Pacific Palisades 1960 – Susanne

 The Schechters - Hans had suffered a similar fate as I at MIT a year earlier -  put us up at their house in Woodland Hills, then a place of soulless "no-where" housing tracts. Indefatigable Hans drove us around for two weeks until one day we found an ad for a two-bedroom house for rent with a secluded little garden in Pacific Palisades, a "village" on a bluff above the Pacific, west of Santa Monica. It was affordable and we took to it at once. Next we needed a car. I found a somewhat faded classical beauty, a twelve-year-old, off-white-and-chrome Packard with a straight-six engine, a slip-o-matic transmission, and a "continental kit" on its huge rear-end... Its last owner had equipped it with a straight glass muffler, it roared like a lion. More difficult after the accident was the driving test - In addition, a California downpour had flooded all intersections ankle-deep, and I had to do the entire test without brakes....

Susanne, my child, was born at the UCLA Hospital in Westwood on Mother's Day, Sunday, May 8, 1960, ein "Glückskind". She arrived as fast as Konrad had.. Alone on the road at five-thirty on this beautiful morning I raced through all red lights on Sunset.

Full of this new-found happiness and a thirst to be free after the shackles at Harvard and the memories buried in Cambridge, we lived this year to the full, barefoot long before flower-children, the beaches, the sun, dinners for old and new friends - with the help of the "Gourmet Cookbook" Barbara explored French cooking and wines from Juergensen' s - and this new child.... During May and June a hot "Santaña"-wind blew at night from the mountains. We discovered a fire-trail where we could hike at night - stark naked.... The city lights below and the sea illuminated by the moon - Greece reinvented. At Douglas I had to stay six months in the "deep freeze", a shack outside of the classified area, waiting for my "clearance." - I worked on a publication of my Harvard research and designed necklaces for Barbara....

And then Anita left her husband. We invited her and her two children for a month to California. She was chosen as Susanne's "godmother." A babysitter watched the three children while we hiked in the hot wind on the mountain.—but a try at a menage-a-trois proved un-manageable....

 At the end of July Barbara flew with Susanne to Germany. - Anita had left for Cambridge - where Gerhard proposed to her.... Thank God Anita had more sense than that - but Gerhard, the good soul supported her for a long time. A folder of poetic letters of hers still exists somewhere filled with the increasing agonies of her mental breakdown.

Barbara was received in Braunschweig with great joy and a family celebration for Susanne's baptism - the heathen child. Wrapped in Marga's baptismal dress, which later Kelly was also baptized in, she radiated a halo of white some of which I had to remove to make the guests visible....

On my great wish Barbara had brought back a small Neupert harpsichord from Germany which now graced our living room. I hoped she would learn to play so we could make music together. - She took lessons in Cambridge, but her interest was in literature and poetry not in Baroque chamber music. Eventually I found Dorothy Klubock who lived next to us on Crescent Street in Cambridge, an excellent impromptu piano player, and with her I played my flute again.

For Christmas we invited Illa von Jöden, one of Barbara's school friends from Braunschweig. She arrived in her worn refugee coat with a cardboard suitcase on the old LAX still housed in WW II army-issue barracks. She didn't know it then, but she came to stay. She met Robert Forrest, a friend and co-worker from Douglas, born in Berlin, at our house, and nobody knew that quiet Robert fell in love with her, who considered it unthinkable that she would ever marry a Black or a Jew.... Robert proposed to her by letter a few months later, when Illa stayed at Anita's place taking care of Elizabeth and Cynthia.

In Spring 1961 our destiny took another unexpected turn. Prof. B. appeared in LA and tried to persuade me to come back to Harvard and finish my degree. The paper of my "first thesis" had been published - with his help. It was a terribly temptation, but I told him that I would return only, if he could extract an affirmative assurance from my committee that they would reinstate me without another oral. A month later he was back. He could, of course, not give me any such assurance, I would have to pass another oral, but everyone had been impressed by my paper. I should come, everything would be all-right

It was a hard decision, and I still don't know what drove me, was it naïveté, pride or my deep-seated need for independence, which only a PhD would guarantee or my? -  I agreed. Raimo Haakinen arranged for a two-year scholarship for me from Douglas. We sold the Packard and bought a used VW Bug, sold most of our furniture, made a bed for Susanne in the box behind the rear seat of the VW, packed our tent and belongings on a roof-rack, and through the heat of Death Valley, a snow storm in the Rockies, and the September storms in Illinois rowed this overloaded ship across the American continent - barefoot as we were....

Anita put us up in a borrowed, incredibly messy house until we found an apartment on Crescent St. off Oxford St. in Cambridge. The committee let me pass my second oral, and I set out to design and build the equipment for an experimental measurement of the conductivity of a low-temperature Argon plasma.  

We had a reliable car and every weekend drove to one of our favorite places around Cambridge: the de Cordova Museum in Lincoln, Plum Island and the dunes of Crane's Beach in Winter, Provincetown on Cape Cod, the Boston Arboretum, the Fens in Boston.... Some of our friends where still there, like Richard and Judith Meyer, Lenny and Joan Friedman, and, of course, Anita.... Illa had flown to Germany to marry Robert. And we met scores of new ones (when I do not always remember). At a reception at the Boston Fine Arts Museum I met Traudel Friedmann accompanied by Ken Sparks - who would soon very unhappily marry Anita. In an international snowball fight at the Fens we got to know Marc and Anik Girard from France and their three children. Not to forget Dorothy Klubock, the pianist, and her husband Daniel, a student of constitutional law, who would save my life during the next four years. Just before Christmas Peggy Brace, a curious neighbor, knocked at our door with a jar of eggnog. Her husband "Bracy" was a Seismologist at MIT. In the spring Peggy recruited me as godfather to their third child Sarah.

