The photo is of Jeppe Hein’s Bench Around the Lake, a wonderfully whimsical set of swoopy benches that seem to spring out of the earth in places around the lake, do odd things, and disappear again. The only thing I have against them is that they are a photographically hideous shade of yellow, which pretty much knocks them out of the running for anything except black-and-white portraiture.

Oh well.

This tree had so many lights on it I understand NASA is looking into it for use as a planetary beacon.

I’m unreasonably pleased that this photo made it into Flickr Explore!

This is me outside the Barracks I lived in on Andrews Kaserne in April of 1977.

Andrews Barracks, located on Finckensteinallee in the Zehlendorf district of Berlin, was originally a barracks and NCO Academy for Hitler’s Shutzstaffel. To the victor goes the spoils, and after the war, the U.S. Army grabbed this prime piece of real estate and created a Kaserne named after Lt. Gen. Frank Maxwell Andrews.

To me of course, it was home while I was in Berlin. There were a lot of amenities, among them a swimming pool built for the 1936 Olympics, a movie theater, an amateur theater-in-the-round, where I actually had a small part in a production of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest , a small PX, and a recreation center, where I played a lot of contract bridge with various denizens of the American community and some expats who came by from time to time.

A winter view of the building I lived in. My room was in the center section, on the third floor, between the stairwells.

There was an awful lot of somewhat grisly history associated with the site; some of the the executions on the “Night of the Long Knives” occurred on the Kaserne, in a small courtyard at the northwest corner.

History aside, the Kaserne was not bad at all as living conditions went- It had been designed as basically the West Point for central Europe, and of course it had been remodeled a couple of times since the war.

Since I was an E-5, I got NCO quarters, which were large rooms that were partitioned off out of even larger squad rooms. In many places there would be 8 to 12 people living in a space I now had to myself, or with an occasional transient roomie. 12-foot ceilings added to the feeling of spaciousness. In the original architecture, my room and the two on either side of it were one huge space, probably a classroom or squad room. Pictures I found later in my tour in the post library showed Hitler standing just about where my couch was. Creepy.

We were allowed, within reason, to decorate our rooms as we saw fit. This led to some fairly wild variations in room decor. One fellow had draped every surface in his room with DDR and Russian flags, including the ceiling. Hanging DDR flags was a common way of partitioning off space, because large DDR flags could be gotten extremely cheaply in the East, for far less than plain cotton cloth in the PX or on the local economy.

This contemporary photograph shows Hitler inspecting members of the Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler in front of the building that would later be my barracks. The white circle shows my room. Some wag during my tour had an enlargement of this photo printed up with a label that said “First Sergeant Middlesteadt inspects Company B, USAFSB”, which was funny when you considered that Top was a generally all-around decent guy and family man.

Not to belabor all this dark history, but it has a bearing on later events. Suffice it to say that the buildings and grounds fairly reeked of a bloody past and dark history if one was at all sensitive to that sort of thing, and could well give you pause when hearing strange noises at night.

I wasn’t particularly a barracks rat, but I did spend enough time on post to become very familiar with all the denizens of Company B. My best friend Mike was spending his time in his room writing a novel, while another friend was busy with an apple II computer- the first one I had ever seen- learning how to program it. I was spending a lot of time developing film in the barracks bathroom when I wasn’t over at the rec center playing bridge, learning German from Gerhard, one of my partners, or the little German gal who was in charge of the center. The overall atmosphere was pretty laid back, and almost like I’d imagine a college dorm to be like.

The general level of soldiers in FS Berlin was very high, indeed. Most of them were college educated, and there were a wide range of cultural and outside interests evidenced in the population. There was drinking, to be sure, and some drugs, but most of us were fairly sober and intelligent folks. The surrounding community had adapted itself to the presence of GI’s completely by the time I got there: The big restaurant right outside the gate was Al Mulino’s Italian Restaurant and Pizzeria- just like any corner pizza joint back home- except they served German beer and you paid in Marks. One had to travel a bit further afield to find genuine German establishments.

The mess hall on post was unremarkable, save the one time we were served lemon Jello over a layer of raw onions, due to a misunderstanding on the part of a newly-hired cook.

All in all, the U.S. Government had managed to provide us with fairly luxurious quarters as quarters went. Next time, I’ll talk about work and the Hill.

I arrived in Germany on a Pan Am flight into Frankfurt-am-Main from New York, and the first thing I saw as I got off the plane was “Dr. Müllers Sex Shop”. Clearly, the zoning laws were different here. I also found it strange that I didn’t need a passport: my military ID was all that was necessary to enter and leave the country. A short hop on a 727 put me into Berlin-Tegel and a military shuttle bus took me to Andrews Kaserne.

