Back in front of a microphone

This photo of me in the summer of 1967 was taken on the news set at AFTV-22 at Spangdahlem AB.

I got my off-duty job at AFTV-22 at Spangdahlem Air Base the old fashioned way: I called the station and asked if they had any openings for part-time help. Nicole Zerbini, the dishy French receptionist, passed my call on to Tech Sgt. Ray Santangelo, the station manager.

He asked me about my experience, and after I told him he asked me to come in for an audition. I sat at the news desk and read some UPI copy for him. He gave me the job, working Saturdays and Sundays -- if I wasn't on call for the OR. I'd be anchoring newscasts, doing live station breaks, producing PSAs, manning the switcher for filmed programs, and generally doing whatever needed to be done. I think I might have been paid a couple of dollars an hour, but that wasn't the important thing. What was important was that I was honing my TV skills.

I still thought the airmen assigned to the station full time were an amateurish lot, but I kept my thoughts to myself. Over the course of the next few months, many of them rotated back to the states, their three-year tours of duty in Germany over. To my surprise, the first two full-time replacements were high-caliber broadcasters. Like me, they were young, but they brought skills that I wanted to absorb.

Two of the newcomers, Sergeants Les Jackson and Chuck Minx, were also in their early 20s. Les was excellent on camera, whether hosting a talk show or anchoring the news. Chuck's skills were in production and film. I soaked up what they had to teach me like a sponge. Both taught me more than they knew. And within weeks, they were dreaming up formats for new shows and improving the look of AFTV-22 by leaps and bounds. I supported them enthusiastically.

I also had to get used to being recognized. I was anchoring at least a couple of TV newscasts each weekend. Back home in Richmond, I had been a voice on the radio. Now I was a face on TV. The medics I lived with were full of questions about what working at AFTV was like. (They were also full of suggestions about programming, some on point and others far-fetched. I had to tell them that as a part-timer I didn't have much say in programming decisions.)

Soon, GIs at the NCO club began to recognize me from TV. Within a few months, I got used to being greeted as "the TV guy" all over both bases, and even when I'd go out to a local German restaurant or bar. I didn't let it go to my head much. If GIs were going to watch TV, they had only one choice. They were a captive audience.

And I was thoroughly enjoying myself. I liked being an OR medic and was getting good performance reviews. And I enjoyed the opportunity to work part-time at AFTV-22, where the station manager offered to use me as often as I could be available.

Happy Boxing Day

The children in my niece Terry and nephew Mike's families knew joy unbounded this Christmas. Because some relatives couldn't make it to Richmond until the day after Christmas, the traditional gathering at Mike's house was postponed one day so we could all celebrate together.

So Carlos, Rowan and Milagros unwrapped still more presents on the morning after Christmas. In this picture from yesterday morning, Carlos has just opened a box of Legos, which also seems to fascinate Rowan. She's wearing her Christmas skirt. Jenny, her mother, is watching. Carlos is my great nephew, and Rowan is my great-great niece.

After feeding us a sumptuous Christmas dinner, Mike's wife, Becky, sent me off with a homemade present I'll enjoy for some time -- a jar of pickled figs she put up herself.

There is cause for celebration on the day after Christmas. In England it's Boxing Day, so called, some say, because it was traditionally a day off for the servants. The gentry would eat boxed lunches and dinners of cold cuts and buffet items prepared by the servants in advance.

December 26 is also St. Stephen's Day in the Catholic and Anglican churches, commemorating the first Christian martyr.

All things considered, and despite the fact that my childhood was long ago, I think I like the idea of celebrating Christmas Day twice.

Christmas traditions

I stopped to photograph this Madonna and Child at a small village church during one of our weekend rambles through the Eifel Mountains. (Don Dale 1967 photo)

I loved Christmas as a child, and I've kept much of that enthusiasm as an adult.

I remember the intensity of the excitement from when I was small, back when I truly believed in Santa Claus. It was magical -- just as it's meant to be. When I got older, I explored the more serious side of the holiday. From about the age of 7 or 8, I played a child of Bethlehem in the annual pageant at Fairmount Methodist Church. My mom helped make the costumes, and my dad made the halos for the angels out of tinsel, wire, and glow-in-the-dark paint.