Gerhard had also failed his oral at MIT... and in 1961had taken a job at Boeing in Seattle - where he met Anneliese during that winter. They got married in Germany in August of 62 and then moved to Cornell University in Ithaca NY where Gerhard was to finish his PhD. A year later in April 1963 Peter was born in Ithaca (the picture below is from 1964).

One night after one of Judith's fabulous dinners in Sudbury, Richard asked us to give Julia Euling a ride to Cambridge. "She looks like an American Indian!" joked sarcastic Richard. This ride started a most enduring friendship - most of the others we lost through divorces, distance, or my foolishness - except for faithful Traudel and Julia. In the summer of 1962 Julia invited us to the sprawling house of her parents' in the Berkshires of Eastern Massachusetts, a paradise on almost 80 acres, - and, of course, beguiling Suschen ran around naked all day.

During the hot and humid summer of 1963 Richard and Judith Meyer while they were in Europe left us their rented house in Sudbury, a restored 18^th-century farmhouse where we celebrated the most beautiful dinners. Behind the house was a corn field where we could always pick the freshest corn.

Someone introduced us to the House in the Dunes above Wingersheak Beach, owned by a Boston lawyer whom we never met. We entered and left through a loose window. On the first floor was a grimy kitchen and a living room with an enormous fireplace, the second floor boasted some 12 wire-beds with dirty mattresses - but who cared. When Cambridge got too hot we would jump into the car and spend the night there. But most beautiful were the winter months. We skidded our faithful VW up the snowed-in dirt road and raised a roaring fire from drift-wood in the fireplace. Along the beach floated small icebergs.

Some time in September of 1963 Herbert Press visited us - a metal sculptor friend from Berlin whom Gerhard and I had met in Florence in 1952. We took him there and then went digging forbidden clams in the estuary. Here you see the poachers eating their catch cooked over the open fire. Herbert abstained from the crime.

A horrendous blizzard closed off Crescent St on New Year's Day 1964 only our Volkswagen made it out. On the night before we had given a glamorous dinner our friends Ronald Kolbe, his Turkish girlfriend, and John Rockefella all in formal dress: Lobster Absinthe, Gigot a la Clinique from Alice B. Toklas' cookbook, and several bottles of 1959 French red wine. Overwhelmed by this treat Barbara did bring it all up again.... For the next week we ate lentil soup to restore our budget.

The lease at Crescent St. came to an end, but my thesis was not finished. We had the stupid honesty to tell shrewd Mrs. Moscow, our landlady that we hoped not to have to spend another year in Cambridge - where upon she evicted us as unreleibel tenants - and Barbara had to find one last apartment - on Richdale Avenue in the North-Cambridge slums by the railroad tracks. The place literally reeked of poverty - or so we thought. - Susanne's pediatrician took one sniff at her hair and explained the stench: as city gas leaking from the heater furnace in the basement below us.... This was the last Christmas where Susanne believed in the Christ Child and Santa Claus: proof, a Christmas tree had suddenly appeared on our back-porch, and she discovered Santa Claus' footsteps in the snow....

Besides playing the flute with Dorothy and an amateur violinist, I made jewelry, for economic reasons usually in silver, to steady my life. And then Lenny Friedman, who had divorced Joan and acquired a new, dark-haired women friend asked me to make a gold necklace for their engagement. I used a necklace I had designed for Illa during the deep-freeze days at Douglas. I now hammered it from 18-karat gold. It looked extraordinary on Lenny's woman friend - and then he asked in her presence how much he owed me. I had decided on $75 - $25 for the gold and $50 for a badly needed re-padding of my flute. Lenny blanched and said that this was too much! Next evening I took the necklace to Henry Shawah, an Armenian goldsmith on Brattle Square in Cambridge. He locked his door and showed me all of his treasures and after two hours made me promise that I would not sell the necklace to anyone for less than $250.... We never saw Lenny Friedman again, and I gave the precious Mandala of Love to Barbara for Christmas.... Eventually, much later, it became Alexandra's symbolic Sufi necklace in "Konrad and Alexandra".

In February or March 1965 John Friedmann took Barbara on an extended photo session in a Bosten park and exposed some four rolls of which I reproduce only two pictures. This was one occasion where I felt a pang of jealousy - rather unnecessarily I should think - but for once she was my beautiful woman.... and she was three months pregnant.

In April 1965 my thesis was finally finished, printed, and approved. There was one last oral defense to be suffered through. It should have been a shoo-in formality, but in the night before the examination I broke out with a skin rash that looked very much like measles - I was so scared. It was just an allergic reaction, and I passed in cold sweat. I swore that this would be my last such experience. Barbara and Julia had waited for me in some cafe in Harvard Square. I bought a single beautiful rose for the woman who had seen me through all these years.

In May I booked a flight for us to Los Angeles where an excellent job at Aerospace waited for me. I had no wish to attend the graduation ceremonies an never picked up my doctoral diploma. Harvard wanted $20 for a copy to be mailed, which we could not spare. It might still be in the archives of the Graduate School. Nobody ever asked for it - except in Garching in 1971 to determine my salary level at the Max-Planck-Institute..... .

In the last month before we leaft I had made a large, 5-foot high metal sculpture from the broken diaphragms of my shock-tube. I presented it to the department and for years it graced the severe entrance lobby of the Yamasaki building on Oxford St. where I had worked - until the Department dean asked me to remove it. Harvard was not interested in acquiring the piece officially (I wanted to take it off my taxes), not even as a present from a former graduate student - this richest educational institution in the country.... I took it home on one of my business trips to Cambridge - which has remained a dark place to be avoided....