. I was needed at Aerospace.
Our Own House
Pacific
Palisades, 15480 Albright St.
1969....
During the wettest winter in Californian memory the Hoffmans announced their return from Washington and wanted their house back. We decided to buy our own. I was very busy at work, so Barbara began with the help of two realtors searching for an affordable place to our taste. We made offers on 2 derelict places, and I designed a third house for a beautiful but impossibly difficult site on Amalfi Dr. Thank God, all three fell through. Finally we moved temporarily into an empty house on Kingsport Dr. in Malibu. And then Barbara found a modest house close to schools and shopping, above Temescal Canyon on the Western end of Albright St – for $53'000.... We scraped up all our savings ($5000), took a 30-year first ($40'400), got a second from the owners ($3800), and borrowed another $3800 from Julia Euling to buy the place.... Today the property is worth $2 Million, and after several modifications it has become our very special personal place.
Our
House on the hill above the dead-end of Albright St, Spring 1969
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Barbara's Earrings
1969
Barbara's
Earrings, Mandeville, Winter1969
These earrings to be worn with the pronges pointing into her ear, I made during the last months in Mandeville Canyon. Photographed later together with her opal pendant on a celebrated silk blouse of hers, they were the unique piece of my jewelery making, a fitting tribute to her finding the new house for us. We lost them during a night romp on the beach, and I was never able to reproduce them.
Aerospace
1970-71
During 1969 my work at Aerospace had reached a critical point. Our exploratory work had shown a way to build a very powerful continuous laser. In the winter of 1970/71 we were visited by Edward Teller. He slapped me on the shoulder and with his heavy German accent said, "Very good work. Continue. This is more important than the atomic bomb...." Teller convinced the government that lasers were a potential weapon against Soviet missiles. I had my doubts. It was all very dramatic. Suddenly I got high blood pressure and heart irregularities.
One early morning an Aerospace vice president appeared in my lab. He began shouting at me, that he would take his support away and have me moved to a different division, if we got ourselves classified by the Air Force. I was stunned. Angrily I decided that this was going too far. I needed a break.
I talked to Karl Kompa from the Max-Planck-Intitute in Munich. He enthusiastically invited me. I told my departmental boss that I wanted to "drink German beer in historical places." He understood and to my complete surprise offered to pay the difference between my Munich salary and that at Aerospace.... Barbara and I agreed that we would not burden our minds with the complex question of staying in Germany or not, we would just make the year a grand vacation.
Within a few weeks everything was arranged. We sold both cars, leased the house for $1500/month, ordered a new Volkswagen in Wolfsburg, and flew to Germany. Barbara and the children left in August 71, a couple of weeks before me. Barbara deposited Cornelius with Marga and her father, Susanne with Lilo and Klaus in Hamburg, picked up the car, and drove to München - where we bought a cheap flight to Athens.... Against all warnings by my father that I should not try to repeat the experiences of 1953, I was determined to show Barbara the land of my dreams and took her to the Greek Islands for the first time.
Greek Islands
1971
Koumbari
Beach on Ios, 1971
It became a most glorious vacation, we visited Mykonos and Santorini and spent 10 days on Ios, which was one of the loveliest islands before it was burnt out by the drug scene in the late seventies.
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We met several people who are still our friends, spent whole days in the nude on remote Manganari Beach and returned in a fierce northeastern storm to Athens only in late September. We never felt so young.
München-Garching
1971-72
The
Max-Planck-Institute in Garching
rented us a furnished apartment on the seventh floor of a high-rise
with a view of Munich and the Alps whenever the Föhn blew.
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Between October 1971 and December 1972 we traveled 2000 km all over Bavaria, visited the grandparents in Gelnhausen and Dettenhausen, went skiing in Austria, spent August 1972 in Groznjan, Istria, and saw innumerable Baroque churches that Susanne fell in love with. Cornelius learned German in first grade, Susanne – actually her mother - fought the teachers of the Heisenberg Gymnasium where she went with marginal success....
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Look at Susanne (13), das Riesenkind at Gisela's wedding in Bad Godesberg – and at her stunning mother!
Back Home Again
1972-74
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Christmas 1972 saw us all together again in Pacific Palisades. Barbara got a used typewriter with which – always sitting on the living room floor – she wrote her voluminous correspondence until she got her own computer. In the following months Barbara and I ripped out the old carpeting and cleaned the wooden ceiling in the living room of its battleship gray. Slowly the house became truly ours.
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In September 1974 my parents visited us for several weeks, and in November we now camped every year at Laguna Percebo in Baja California.
Gerhard with
Cancer
1975-76
Returning from a whale watching trip to the Channel Islands in November with Anneliese and Peter, Gerhard collapsed on our sofa with an excruciating pain in his lower spine. Next day Anneliese took him to the hospital where they kept him for a couple of days. The cause turned out to be two partially disintegrated vertebrae, metastases of a kidney cancer. The prognosis was grim, operating was impossible because of the extent of the tumor and its metastases, chemotherapy was the only choice.
Anneliese
and Gerhard, May 1976
Faithful Barbara visited Gerhard two or three times a week at home or at the hospital and helped him relieve the accumulated emotional burdens of his life, his love for her, his amnesic memory of the Konrad's accident, twisted remnants of his childhood problems with his parents, with his older brother, and his unfinished professional expectations. A hard mission for Barbara to carry for such a long time. All I could do was to support her.
Amorgos, Greece
1976
The
Churches of Amorgos ready to rise to Heaven, 1976
In June 1976 Barbara and I deposited the children in Germany and went to Greece for three weeks. Barbara urgently needed a break. Ios having gone over the hill, I chose Amorgos, 10 hours by boat from Athens.
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We fell in love with this island and
would return every few years. A wonderful place, unspoiled by mass
tourism. After a while we knew most everybody in the little harbor of
Katapola. At first we stayed at Tassia's. After 1985, when she got
too old to serve breakfast to her guests, we moved on to other
pensiones, always eating at the one and only restaurant.
Here you
have to throw part of my ashes into the blue sea. Cornelus knows
where....
When we returned from Europe we found Gerhard confined to his bed at home. He had broken one of his cancer-eaten leg bones and in a major operation the doctors had inserted steel rods into both legs. There was no hope, but at least this reduced his pain. I spent a whole day with him, but my presence infuriated him so much that I had to leave this mission to Barbara.
Heike Rönitz
August
1976-1977
Heike,
September 1976
Susanne had very few friends in High School, which moved Barabara to adopt a YFU student for a year. Heike Rönitz came from Karst, Germany. She became a wonderful companion to all of us during that difficult year. She went to high school with Susanne and shared all our activities and excursions.
Gerhard Dies
5
December, 1976
Gerhard,
November 1976
After his birthday at the end of November Anneliese was physically no longer able to care for him at home - moving him around, administering injections of sedatives. Reluctantly she had to take him to the hospital. In the last days they gave her a bed in his room. He died on December 5, 1976 only 43 years old.
Barbara's Opal
1969-75
Barbara's
Opal on one of her blouses of 1975
On a visit to the Edelsteinmesse (Precious Stone Fair 1968) in Munich I had bought an Australian Fire Opal for Barbara. It softly reflected all her best qualities. It lay around for a while: a ring? A pendant or brooch? In 1969 I was trying to reinvent the ancient technique of granulation, and when I had learned that, I made this setting for the beautiful stone hanging it from a gold chain. The torque came later. Barbara doesn't wear it often. She has outgrown the colorful blouses of that time.... But a fire opal is still the perfect description of my love for her.