When I was about 14, I joined the volunteer cast of the annual Nativity pageant at the Carillon in Byrd Park. For the first few years, I played one of a handful of slaves being beaten by Roman soldiers. By the time I left Richmond for the Air Force, I had graduated to being a Roman soldier. (Age has its perks.) We volunteers returned year after year, and seeing each other for the rehearsal and then the Christmas-Eve performance was the real start of the holidays.

Christmas dinner when I was a child was usually at either our house or at my Aunt Annie's. Both women were good Southern cooks, taught by my grandmother, who usually pitched in with at least one dish. Their holiday menus were much the same, although each year there'd be talk in the kitchen about a different take on one tradition or another - but they never messed with the basics: the turkey, the gravy (giblets, but no gizzard), the dressing (cornbread with sausage), the candied yams (thick brown-sugar syrup), the cranberry sauce (Ocean Spray) and the pickle tray. They'd usually experiment with the vegetables -- creamed peas with pearl onions, Durkee's green bean casserole with mushroom soup and french fried onions, creamed spinach or some such. My father was in charge of making the Waldorf salad from scratch. We kids would shell the nuts for him.

I've had my share of good Christmases, with a few bad ones thrown in to teach me the difference. Some that could have been bad were not. I was fired from WTVR TV a week before Christmas in 1977. I was jobless, but that holiday turned out to be a good one. The support from friends and colleagues at work was overwhelming and full of good cheer.

My first Christmas in Germany -- my first away from home -- was also a good one. I missed my family, but we went to midnight services at St. Peter's in Bitburg, and on Christmas Day we had a jolly traditional Christmas dinner in the hospital chow hall, with turkey and steamship round of beef carved to order. And there were parties in almost every room in the barracks at one time or another.

The hard Christmases marked the absence of immediate family members: the first without my father's Waldorf salad, the first after my sister died, and the first without my mother's cooking.

Nowadays, I have Christmas dinner with my niece Terry and my nephew Mike and their families at Mike's house. Mike and his wife, Becky, live in the house where his parents and grandparents once lived. Becky's mother, Louise, provides continuity from her side of the family. Becky and Terry are both excellent cooks, and the food is always splendid.

But what's far more valuable to me is the gathering itself. Traditions continue. Life changes, yet stays the same. The great nieces and nephew and the great-great niece keep the holiday focus where it should be, on the young. And it makes me very happy to be present.

So here's a merry Christmas wish for you all for 2009.

O Tannenbaum

(Don Dale 1967 photo)

As Weihnachten -- Christmas -- rolled around in December of 1967, my roommates and I decided we wanted a Christmas tree in the room. The base and the town were surrounded by forests, so we layered up in warm clothes and set out with a saw.

A 20-minute walk took us into a forest of evergreens, most towering three or four stories tall. We found the small tree you see in the picture above, sawed it down and carried it back through the little crossroads town of Mötsch to the hospital barracks.

One of my roommates bought a star for the top and a string of lights at the PX. We decided it was a GI tree, so we decorated it with GI things -- name tags, airman stripes and several gold epaulets -- and red stars cut out of construction paper. Each of us got a few presents from home through the mail, and we piled them under the tree. Aside from the big tree in the dayroom, ours was the only Tannenbaum in the barracks.

It made Christmas in our room a little merrier, perhaps. But we had unwittingly violated German law six ways from Sunday.

I found out when I was telling the OR's chief medic about our little tree. "You're lucky the Polizei didn't arrest you," he said.

What we didn't know was that the German forest we had invaded was protected by laws with stiff penalties. To chop down a tree you needed a permit, and a forestry official -- the Jägermeister -- had to accompany you and approve the tree selection. You had to pay a fee and pay the Jägermeister. Violators were subject to stiff fines and possible jail time.

And we had merrily carried that tree right through the center of Mötsch and into the hospital barracks. We must have had the Patron Saint of Naïveté sitting on our shoulders.

But it was a cool Christmas tree.

Team medic = free travel

I took this picture in London in the fall of 1967. I managed a quick visit when I accompanied the Bitburg football team to play at RAF Mildenhall. Those kids are sitting on a cannon overlooking Tower Bridge.

On a late summer morning in 1967, the 36th Tactical Hospital's chief surgeon mentioned to a few of us that the base football team was looking for a medic. The job would mean going to practices and games to handle first-responder medical aid. But he warned us that whoever volunteered would not be relieved of any of his regular OR duties. "And there's no extra pay," he said.

