May 1976

Filling the balloon with hot air using our camping stove and a clay pipe at Cornelius' school. Stefan Pay on the left watches Cornelius. The teacher was scared.

Lift-off! Slowly the tissue-paper balloon rose off the clay-pipe chimney

There it flies! Untethered it drifted with the wind across Sunset and landed in a tree in Temescal Canyon - irretrievable it hung there for a week..

Renaissance Fair 1976, Horse riders were admiited free that year, so Cornelius and Peter made themselves hobby-horses. It became a great event.

A new institution, Easter Breakfast: Cornelius, Stefanie, Nancy, and Gerry Bott, Susanne, Barbara, Carl and Carol Westberg in our garden

Mary Robertson on a visit - one of the nicest pictures of her - and Barbara in our garden

Gerhard took up wood sculpting and finally revived his talent to paint

Gerhard and Peter

 While I was on my first visit to Georgia, May 23-June 3 in Tbilisi, (KINO) and thereafter in Amsterdam (CLEA), Barbara took the children to Germany and visited her and my parents, Gisela and Charly Winke, and Heike Rönitz's parents in Langeoog. Between the two conferences I stayed in Gelnhausen with my parents, trying to console them in their grief about Gerhard, who did not want them to come to LA.

Susanne being comforted by Charly Winke

Cornelius with his grandfather in Tübingen

Cornelius leaving Tübingen

Amorgos, at the entrance to Moni Khosoviotissa

Amorgos, A glorious day in the Gumpen (water holes) above the "Chapel of the Four-Hundred Martyrs." Very near the Cycladic burial ground where our marble lady comes from.

Amorgos, on the way to Aghia Anna

In late June we left the children behind in Germany and spent three weeks in the Greek islands. Despite heat and humity we enjoyed two very beautiful and restful weeks in Amorgos.

Dieter and Marlene Lattmann were also in Greece, and we had agreed to meet on the boat and introduce them to Ios. Dieter was already in Bonn and deeply preoccupied with the German government's handling of the hijacked Lufthansa flight in Mogudishu, which he disapproved of. -- Ios had turned into a blaring zoo, our paradise was lost. We finally moved to the farthest end of Milopotas Beach. Then Dieter began shouting at me one evening over dinner that I was a despicable CIA spy betraying my Soviet friends.... The first unforgotten collision between us..... An unhappy time.

In the fog, tears in their eyes, Barbara is trying to cheer Cornelius, only Peter is laughing

While Cornelius takes a pee-break in the drizzle Barbara tries to engage Susanne to find our way on the map

 When we returned to München we met Susanne and Cornelius, picked up Peter who had flown in from LA, and to divert us all from Gerhard's dying we set out on a hike in the Lechtaler Alpen (Austria). Starting from Buchboden near Bludenz am Arlberg we hiked via the Iscarnei Alm to the Biberacher Hütte. Heavy fog soon turned to rain, Susanne slipped with her oversized pack, completely wet and muddy we reached the primitive Hütte. To Peter's greatest disappointment - he was the only one who voted to continue to the Göppinger Hütte - we next day abandoned the hike and took a train to Innsbruck, where Barbara washed all our clothes in a laundromat at a student dormitory where we had found two rooms.

The Mays rescued us in München and gave us their basement. Sad and depressed we roamed town for a few days.... The children went to the circus. On July 26 I flew back alone to LA to go to work and pick up Heike. Barbara stayed on until September 7.

Susanne had very few friends in High School, which moved Barabara to adopt a YFU student for a year, the lot fell on Heike Rönitz from Wittmund and Karst in Northwestern Germany. I picked her up, but until Barbara returned she stayed with Mrs. Mahoney, the local YFU representative. Heike became a wonderful companion to all of us during that difficult year. She went to school with Susanne and shared all our activities and excursions.

Muschen and Suschen (incredibe, she is knitting a sweater)

December 1976

Heike our good spirit of 1976, a hot New on Santa Monica Beach.

