Nearing 80 years of age, I find myself wondering how my partner, Judy, and I ended up spending so many years in western Europe, especially during the volatile 1970s. Why two years in Germany and almost a year in Greece?
The woman who married me in 1968 claims that her maternal grandmother, Anna Johnson, had always wanted to travel, but as a traditional Minnesota farm wife that it wasn’t in the cards at all. Anna was a great reader and made sure all three of her daughters graduated from high school — a big deal in 1930s Depression-era America. She read book after book with her granddaughter, and spoke often about traveling back to “the old country,” thus infecting my partner with an insatiable longing to travel.
My own travel lust — equally fervent for hiking our backcountry or roaming about western Europe — comes in here since I’ve finally realized this intense desire has been super-charged via a sturdy Norwegian-American farmwoman and tradwife.
Judy, therefore, always pushed for travel to Europe and especially France, since she studied college-level French and German for six years, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in French literature at UCSB (1969 and 1971). During her master’s years at UCSB, she was a French teaching assistant. Meanwhile, I completed my degree and “graduated” to working at the Isla Vista Donut Shop in Isla Vista (near Morning Glory Music).
In my aggressive, enabled way, I had wangled a very low-interest student loan from the Bank of America, so Judy and I were able to flee to Europe with our backpacks in June 1971. It was an educational loan, and I self-servingly figured two or three years abroad in western Europe would continue my university work directly “in the field.” This was our “Grand Tour” of “the continent,” as Brits would say in the 19th century.
I can empathize with the Henry James character Christopher Newman’s early adulation of Europe, particularly when he emphasizes that “beauty” has little to do with the Industrial Revolution (in full swing in 1877 Europe), commenting that: “It had come back to him simply that what he had been looking at all summer [in Europe] was a very rich and beautiful world, and that it had not all been made by sharp railroad men and stock-brokers” (from his 1877 novel “The American”).
We managed to stay in Europe for two full years — 1971-73 — and we felt quite free, starting at 23, married … but with no direction home. We had no health insurance, no return plane tickets, no family, no phone (pre-cell era) and little money, but we carried backpacks and sleeping bags preparing to sleep rough when necessary. These years spent mostly in Paris, Bavaria (Munich), north Italy and Greece became the epic travel adventure of our lives together.
The legendary Frank Frost was my master’s advisor — UCSB history professor and jazz pianist — and he heartily encouraged the Europe venture. He also made it clear that I would need to master at least one modern European foreign language if I ever thought I’d be admitted to the history Ph.D. program at UCSB. (I had been denied admission in early 1971.) We agreed that the language had to be either French or German.
Thus, quixotically my partner’s pre-existing obsession with Europe and France only added fuel to my own outlandish academic arrogance and bonfire of the vanities. Ancient Greece and the eastern Mediterranean littoral became my specialized fields of study in history and archaeology, and so moving to France or Germany meant easier trips to Greece and to the Levant.
Frost could observe that Judy and I had no money — we both worked jobs throughout our university years — but also agreed with us that working in a foreign country would be the best way to learn its language and culture. When we ended up in very cheap digs on the Left Bank in Paris in July 1971, for all her excellent French and determined application, Judy was unable to secure a job (or a work permit or a residency permit). Historian that I am, I failed to recall that France had left NATO in a huff in the 1960s (and did not officially rejoin until 2009). American citizens had no special cachet in 1970s France. A perfect Catch-22.
After a few weeks and blowing almost all of our tiny cash reserve in Paris, we traveled to Germany in second class on the train feeling thin in the wallet but fat with choice experiences.
Munich, the fabled city of 1938 British appeasement and premium beer, had always been our backup location to find teaching jobs. We first went to Mannheim-Ludwigshafen on the mighty Rhine River. There, we met Kurt S., the German brother of a fellow UCSB graduate student — he was one of just two contacts we had in western Europe. We luckily spent a night with him and his sweet family, rattling on in German, and he had stored two boxes of my precious history books and Judy’s portable typewriter. (We had mailed these to him by slow boat several weeks earlier.)
Kurt quickly gave us the lay of the land in West Germany. He agreed that heading on to Munich was smart and opined that we should have little trouble getting a German residency permit (Aufentshalterlaubnis). He thought some teaching positions might be available. He was also pleasantly brutal: “My West Germany is an occupied land — we lost World War II — but luckily Bavaria was in the American sector and has fared alright after 1945. You Amis rule here whatever the official line is.”
During the past 53 years, Judy and I have returned at least 23 times to Germany and Greece. I managed to find original Ph.D. material (stone anchors) during archaeology diving with the Swedish Cyprus Expedition on the Island of Cyprus (4.1.1.) and found my way to productive marine archaeology work in Israel and Greece, too.
In 1977, late in her life, 83-year-old Anna Johnson was escorted to Norway by Judy where they visited relatives and mingled in towns such as Stavanger, Oslo and Sandnes.
Today, our son lives in Munich and survives as a working musician playing rhythm and blues and old-time music in a variety of venues (4.1.1.). Our five grandchildren are German citizens who speak mother-tongue Deutsch, although they all speak English as well.
How did we end up with these direct European connections? The family lines feel like ties to the mother ship of our American culture. Together, with the United Kingdom and USSR, we finally defeated Adolf Hitler and the German Nazis in World War II (never forgetting the Russian suffered by far the most). We eagerly acknowledge our multiple connections to European cultures — whatever your own ethnic or racial origins, English and Spanish are European languages now spoken in North America!
We, the Americans, established NATO in 1949 and have maintained extremely strong unity with the European Union until some of our political leaders became openly pro-Russian.
The current administration seems intent to blow up our political, economic and cultural ties with Europe, basically our parent culture. About 80% of Americans are descended from people of European ancestry, although debate rages about the precise percentage. Some gauge the percentage to be around 60%. The very English language of our Declaration of Independence and U.S. Constitution reflects European Enlightenment principles and the values of a liberal democracy. John Locke’s “life, liberty and property” became Thomas Jefferson’s “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”
One of America’s greatest strengths comes out of all the diverse ethnic, religious and racial strands that make up our country. We are a nation of immigrants — the earliest arrived as settler-colonists from Great Britain and the European continent. I honor all these cultural roots of our modern country and make no apologies for my enthusiastic Eurocentrism.
4.1.1.
Dan McCaslin, “Stone Anchors in Antiquity (Studies in Mediterranean Archaeology,” vol. LXI (Gothenburg 1980); Henry James, “The American” (1877); Gabriel McCaslin in “Mama’s Greens” on Apple Music (“Maybe the Dawn”).