I soon learned that my security clearance had not preceded me, so the powers-that-be, like all others, found something for me to do. They put me on a train to Bavaria, to a little resort town called Bad Tölz, where I was scheduled into an electronics class to basically pass the time while they waited for my clearance to arrive in Berlin.

This led to the interesting experience of traveling by train across a country where the only language I had was knowing the Chorus from Beethoven’s 9th symphony. I didn’t know exactly how far “Töchter aus Elysiam” or “Ahnest du den Schöpfer, Welt?” was going to get me. I took the duty train right back out of Berlin the second night I was there.

It’s perhaps germane to explain the duty train system a little bit: Berlin remained an occupied city for many years after World War Two. It was divided at the end of the war into four zones, one for each of the Occupying Powers- The French, British, United States, and the Soviet Union all maintained military forces in the city. Since Berlin ended up as an enclave within communist East Germany, it was necessary for the other powers to establish and maintain travel routes for the 118-mile journey through the “Iron Curtain” to the West. Each Power ran its own schedule of trains, so there were several routes and trains to choose from. I almost exclusively used the US train to Frankfurt while I was there. Duty train stories could fill another post.

Arriving in Frankfurt, I had to immediately decipher the German rail system- I went to a ticket booth and said simply “Bad Tölz”, bought a ticket out of the German Marks I had acquired before leaving Berlin, and paid attention to the ticket agent as he pointed out the ticket where it said “Schiene 21″. I figured out that “Schiene” must mean track and nodded my thanks and headed off to find the train. A few hours later, I found myself in Augsburg, needing to change trains. I found a friendly ticket agent, who directed me to the right place. Bad Tölz turned out to be a spa town not far from the Austrian border.

My initial impression of Bad Tölz was that it was very picturesque, reminding me a little of a Swiss village I had seen on a postcard my grandmother had when I was little. I settled in, and the school, taught by two ex-German Army instructors, passed the two weeks by quickly.

School over, I found myself back in Berlin, getting a room assigned in the barracks and getting a briefing on the classified aspects of our mission up on the Hill.

Teufelsberg (Devil’s Mountain), is the highest place in Berlin; ideal for a listening post. It was built after World War two from the rubble of 400,000 bombed buildings piled on top a a Nazi-era military technical college that was built by Albert Speer, Hitler’s principal architect. The college, being Nazi architecture, had been intended to be knocked down after the war, but was too sturdily constructed, so in a sense, Speer dictated where the Field station was eventually built. It was accessed via a winding, climbing road from the Grünewald in the British sector of West Berlin, steep enough so that the trick buses groaned in low gear while climbing to the top. I used to sit on the bus and stare into the vegetation, occasionally getting a glimpse of a piece of masonry or shattered column where the dirt covering it had eroded away, a somber reminder of how much destruction had occurred in this place 40 years before.

What we did on “the Hill” or “T-berg” was quite simply industrialized spying on a massive scale. T-Berg was one of the Cold War’s premier ELINT (Electronic Intelligence) stations. Inside, hundreds of technicians and operators maintained a 24-hour-a-day watch on almost every facet of East German and Soviet communications in Eastern Europe- telephone, fax, data, you name it. Personnel rosters for the other side were maintained and annotated, linguists in almost every Eastern European language resided on the Hill, listening to and transcribing tapes that the operators had captured. Techs, such as myself, maintained all the equipment used for this huge effort. A large communication center and Operational communications center (OPSCOMM) was maintained there as well. Teletype machines with adjustable-speed drives could be hooked up to radios to print out message traffic in the encrypted coded groups, which would then go to NSA reps for decryption. Morse-code specialists listened to Dits and Dahs until some of them quite literally went mad.

On the Hill were hundreds of radio receivers, huge adjustable satellite dishes on equatorial and azimuthal mounts, antenna systems galore, and enough RF cable to cross the Atlantic Ocean and come back. I tried to count just the Teletype machines once, and stopped somewhere after 500.

It was all super-secret then, although anyone with half a brain knew what was going on up there with all the obvious antennae and the American soldiers from the Intelligence and Security Command, and the large proportion of Russian and German-speaking GI’s assigned there. Nowadays it’s all done by computer, I’m sure, but I don’t think that I’ll ever consider that half as romantic as actually going somewhere and doing it the old fashioned way. We had constant alerts and drills to go out and stand guard, even though the reality was that the opposition knew what we did there as well, and there was an entire Soviet division four miles away tasked to removing us first if the the balloon ever ‘went up’ in Europe. Our first physical indication of the arrival of hostilities would be accurate, heavy artillery fire or a tactical nuke landing on us, and we knew it.

It gave us something to think about on mid-tricks.