Muschen in Mammoth

Irmchen dressed for cross-country skiing. North Crater, Mono Lake behind her

In April we went skiing in Mammoth with Muschen and Irmchen Gernand who spent a month with us in March and April. I went on long cross-country tours with Irmchen - finally I had a real comrade in spirit, she loved it.

Bodie, George Washington in one of the refurbished ghost houses.

Camping wild near Joshua Tree Monument, which was filled to capacity.. Shaking the tent before packing up in the morning.

Susanne took these photos with her new Canon camera

Hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains with Peter who stayed with us during his Spring vacation

Susanne and Heike, Jalama Beach

Suschen and Muschen trying to fly. Jalama Beach-Point Conception

Every year Mr. Lish put on a musical at the High School. This year it was Guys and Dolls and Susanne had garnered a part in it - how she loved to be part of life in school. We all attended and the performance was surprisingly good! Here you see her highly made-up accepting flowers from her appreciative audience.

Susanne, Math and English not being her greatest strengths, the school councillor had let her take up photography, in which she became quickly very good. Barbara who had been able to master any subject at school and get an A was not happy with this choice, I had to do a lot of talking, but this subject became the basis of Susanne's entire professional life. We finally decided to send her to one of the excellent art schools in LA.

In March 1977 Peter Grigoriev, a physicist from Moscow, appeared at USC and spent much time at our house. For their security I never photographed my Russian friends when they visited. One night Irmchen - who was still staying with us - Peter, and I went to a Sufi sema (religious dance) at a high school in Hollywood - a deeply moving experience for the three of us. I was allowed to take photos in natural lighting. I pushed a 400-ASA film by a factor of three and returned with a series of unforgettable pictures.

Hiking with my parents on the Seiser Alm

On my way back from the USSR I met my parents in München and joined with them in their vacation at the Seiser Alm above Bolzano. Mother was now 78 and Father 76. They had become very old, and I had to walk slowly with them on their daily outings - yet I had a good time and many intimate talks with my beloved mother.

During the ten lonely days I had been pushing my way through the overcrowded museums of Leningrad I had resolved to fly back to LA via Madrid with the single purpose of seeing the collection of Hieronymus Bosch's paintings at the Prado. For a small amount of extra money I was able to arrange that - and then had a series of highly improbable coincidence meetings on the journey. - On the train to Tübingen I was shaken out of my dreams by a conductor whom Barbara and I had met two years earlier. In front of Bosch's Garden of Delights I suddenly found myself sitting next to an exceptionally beautiful French girl whom, years earlier, we had spent several days with in the nude in Greece.... And finally on the flight from Madrid to LA I was discovered by the girlfriend of Anita Heider's ex-husband..... These encounters were sufficiently hallucinatory that in Los Angeles I fell into Barbara's arms in search of protection....

Heike sent me some of her pictures from this trip. One of the discoveries is Cornelius' gloomy face on every picture. He was eleven then and three women..... Barbara confirms that he was in a bad mood on this excursion, and nothing could get him out of it.

Camping in Oregon

On the Wild Beaches of Oregon

Heike in stitches and....

.....Cornelius trying to smile

Father Lattmann in Badenweiler, October 1977 

 Barbara with her beloved father, Tübingen 1977

When I now look at these pictures, I see that it must have been Barbara who was despaired - maybe her husband was the reason? I only remember that Susanne and I were holding a taut rope between us for the other two to walk on, as it occasionally still happens in very special moments. - In such moments sensitive Cornelius is often most affected....

The two long-legged dancers

In tears Suschen is hugging her mother trying to comfort her.

On a hike in Little Sycamore Canyon

They let themselves be taken to many places, and we invited our close friends - Bela Lengyel, Nancy and Gerry Bott for whom Father had done extensive genealogical research. We and our environment was no longer strange to them. Both and especially mother were ready for anything.

Barbara devoted herself to them with all her special powers

And then there happened the Great Magic Show. With the help of an instruction book and an accompanying kit Cornelius and Peter had been practicing magic tricks and their grandparents let themselves be intrigued famously.

Grandfather musing and Peter and Cornelius planning their strategy.

Susanne, who in her practical reality saw already at four all the strings attached to the marionettes, is bored - but the grandparents are eagerly waiting - while Cornelius takes a critical measure of the challenges to come.

First Peter performed a card trick for Grandmother and Barbara.

Then Cornelius let Gandfather test the string on which he would ballance a tennis ball. The string was in one piece....

Grandfather was hit by a stroke of celestial lightening.... and the ball rolled as predicted.

I have no idea how this worked - but very rarely have I seen my father enjoy himself and laugh so relaxed as on this evening.

It was not the happiest week at Mammoth, but look how burned we were when we returned!

I spent many hours at the Hot Springs. The road was still snowed in and I had to ski there about fourty minutes one way - after the return journey I felt truly worked over....

Lunch near Lone Pine on the way home.

Mammoth Hot Springs - Do you see the people at the uppermost edge of the picture? That's were the hot spring rises in the middle of an ice-cold brook. The steaming hole up front is scalding water, and the whole area smells for sulfur. You have to take a shower afterwards. A very old power place sacred to the Indians.

In 1966 Anik and Marc Girard had taken us for the first time to this secret spot at the edge of the Anzo-Borrego desert, an "oasis" with a spring ! There were so many bunnies there that is it soon became the place where we went easter-egg hunting - when Susanne was still convincible that easter eggs were laid by bunnies. Barbara would get up at six in the morning and hide them all over the place - until one year, in February, we discovered scores of rattle snakes - but that was much, much later...

Antoinette, Anik's live-in girl from Martinique, Barbara with seven-month-old Cornelius on her back, Anik, Frederick and Manuel (Dos Cabezas 1966)

Kris, Peter, Cornelius, Anneliese, Barbara hidden behind the flowers.

We camped among the bushes close to the spring. Barbara in the typical posture of a good squaw prepares breakfast. Drinking water had to be carried-in in the red can. Purzel is fed too. How many times and in how many places we camped like this.... By the way, do you notice? Barbara to my great distress had cut her hair short for the first time....

Cornelius and Purzel and our ship-shaped tent

The ritual included a steep hike to Mortero Palms, a dense stand of indiginous Washingtonias in a a rocky side canyon

I think it was silly Peter - who is terribly allergic to insect stings - who once beat the rustling palm skirts and woke up a swarm of wild bees..... A second spring feeds the palms and it is cool and shady among these strange behemoths.

Peter and Cornelius at Mortero Palms

On the way back we stopped at Pala Indian Mission east of Oceanside, for many years our favorite California mission.

Anneliese, Cornelius, Barbara, Kris, Peter, and Purzel at the Plaza in front of the mission.

During the following months Barbara, to ballance herself, took up pottery classes at the Pottery Farm in Santa Monica, the same place where Susanne had potted in the previous 2 years, and Cornelius would go to next, the reason why we have so many hand-thrown pots in our house.... But Cornelius' real passion was soccer - and I less passionately had to serve as referee - and more and more playing in the orchestra at Junior High, first a saxophone, then a clarinette and later an oboe. For a year he took clarinette lessons from Mr. Lurie. I finally bought a used clarinette with him in Pasadena - a memorable event because afterwards Cornelius insisted that the instrument had been stolen by the woman we bought it from ....

In July Klaus and Lilo Lattmann stayed with us for three weeks (no photos). Barbara took them on a 2-week tour of California. Susanne now worked at a record shop in West LA - with a gay guy by the name of Jerry - with whom she went dancing at all the gay hangouts in Hollywood. I remember her calling after midnight one day when Barbara was travelling with Klaus and Lilo, to tell me that she would be home late, she had just carried the completely drunk Jerry to his upstairs apartment and put him to bed.....

Father Lattmann back in Tübingen with Marga, (February 78)

Barbara and her father November 1978