Nobody leaped at the opportunity.

The OR lounge was beginning to clear out when I asked out of curiosity who the team would be playing this season. He told me the schedule included a handful of other air bases in Germany. And a game in Naples. And another in Mildenhall, England.

I immediately volunteered.

It turned out to be a far different job than working in the OR. I treated a slew of minor injuries that season, and one or two major cases that required hospitalization. I learned a lot about emergency first aid. I also had to learn the difference between football-player patients who were stoic and those few who were complainers. The two groups required different approaches. The stoics thought they could play with a broken arm. The complainers were more focused on minutia. It took me a few games to master the art of persuading the stoics that they needed treatment and the art of calming the unfounded fears of the overly fearful. (Did I say that diplomatically?)

The weekend trip to Naples with the team was an adventure in more ways than one. We used Bitburg's Gooney Bird, a two-engine prop plane that had been around since World War II, for the trip to Italy. On our approach to the airfield at Allied Forces Southern Europe Command, the right engine burst into flames. We landed with flames still leaping from the cowling. By the time we drew to a stop, firemen in what looked like space suits were swarming the engine and we quickly deplaned.

After practice the home team gave us a tour of Naples, and both teams were guests at a dinner hosted by the commander at a restaurant in the hills overlooking Naples' harbor. The lights of the city below us stretching down to the waterfront in the distance were magical. After dinner, it was back to our rooms so the teams could get some sleep before the game.

After the game, which we lost -- Bitburg didn't win many games that season -- we had the evening and the next morning to explore Naples on our own. A couple of us hit the PX, which was far larger than Bitburg's, and then headed off to town. We strolled around Piazza Garibaldi, walked the congested and animated streets of the old city, and had an amazing lunch at a pizzeria. We also made a quick visit to the 13th-century Duomo before we had to catch our flight back to the Eifel. The Gooney Bird had been repaired.

We lost the game at RAF Mildenhall, too. Mildenhall was a British air base during World War II, but by 1967 it was a joint USAF-RAF operation. Mildenhall is north and east of London in Bury Saint Edmunds, Suffolk. After the game, I set out alone for London. I had to change trains at least twice going and coming, but I managed to spend an afternoon at the Tower of London and see the crown jewels.

European currencies were not as strong against the dollar in 1967 as they are today, and for an American, traveling was relatively inexpensive. But as a two-striper in the Air Force I wasn't making much money, so the free trips with the football team to Naples and London were a big bonus.

Discovering AFTV

This is the cover of an edition of the German-published monthly guide to American Forces Television programming originating at AFTV-22, which served Bitburg, Spangdahlem and Hahn air bases and any other troops in our section of Germany. That's singer Patti Page on the cover. The content was similar to what we were used to seeing in TV Guide back in the States.

I had vaguely heard of the American Forces Network before I got to Germany. But I was surprised to see that in addition to the AFN radio service, provided in those days by the Army, the Air Force provided television for us troops -- Armed Forces Television, or AFTV. (AFTV was renamed American Forces Television a year or so later because of a perceived "host-nation sensibility," but the initialism remained the same.)

AFN, the radio station with its headquarters in Frankfurt, was as slick and well-produced as radio back home. It was all-things-to-all-people radio, a style that had died out in the States about a decade earlier. There was a live morning news and deejay block, a canned classical music show following that, a noon news block, and a live-deejay popular music show during afternoon drive time. But we all listened.

AFTV was another matter.

I first watched AFTV in the hospital barracks dayroom on my second day in Germany. AFTV-22 in Spangdahlem (about 15 minutes away from Bitburg) was broadcast in black-and-white with cheap equipment and a level of talent and professionalism that you'd expect to find, in those days, in a very small community in the States. It wouldn't be terribly unfair to call AFTV-22 amateurish. Every time I watched it, I wanted to put to work what I had learned at WTVR TV and fix it.

AFTV provided most of the same popular network shows that were airing on CBS, ABC and NBC TV in the States. Back in Los Angeles, the American Forces Radio and Television Service would dub the network shows to film and then send them out on what was known as a "bicycle" network: They'd be flown to Germany, aired in Ramstein, then shipped to Spangdahlem for broadcast, then shipped to Berlin or wherever for airing there. Often, the film had been broken and spliced quite a few times when it got to the end of the line. And because the films were being physically transported from station to station, the shows would air a few months late in our corner of Germany.

