In the spring of 1982, our junior year of German class at LaFollette High in Madison, Wisconsin, the people above (mostly) hosted a class (mostly) of German sixteen year-olds for about a month. By far, it was the most fun many of us had during high school. Once school was out in June, we flew to Germany and became their guests for a month.
About 13 years ago, I organized a gathering to commemorate the 25th anniversary of our exchange. We had a good turnout. At that time, our teacher, Dennis Bergren, was still with us, and he attended along with the other teacher who chaperoned our trip, who taught at East High. Since then, I have been keeping my eye on the calendar in hopes of returning to both Mainz and Berlin for the 40th. It might even be fun to rendezvous with both American friends and German students, too. It's with that hope that I intend to share what I write with those who were also there. I also hope that their memories for events and sights are better than mine.
I do recall taking the photo above. That's from a photo taken with my camera, my dad's Pentax K-1000, of the American students, plus an older student from LaFollette who tagged along on our Berlin excursion. She's at the far right. I notice that it was cool that day as we visited a section of the Berlin Wall, judging from the jackets. The Wall wasn't just a tourist curiosity back then. To either side of the frame, there were stairs you could climb on the West side of the wall (West Berlin side) and view the East German guard towers, soldiers and no-man's land. Between the West Berlin wall and the wall that bordered the East Berlin side, that area also known as the 'death strip', was many meters wide. I recall when I showed younger people the photo above, they would say, "That's not high! I could jump over that." They didn't know what existed between the two edges of the wall, as shown below:
