Halloween, a favorite of Leif's

I suppose Leif and Peter Anthony were like most brothers. Sometimes they were good companions, and sometimes they competed. Sometimes Peter teased Leif and Leif got mad and went on the attack. I used to tell Peter that he was lucky Leif was six years younger than he was, because he was to big for his age. I think that in the years after Peter left home, when Leif was twelve, they grew apart and forgot all the good times they had together when they were younger.  This photo is an example. It was Halloween and Peter, who was nearly nine years old and in third grade, was a classy vampire with a ruffled shirt. He was already in costume way early, as we were having a party at our house for him and his friends. His dad dressed up as a sort of swami fortune teller. I looked ridiculous in a true 1970s tie-dyed dress, leopard print hat, and fish net stockings, or at least that's what I think I wore.

Look at the expression of pure delight on Leif's face, the cute body language as the vampire leans over to bite and Leif expects it will tickle. Yes, Peter did bite, and yes, it did tickle. There was a lot of laughter.

Leif was only two-and-a-half years old then and not really old enough to understand much about Halloween except that he got to go beg for candy at a few doorways in the stairwell, but he certainly understood the idea of having fun with his brother.

When Leif was grown, Halloween was one of his favorite times. He loved to have parties and was devilish and cute. I wish he was here this Halloween with us.

Leif and the Plaque for Timothy

Back in the days when I had time to make homemade gifts and thought they would be appreciated, I used to paint, sew, or needlework gifts for the family. I wasn't a good enough artist to come up with my own paintings for most purposes. When some of my nieces and nephews were born, I painted plaques for their rooms. This was one of them. I painted it in June 1978 for my nephew, Timothy, when he was a baby and had Leif hold it so I could take a picture. He looks so beautiful and sweet.

At the time we were living in Fuerth, Germany (Nurnberg), just before we moved to the village of Sachsen bei Ansbach. Leif was three-and-a-half years old. He was bright and curious, persistent and unstoppable. He had been attending a Montessori preschool which was excellent for him, but from which I have no photos.

Like so many of our photos from that time period, this one had fading and chemical staining. I've tried to rescue it.

Our boys did not have "professionally decorated" rooms, just as they didn't have professionally decorated birthday cakes. What they had on their walls was likely to be either things I had made out of needlepoint, posters, or things they had made or colored themselves. They had inexpensive, plain bedspreads, and quartermaster plain furniture, except for a toy box, which was mostly filled with things like Matchbox cars.

Memories on the Neckar River

When we were in Heidelberg in June, we had a lovely walk along the Neckar River and we passed this big ring fastened into the wall along the river path. There are several of them, used to tie up boats and barges, but this particular one stands straight out and I recognized it at once, though I hadn't seen it in over thirty years.

I remembered the beautiful April day in 1978 when we were visiting Heidelberg. It might have been Easter weekend or even Easter Sunday. It was a bit chilly and spring wasn't a little late, but it was still a beautiful time for a walk along the river. Our boys saw that ring and they just HAD to hang on it. Peter Anthony could just barely grasp it and then walk his feet up along the wall, but Leif was way too short for that, so his Dad had to hold him up.

On his head, Leif has a red visor with built-in flip-down sunglasses that he just loved. I think I have another photo or two of him wearing it, and I'd forgotten all about it until I saw this picture again.

In the spring of 1978 we were living in Nurnberg, or actually Furth, and it was about a two-and-a-half hour drive to get to Heidelberg so we didn't go often to visit Peter W.'s aunts, uncles and cousins there, but every visit was a joy.

Leif was three years old and Peter Anthony was nine in these photos. Hard to believe that was 34 years ago.

I'm glad I took these photos, so that I have more than just the memory of that place and time. And I'm glad I found them and scanned them. Time is not being good to many of our older color photos. They are fading or discoloring and there's only so much I can do with PhotoShop to improve them.

A Visit to Bamberg

We moved from Charlottesville, Virginia to Fürth, Germany (Nurnberg) in the summer of 1977. We lived in an army housing area that has now been turned back over to the Germans and no longer exists as we knew it. We lived on the first floor of a three-story apartment building in a three bedroom apartment.

Leif was two-and-a-half when we arrived there, and I suppose in some ways he was in his "terrible twos," though I as I remember him the year that we lived in Fürth he was much more easy-going than he had been in Charlottesville.