AFTV-22 out of Spangdahlem also produced live newscasts and a few live specialty programs -- a kid's show, a morning "woman's" show and a weekly prime-time variety show on Friday nights. The camera work was clunky, the directing was ham-fisted, and the on-camera talent was almost inept.

But we watched, because it was all we had. When a film of a week-old football game was airing on AFTV-22, the dayroom was jammed with viewers. (The Air Force went to special lengths to see that film of major sports events was rushed to us.)

It took me about 6 months to learn that there was a possibility, just a possibility, that I might get a part-time job working weekends at the Spangdahlem TV station.

Winter in the Eifel

(Don Dale 1967 photo)

I always thought this shot would make a nice calendar picture. You could put the month and dates in the lower right-hand corner and label it February.

This was taken on the road to the castle at Vianden in Luxembourg. We were still in Germany, but we were near the border. I saw the stream and the copse of trees, turned the VW around and went back to see if it was really as picturesque as it had looked at 80 kilometers an hour. I decided it did, and I'm glad I took the picture because of the memories it evokes today of the beauty of a stark winter in the Eifel Mountains.

I'm not claiming that this image is art-gallery quality -- far from it. But I think two of the secrets of taking good pictures are taking your camera with you and editing severely. You can't take a good picture unless you do drag that camera around, and if you show other people more than about 20 percent of your pictures you're including too many losers.

Day tripping

(Don Dale 1967 photo)

The Eifel Mountains, for me, had all the charm and scenic beauty of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains. My friend Bob and I stopped at the end of this ancient bridge near Kyllburg one Saturday. We spread our lunch on the bridge railing and ate while enjoying the view of the valley below.

Lunch was simple: a few hard rolls from Bitburg's bakery, some cold cuts from the town's deli, a bag of chips from the commissary and a bottle of Mosel wine. We also had a tube -- that's right, a tube -- of mayonnaise from the German deli. It was handy, although it was like putting toothpaste on a sandwich.

Mom's fruitcakes

Three good friends of mine enjoyed some of my mom's annual fruitcake from home in 1967 in the barracks. They are (left to right) Glenn Thomas, Doug Allen and Bill Marcacelli. Glenn worked in administration, Doug was an emergency room tech, and Bill was a ward medic. I don't know who took this Polaroid image.

My mother never once set foot in a liquor store in her life.

That meant that early each November my father was assigned to go to the ABC store to pick up a bottle of sherry and a pint of apple brandy.

My mother was getting ready to make the holiday fruitcakes.

The ones my mom made were not the dry, tasteless kind that are passed on from friend to friend each Christmas, or worse yet, usable as doorstops. The whole family looked forward to these fruitcakes -- one for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas.

When I was in the Air Force, my mom sent me a fruitcake each year. My barracks mates couldn't get enough of them.

I found her recipe. It was in her copy of the 1942 Good Housekeeping cookbook, but she had made changes over the years. The recipe is annotated in her hand in both margins.

Here's the recipe she settled on after much experimentation.

1 lb. dark raisins
3 lbs. mixed candied fruit (my mother usually used green and red cherries, citron, orange peel and pineapple, with emphasis on the cherries)
1 lb. black walnuts
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
1 cup softened butter
1 cup granulated sugar
5 eggs
1/4 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons baking powder
1/4 cup sherry
1 1/2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Cut up fruits and nuts coarsely, mix thoroughly with 1 cup of the flour, and set aside. In another bowl, work butter with a spoon until fluffy and creamy. Gradually add sugar while continuing to work with a spoon until light. Add eggs, one at a time, beating vigorously after each addition.

Sift remaining 2 cups flour with salt and baking powder and add to butter mixture alternately in thirds with the sherry and vanilla extract. Fold in the floured fruits and nuts. Pour into a ring fruitcake pan that has been greased and lined with heavy wax paper. Bake in a slow oven at 300 degrees for 2 1/4 to 2 1/2 hours or until done. Makes one 6-lb. fruitcake.