Eastgate was a social center of my formative years; it was THE shopping mall on our side of town forever and ever. In many ways, it marked a boundary as well, the city seemed to end at Eastgate- the land beyond was definitely terra incognito at that time.

Eastgate is where my brothers and sisters had their first jobs, where I bought my first girlfriend the first present I had ever purchased for anyone outside my family; the destination for informal dates; it was where we went back-to-school and Christmas shopping.

I’ve been driving by it daily, oblivious, for the most part, to it’s gradual decay, my mind seeing it as it always was, camouflaging the stark reality of its decomposition. I think I last shopped there about July of 2003, and I think it closed finally in 2004.

The outlots are thriving in their own way, and serve to hide the central decay from Washington street and Shadeland Avenue. Driving up Shortridge road, however, becomes a little like driving past a graveyard, the bare parking lots with weeds poking through every few feet like a vast grey-and-green sward, the yellowed walls of the shopping center becoming its own mausoleum.

I poked my face up to the locked doors to the food court looking through all the way to the other side, remembering chasing my son through the game arcade that used to be here when he was maybe 8 or 9 years old, the echoes of the little kiddie train that ran on the mall at Christmastime; the record store where a girl I had a crush on in high school worked; and wandering the Christmas-decorated stores with my first sweetheart.

The stores eventually scattered to other venues, as did my siblings and I. Still, I felt a pang of longing and sadness for the innocence of those times, now gone, like the very life of the mall.

Like most other folk who live in any given city, there are lots of things here I know about but have never seen, but would have seen were I a tourista. A case in point is the Canal walk downtown.

Since I’m now under doctor’s orders to get out and walk about, I’m going to start looking for more places to go while the weather is nice.

Out front of the Indiana State Museum pictured above I came across this steam clock merrily burbling away. Of course I love all things steam, and I had never seen one of these, so it took me some time to fairly appreciate it.

A little farther north, there’s a pedestrian bridge over the canal that gives a good overview.

At several places along the canal, there are nicely framed views of the Indianapolis downtown area.

These townhomes are probably where the 21st century version of Yuppies live. It’s a pretty place. although entirely too close to Downtown for my tastes. Note the State Capitol dome in the background.

At the northern end of the canal walk, just past Tenth Street is this placid pool where the walk loops around it, giving us this view down the length of the walk.

I’ve driven US-24 through Waterville, OH probably a hundred times or more. Today, I decided to duck down into a little park I’d seen for a quick rest. I was surprised to find this old-time canal boat sitting under a bridge over -wait for it- an old time canal with a towpath. The Volunteer is a replica canal boat operated by the Toledo Parks system, on a genuine section of old canal along the present-day Maumee river.

Like many of these attractions, it’s operated by volunteers in period dress. The people operating this boat were sterling examples of how to put on the show, remaining in character and dressed in period clothes. It was almost possible to go back to 1840 in your mind, were it not for the muffled highway noise- just audible, even though masked by the trees.

Every time I see something like this, I feel a kinship of sorts with the folks volunteering. I did something similar for several years, on a tourist railroad museum. It’s not remunerative work, but it is good for the soul.

I’m on the road again, cruising the highways for a while. I took this picture of Pilot Mountain in North Carolina from a rest area/scenic overlook on US-52/I 74.

I spent some time last week with my cousin Jim in Tulsa, as I was passing through. The rare luxury of being able to spend actual time there with him meant that I got the twenty-five cent tour of the city. This photo is the Boston Avenue Methodist Church, a major landmark downtown. I snagged this shot as we were stopped at a light.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

We used his way-cool Volvo convertible, seen here doing its Transformers impression:

and cruised the town accompanied by a running commentary from him on a large variety of historical and current events. He pointed out the plaza where, later this summer, they are going to open a time capsule that supposedly has a brand new 1957 Plymouth in it.

Whenever I get too big a head or think myself the smartest guy around, I always try and remember that Jim has me outclassed in almost every way. He’s a medical doctor, and has a PhD. in Chemistry from MIT. Despite all his education, he’s the nicest, most down-to-earth guy you’d care to meet.

Anyway, to get back to the meat of the story, we toured the new construction for the State University as well as various parts of town with all sorts of history behind them, complete with a tour down along the river where the Native American tribes are building new casinos and shopping centers, as well as a campus tour of Oral Roberts University and a complete history of the place, in some depth. Jim loves Tulsa, and has a great deal of respect for its history, and it shows.

I particularly was intrigued by this wonderful statue/sculpture of praying hands- it’s 60 feet tall and the world’s largest bronze structure:

as well as the Cityplex, once the ORU medical school/hospital. Very futuristic looking; indeed the architectural style is called Futurism.

All in all, it was great fun. Every time I see Jim, I learn something new. Spending this much time with him was refreshing. It’s too bad we don’t get to see each other more often.