I think it helped a lot that we did a lot of traveling, since he loved the stimulation and novelty, and that he had friends to play with and the Montessori preschool to attend. The more he could be active and away from home, the better he liked it. The car trips, the Volksmarches, the trips to downtown Nurnberg (with requisite visits to the pet and toy stores) and the parakeet we got all seemed to keep him engaged and less frustrated.

One of the places we visited in the fall of 1977 was the city of Bamberg, which we would return to on our 1988 trip to Germany with Leif. This photo of Peter W. and Leif on the bridge over the Regnitz River reflects his joy and interest at seeing new surroundings. I love that little houndstooth checked coat he's wearing. It was Peter Anthony's when he was little. They both looked so cute in it.

My Little Happy Wanderer

Leif was my little "Happy Wanderer." He loved to be out, going places, just about any place, the city, the woods, the beach. When we lived in Germany, we went on lots of Volksmarches (organized hikes I've written about before). Our boys had their little backpacks to take things along with them. Leif, when he was this little, often took a stuffed animal along for the ride.

This photo was taken in the Fürther Stadtwald, the City Woods of the city of Fürth, Germany, in the fall of 1977 when Leif was a little over two-and-a-half years old.

I was looking for a photo that I was pretty sure I didn't ever have, one of me singing to my boys, or playing the guitar and singing, and since I didn't have one but wanted to post a list of songs I used to sing to them at night. Sometimes we also sang them while driving in the car. I'm sure the list isn't complete, but I'm surprised I remembered over sixty songs I sang.

This photo goes with "The Happy Wanderer," which I used to sing to them. I loved that song, which I learned in grade school. Here is the list I came up with. Happy memories come with all those songs. Some of them, many of them, I learned as a child. It was fun to teach them to my sons and pass them on.

1. America the Beautiful

2. Ants Go Marching, The

3. Battle Hymn of the Republic

4. Daisy, Daisy

5. Dixie

6. Do Your Ears Hang Low?

7. Down in the Valley

8. Edelweiss

9. 500 Miles

10. Found a Peanut

11. Four Strong Winds

12. Goodnight Irene

13. Greensleeves

14. Hang Down Your Head, Tom Dooley

15. The Happy Wanderer

16. Henry Martin

17. Home on the Range

18. Hush Little Baby

19. Inchworm

20. Itsy Bitsy Spider (or the Eensy Weensy Spider)

21. I've Been Working' on the Railroad

22. John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt

23. Kumbayah

24. Mary Had a Little Lamb

25. Michael Row the Boat Ashore

26. Moon River

27. My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean

28. My Darling Clementine

29. My Grandfather's Clock

30. Oh, How Lovely Is the Evening

31. Oh, Susana

32. Old Black Joe

33. Old MacDonald Had a Farm

34. On Top of Old Smoky

35. On Top of Spaghetti

36. Once Upon a Dream

37. Puff the Magic Dragon

38. Red River Valley

39. Rockabye Baby

40. Row, Row, Row Your Boat

41. Sail, Baby, Sail (The Slumber Boat)

42. She'll Be Coming' 'Round the Mountain

43. Shenandoah

44. She's Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage

45. Somewhere Over the Rainbow

46. The Sound of Music

47. Summertime

48. Sweet Betsy From Pike

49. Taps (little did I know it would one day be played at his inurnment service)

50. Try to Remember

51. Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

52. Way Down Upon the Swanee River

53. When Johnny Comes Marching Home

54. When the Red, Red Robin

55. When You Wish Upon a Star

56. Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

57. Yankee Doodle

58. Yellow Rose of Texas

59. You Are My Sunshine

60 plus (And Christmas carols, of course)
And I just remembered "Frere Jacques"

Garretson Family - Katterbach, Germany - November 1978

In the fall of 1978, some agency at the Katterbach army community was offering family portraits so that military families could send them home for Christmas. My recollection is that we discovered it when we were over there for something else and it was only available that day, so we had one taken even though were weren't exactly dressed for a family portrait. It turned out pretty nice even so.

Peter Anthony was going to have his tenth birthday a month after this was taken, and he was in the fourth grade at the Rusam Volksschule in Sachsen bei Ansbach.

Leif was three years old and would be four in two months. He was attending the German Kindergarten in Sachsen.

Peter W. was Chief of Justice (or Chief of Criminal Law, another name for the same position) for the 1st Armored Division in Ansbach and a major in the Judge Advocate Generals Corp.