Okay, that was the recipe. But the process didn't end there. My mother would double the recipe and make two fruitcakes. She used fruitcake tins that she'd had for God knows how long. She'd line the tins with aluminum foil and place a finished fruitcake in each. She'd put half an apple in each center hole. Then she'd soak cheesecloth in the apple brandy, cover the top of each fruitcake with a section of the damp cloth, and seal the tins. Each week, she'd check to see if the apples were still okay. If they were showing signs of mold, she replace them with fresh apple halves. And she'd dampen the cheesecloth with more apple brandy. By Thanksgiving, when she'd slice the first of the two cakes, they were incredibly good -- dense, moist, nutty, fruity and redolent of all of that apple brandy.

I haven't had a decent slice of fruitcake since she stopped making her own in her late 80s.

The enlisted men vs. the dependents

(Don Dale 1967 photo)

It snowed often enough in the Eifel for those of us who lived in the hospital barracks to find creative ways to have fun outdoors. This picture was taken from the top of the hospital barracks. In the distance, those pastel apartment buildings are for dependent families, meaning they were for enlisted men and officers who brought their families to Bitburg with them. (The main part of the base and the flight line were to the left, quite some distance beyond that berm.)

We woke up to the first good snowfall one weekend in the fall of 1967 and decided to build a snow fort. Teenagers from dependent housing began to gather in small knots in the distance. As the rather substantial snow fort began to take shape, they moved in closer. By the time we'd finished, the snowball battle was on.

The dependent teenagers were the victors. They attacked without cover, pelting those of us inside the sheltering fort mercilessly. Raw numbers triumphed: There were many more of them than there were of us.

They were an amiable lot, as we were. The battle ended with good cheer and handshakes amid the ruins.

Travel serendipity

The Café de Paris in Luxembourg (Don Dale 1967 photo)

Serendipity played such a major part in our travels in nearby Luxembourg, Belgium and France, and in Germany, too. On off-duty weekends, we'd pile into my Volkswagen and just go. Luxembourg was a favorite destination. It took about 45 minutes to drive to Luxembourg City.

I took this picture of nine woman and a man sitting in front of the Café de Paris on the Place d'Armes in the center of the city. Across the square was a restaurant, the Café du Commerce, that we wandered into one day looking for lunch. It was a lucky choice. The Café du Commerce turned out to be a true bistro with good food and superior service. I had my first experience with steak tartare there and loved it. Ditto the salmon bisque, which was delicious and unlike anything I'd ever had before. If someone had transported the Café du Commerce back to the States, we'd never have been able to afford it on our military paychecks. Europe, however, was still recovering from the war that had ended just 20 years before, and the dollar was still strong against most Central European currencies.

We returned many times to the Café du Commerce as we sampled the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg's attractions. One of the most spectacular sights in the city was the Adolphe Bridge, which was then only about 5 years old. It's a massive, arched structure that crosses the Pétrusse River valley. Before Luxembourg converted to the Euro, an engraving of the bridge was featured on the back of its paper money.

Another favorite destination, not in the city but closer to the German border, was the castle at Vianden. In those days it was in near ruins. The few tourists who sought it out were free to roam at will. Today it's been glitzed up dramatically, with tickets, tours, a souvenir shop and spectacular nighttime light shows. Back in the day, we'd just point my Volkswagen up the mountain and, at the top, we'd wander through the ruins of the castle, which dates back to the Middle Ages and was home to the counts of Vianden. (You can see before and after pictures of the castle by clicking here.)

Far below, we could see the town of Vianden, the River Our and farmland in all directions.

The horse knows the way

(Don Dale photo, 1967)

The Simonbräu brewery in Bitburg dates back to 1817. I had my first taste of the company's best-selling product, Bitburger Pils, 150 years later. In 1967, the brewery was still regional in its focus. Today the market for Bitburger Pills is world-wide. You can pick up a six-pack in any Richmond store with a decent beer selection. But that's only been true for the past couple of decades. I remember seeing Bitburger Pils for sale in Richmond for the first time at the Strawberry Street Vineyard in the 1980s. It was like running into an old friend unexpectedly.

The bottled version we get here in the States tastes different. I suspect that's because it's pasteurized. But it's still good, far better than American beer.

I took this picture in downtown Bitburg in 1967, before the brewery expanded and went international. There was nothing unusual about kegs of Bitburger being delivered to local bars and restaurants by horse-drawn wagon in those days. That's just the way it was done.

When I came back to the States after being discharged from the Air Force, I sang the praises of Bitburger Pils to my friend Walter Foery, one of my favorite travelling companions. I kept telling him, "It's the best beer I've ever tasted."