Katterbach had a military housing area, a commissary, a heliport, a nondenominational chapel and various other services. It was just across some farm fields about 3/4 of a mile from our village of Sachsen and it was where we went for grocery shopping and a few American activities like Boy Scout events. Of course we knew some of the people who lived in the housing area.

When we moved to Sachsen from Fuerth, there were no quarters available there, and that's how we ended up living "on the economy" in Sachsen and sending the boys to the local German schools. We could have sent Peter A. to the American school, but at that time it would have meant that he would have had to ride a bus for an hour to an hour-and-a-half each way and we thought that was cruel and unusual punishment and chose the German school instead.

I doubt that Leif would remember Katterbach at all because we were seldom there and rarely for anything memorable to a preschool child, and Peter A. has few memories of his childhood, though in his case, Katterbach was signficant. He was an altar boy at the chapel and he brought the two communities together in song when he got the Sachsen Kinderchor (children's choir, in which he was a soloist) to sing at the Katterbach chapel at Christmas time.

Peter A. did know some boys in Katterbach because he was in an American Cub Scout den with boys from that community, but as far as I know, that was about the only time he saw them. His friends were from his school in Sachsen.

Leif had friends in Sachsen, both American and German, that he enjoyed playing with, but he didn't know anyone in Katterbach or go over there to play.

The year this was taken was a good one for us. We enjoyed our neighbors and activities in Sachsen, were very pleased with the boys' schools, did a lot of local traveling and Volksmarching, and loved living in "Hanni's house" at the top of the hill with the orchard around us. I'd love to go back to that time with my boys and Peter, sit in the kitchen on the "Eckbank" (corner bench, a kind of breakfast nook set) and make something with them, or look out over the valley from the balcony on the second floor. It would be so good to go back to a time when I had both my beautiful, smart little boys with me and the future looked bright and full of hope for both of them.

Leif & Peter A. - Grafenwoehr, Germany - Fall 1977 - Age 2 and a Half

When we moved to Fuerth, Germany in the summer of 1977, Peter W. was the OIC (Officer in Charge) of the Nurnberg Law Center, and had branch offices in other towns where units of the 1st Armored Division were stationed. One of those was Grafenwoehr, a town in a beautiful wooded area northeast of Nurnberg in northern Bavaria.

Peter W. was familiar with Grafenwoehr from training Reforger exercises held there in the fall that he went to with the 1st Infantry Division from Fort Riley, Kansas when he was stationed there. Grafenwoehr was at that time a large training area for US troops during the Cold War.


I think we drove to Grafenwoehr that fall day partly because Peter was visiting the branch office there and partly because he wanted to show us the area.

It was a crisp fall day and the boys had a great time running around in the woods. This is one of my favorite sets of photos of the two of them. They were at such beautiful ages and usually really loved each other and got along well.

Peter W. took a look at these photos and asked why I got Leif those "awful pants," and I had to laugh. The 1970s styles look pretty ridiculous to us now, but at the

time, everyone was wearing them, even Peter W. It was the day of plaid pants, leisure suits and double-knits. Just wait, someday they will be back, just like the platform and wedge heel shoes for women.

Peter A. was eight years old when these photos were taken (going on nine in a couple of months) and was in the third grade. Leif was a little over two-and-a-half years old. We are so used to thinking of him as the giant of the family it's amazing to see him looking so small, sweet and vulnerable.

What Fascinates a Three-Year-old?

If you think about it, it's amazing what fascinates and interests people, and this is just as true for very young ones. I read somewhere that young children are like little scientists exploring and testing their world to see how it works. This was certainly true of Leif, who wanted to figure out how everything worked . . . and he had a mother with a camera that loved watching him do it. I caught him on the floor having unbuckled his belt and he was carefully examining the buckle to see exactly how it worked. I doubt there are any other mothers who would take a picture of their son scrutinizing a belt buckle, but it just seems to like him to want to figure it out.

The date I wrote on the back of this photo was clearly wrong if the place was correct because it said it was taken in Fuerth, Germany in January 1977. However, we were living in Charlottesville, Virginia in January 1977 and didn't move to Fuerth until the summer of 1977. So it's probably January 1978 when Leif was just about 3 years old.

This photo is a great example of why it's a good idea to scan photos before they go bad. Despite some extensive PhotoShop work, you can still see that there are yellowed areas with a purple tinge at the end at the top and bottom of the photo. We have too many photo processed in Germany that have discolored yellowed areas or where the entire print has turned orangey in color. This is caused by improper processing and will only worsen with time. I can salvage some of them with PhotoShop, but they will never look like they should.

Leif Celebrates his Third Birthday at Happy Time Montessori School - January 26, 1978

When I did a whole series on Leif's birthdays back in January, since his birthday is January 28th, I hadn't found these photos, and I didn't have them when I wrote about him attending the Happy Time Montessori School in Fuerth, Germany, either. It amazes me to see them now, how small he looks, how little and vulnerable. At the time, although all three-year-olds are small, he looked so large compared to the other kids in his class that it was hard to realize that he really WAS small, just a little boy. The thing that really touches me about the second photo is how carefully he is serving the drink to one of his classmates. We were celebrating his birthday in his classroom, and the kids were all sitting in a circle on the floor. Rather than having the adults pass out cupcakes and serve the drinks, his teacher had Leif do it. It would have been challenge enough for most three-year-olds to set cups down on a table, but getting them safely all the way to the floor was a bigger feat. Leif accomplished it without spilling a drop, and you can see in the photo how carefully he is setting the cup down.

In the first photo, he sits neatly cross-legged, eating his cupcake, and he appears to have some frosting on his mouth. I think he helped make the cupcakes and frost them, too, standing on a chair in our quarters in Fuerth.

He only went to the Happy Time Montessori School for one year, the school year during which he turned three. The following summer, we moved to the village of Sachsen bei Ansbach.

Leif's Third Home - Kalb Army Housing Area - Fuerth, Germany - Summer 1977 to Summer 1980

In the summer of 1977, we moved from Charlottesville, Virginia to Fuerth, Germany, which is right next to Nurnberg. When we first got to Europe, we took time to travel to Norway using Eurail passes and visited cousins there. Then we spent a month living the the old Bavarian American Hotel, near the train station, while we waited for quarters on base. We finally got a three bedroom first floor apartment in a building like the one in the background of this photo. I evidently never thought it was either attractive enough or interesting enough to photograph. The building in this photo is actually the one across the huge parade field that the kids used as a playground. We had a balcony on the side facing the playground and although it was quite a ways off the ground, even on the first floor, Peter A. could lower himself off of it.

Leif had friend in the neighborhood, particularly Katie, another two-year-old in the next building. He "married" her when they were not quite three years old. The year that we lived in the Nurnberg area, we went on many Volksmarches (hikes on marked trails, for which we got medals after walking 10 kilometers; other medals were given to those who walked 20 or 30 kilometers), visited the zoo, several wonderful museums, the castle, other parts of southern Germany, and the wonderful Kristkindlmarkt by on the square with the Frauenkirche at Christmas time.

Leif went to a Montesorri preschool during that year, and it was there that his teacher said she felt he wasn't getting anything out of it because he was always off puttering around by himself, seemingly not paying any attention, but when she did an assessment, she was astonished to find out he was way ahead of the rest of the kids, could repeat things verbatim, and understood and had learned everything.

This is another place we can no longer go back to, at least not in the form it was when we lived there. In about 1994 it was one of the U.S. military areas that was returned to the German government and since then it has been changed. Many of the community facilities such as the movie theater have been torn down and the apartment buildings have been renovated. I don't know what happened to the school where Peter A. attended third grade.

I don't think Leif would have remembered this place, either, but it was a full year. This photo was taken in February 1978 when he was three years old. There is a lot of dreary, cloudy weather in Germany in the winter.

Leif's Third Christmas 1977 - Furth, Germany - Almost 3 years old

After our year in Charlottesville, Virginia, we were stationed in Fuerth, Germany, right next to Nurnberg, and Peter W. was the Officer in Charge of the U.S. Army's Nurnberg Law Center. We lived in an army housing area that no longer exists, in a first floor apartment. The building had three floors and there were six apartments in our stairwell. There was a very large area behind the building, surrounded by other apartment buildings like ours, that was the kids' playground.

Leif's best friend was a girl named Katie who lived in the next building. She had one blind eye because her brother had accidentally shot one of her eyes with a BB from an air gun.

Leif was two-and-a-half the summer we moved to Furth, and we lived there just one year. He attended the Happy Time Montessori Preschool.

That year, one of the organizations offered a service on St. Nikolaus Day, December 6th, where St. Nikolaus would come to one's home and visit the kids. I believe they requested a donation for a service organization. We decided that would be fun for the boys.