A couple of decades passed, and Walter and I booked a cruise down the Rhine River from Holland to Switzerland. At our first stop inside Germany, we visited a small village gasthaus that featured Bitburger Pils on draft. We both drank a glass. Then Walter began singing its praises. All along, he had thought I was exaggerating. One sip, and he, too, saw the light.

The Summer of Love, part three

The garden at Anne Hathaway's cottage at Stratford-upon-Avon. (1967 Don Dale photo)

On Sunday morning I slept in, had a good breakfast in Leicester Square at the Golden Egg, and decided to find Speakers' Corner at Hyde Park. It wasn't easy. The park is huge, 350 beautiful acres in the middle of London. I spent the morning roaming through it. The weather was warm and the sky was gloriously sunny. I saw young people exercising their horses on the bridle trails. I watched elderly ladies walking their poodles and Afghan hounds on the pathways. I took pictures of people sunning themselves by the Serpentine as they watched sailboats and rowboats out on the water. I found a plaque that said that it was Charles I who opened what had been a royal hunting ground as a public park in 1637. By the time I found Speakers' Corner, the speakers had all dispersed, and I realized I had been walking for hours.

On Sunday afternoon, I visited St. Paul's Cathedral (stunning exterior and interior), stopped at Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop (a major disappointment), and headed for the Tower of London. Begun by William the Conqueror in 1078, the Tower is set along the Thames and has its own river entrance at Traitors' Gate. I found the spot where two of Henry VIII's wives were beheaded, Anne Boleyn in 1536 and Catherine Howard six years later. I wanted to see the Crown Jewels, but the line seemed endless. Instead, I had lunch at a proper English tearoom just outside the Tower gate. Then I took the Underground back to Trafalgar Square to take some more pictures and talk to people.

On Monday, my last day in England, I got up early to be sure to catch a bus to Stratford-upon-Avon and then Warwick Castle. In a letter to my parents later, I called Stratford "a tourist trap." I visited Shakespeare's wife's home, Anne Hathaway's Cottage, which was modest inside but was backed by a lush flower garden in full bloom. The house was furnished in "period," not original, furniture, and the docent was overly sure about Shakespearean dates and facts that scholars are not so certain about. I decided that Stratford wasn't the place to find Shakespeare. The final disappointment was discovering that the churchyard where Shakespeare is buried was closed to the public -- although I suppose that's a necessity to prevent tourism damage. "I was disillusioned with Stratford-upon-Avon, to say the least," I wrote.

Warwick Castle, which dates back to 1068, was a different matter, with its extensive grounds, beautiful landscaping by Lancelot "Capability" Brown (an important name in 18th-century English garden-design history), and an extensive art collection including paintings by Van Dyke and Rembrandt. It was well worth the one-shilling price of admission.

By eight that evening, I was back in London, where I had dinner and took one last look at Trafalgar Square. It was time to go back to Bitburg. At 11 p.m., I boarded a train for Dover, where I caught the overnight ferry for Ostend, Belgium. For most of the crossing I sat on the deck not being seasick, although it was a struggle: to say the English Channel was rough that night is an understatement. Grateful to be on solid ground again, I caught a train from Ostend to Trier and then another back to Bitburg. All told, it was about an 18-hour journey.

As I look back on my first real venture out of the Eifel Mountains now, I realize that you have to learn how to travel, just as you have to learn how to program your digital thermostat or parallel-park your car: You research it and then give it a go yourself. I came back much more confident that I could take advantage of the opportunities I'd have in the next 30 months in Europe. I learned a great deal. I learned that one of the secrets is to just do it. I went to London by myself without much of a plan or much money, making it up as I went along. I learned the value of a good guidebook, especially when money is tight. I learned that it's often the unexpected adventures, the chance encounters, and, yes, the setbacks, that make a trip memorable.

In the years since, I have been to London more times than I can count, and I've visited most major capitals in Central Europe, some more than once. I've walked the beaches at Normandy for the 60th anniversary of D-Day, flown into Naples with one engine on fire, taken a course in medieval cathedrals at Trinity College at Oxford University, hiked in the Alps and the Black Forest, spent two . . . um . . .interesting days in the Azores after landing with two out of four engines malfunctioning, and eaten in restaurants with one, two and three Michelin stars in The Netherlands, France and Germany. Travel has been one of the real joys of my life.

That trip to London was the beginning of my education.