The evening of December 6th, the doorbell rang and there was St. Nikolaus, dressed like the German Nikolaus, not like the bearded American Santa, but similar enough that any kid should have known who it was. However, as I said in my earlier post, a lot of young children are scared of Santa, and Leif turned out to be one of them. He took one look at St. Nick and ran screaming to a big upholstered chair in the living room and tried to hide.

St. Nick tried to talk with him but Leif wasn't responding well. We tried talking to Leif and encouraging him to be friendly. Nothing doing. He was crying. Peter A. showing brotherly concern and trying to let Leif see that St. Nick wasn't hurting him any, but that didn't help either.

St. Nick didn't give up. He finally got down on the floor, so he was at Leif's height in the chair, and talked to him. Eventually, he got Leif to turn around and give him a hug. That's what you see in the photo above.

St. Nick was played by an army sergeant, and I no longer remember his name, but I do know that he had kids of his own and he was really good with Leif. Leif never told us why he was so frightened of him.

The other photo is of Leif playing with some of his Christmas toys on Christmas Eve, on the rug in the living room of of quarters there. So many of our Christmases were just the four of us, like this one, but we had a good time and a lot of love.

Peter Anthony the Vampire & Leif - Halloween 1977 - Fuerth, Germany

Peter Anthony was very interested in magic, stage makeup and the like. During the time we lived in Fuerth, Germany (right next to Nurnberg), he had both a magic set and a horror makeup set. I don't know which one the boys had more fun with.

The horror makeup set had some kind of a gel that would set up and result in a pliable, translucent plastic. The kit came with molds in which to shape the gel into "scars" that could be applied to the face or body with a supplied adhesive. There was, of course, fake blood, and makeup to color the scar and apply around it to make it look like part of one's skin.

Naturally, vampire teeth were supplied, along with other appurtenances.

This fall, 1977, when Peter A. was almost 9 years old, and Leif was not quite 3 years old, Peter had a great time mixing up scars, making himself up as the horror star of some wild story, and involving Leif, or his friend Baker Jordan, in his adventures.

In the photo above, Peter the vampire, in his fancy dress shirt and his dad's opera cape, is pretending to bite Leif in the neck. Leif was happy to cooperate in this game.

Leif & Peter Anthony - Playing together in Germany 1977 & 1979

Yesterday I wrote about my sons playing together when they were very young and mentioned how one minute Peter Anthony was trying to keep Leif out of his room, and Leif throwing toys at his door in frustration, and the next minute the two of the playing grand games of imagination together. The second photo, taken in Fuerth, Germany (near Nurnberg) in December 1977 may not have been taken at that exact moment, but it was taken in Peter Anthony's room where they were once again constructing a complex playscape with quite a variety of toys.

It says a lot about Leif's intelligence that he was able to play with Peter Anthony, who was six years older, and a lot about Peter Anthony that he would play with Leif. They each had their own friends, but often chose to spend time together.

In this photo, Leif is not quite three years old and Peter Anthony is days shy of his ninth birthday. Despite their occasional frustrations with each other, I found it quite amazing that a two year-old and an eight-year-old could play imaginatively together using intricate story lines and scenarios.

The photo at the top was taken two years later, in October 1979, when we were living in the German village of Sachsen bei Ansbach. Both boys were attending German schools and by this time were as fluent in German as any of the local kids in the neighborhood and our family was fully bilingual.

Each of them had German friends, Peter Anthony was in an American Cub Scout pack, and the two of them continued to enjoy playing with each other. Peter Anthony was nearly eleven years old and Leif was three months shy of four years old. They were thoroughly engrossed in and indoctrinated by the first Star Wars movie, which came out in May 1977 and you can see that's what they were playing in this picture.

When the boys outgrew those toys, I packed them up and kept them, and now they have been passed on to Peter Anthony's son, Marcus.

There were only a couple of other American kids around in our village, two girls, each the age of one of my sons. Leif and Erin were fast friends, and Peter Anthony occasionally got together with the older girl, but neither of them went to the German schools like our sons did and they didn't speak German.

The summer after the "Star Wars" play photo was taken, we moved to Japan, and there the boys continued their interest in Star Wars but added, as I have written before, an avid interest in the Japanese children's shows on television and the fantastic robot toys that were being produced in Japan at that time.

Some children never learn to play creatively, as our sons discovered when they tried to play that way with other kids, and I was always fascinated to hear them playing with such inventiveness, especially with each other.