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This may be my shortest Berlin story but perhaps it will trigger someone else’s recollections.
About a month after arriving in Berlin I was working in the Rail Transportation Office on a pleasant summer day. My German colleagues were going about their work and the only thing unusual was that the combination of absences for leaves, training, Spandau guard duty and so on had resulted in a couple of hours of my being the only GI on duty.
One of the civilians took a phone call. I did not even pay attention to it — I was so new in Berlin that no one was going to be calling me. Then I noticed the woman who had taken the call had become the center of a huddle. Everyone was excited. I was informed that a colonel was on the line and he wanted to speak with the highest ranking American. I could see that the German staff were intrigued by the seeming importance of the call. This was the most dangerous city on earth according to Nikita Khruschev and something was up! In my Army clerk school training I had never expected to work in a place with incendiaries in the back of each file drawer.
I punched the button to pick up the call.
“PFC Rynerson speaking, sir!” Dead silence followed that for a long moment.
“You’re the highest ranking American there?”
“Yes sir, and I’m also the lowest ranking American here.”
“Well, it’s about my household goods…” It seemed that the colonel had what for us was a routine query but he had trouble understanding German-accented English on the phone. The civilian staff of the RTO had the full range of accents, from a Canadian woman whose English was crisp and clear to a guy in the baggage room who had trouble with German, let alone trying English.
I let my colleagues know that they could stand down and get back to the routine. And they helped me answer his question. Welcome to Berlin Brigade!
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P.S. Eventually I made E-5 but never received a phone call sounding so important again.
-- rwr
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R.W. There was a store across the street from the RTO that I would go to for Hummel Figurines that I would send home. The guy there gave me some paper’s with pictures and prices on them. My parents along with my sisters, aunt, and neighbor would send me money and what they wanted. The guy would box them up all ready to ship home. I bought a few myself and all ways remember he had one called the manger scene and it was around $80. Never bought that one.
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You remind me that there were (and are) a bunch of interesting stores in the little business district of Lichterfelde-West. I bought maps – new and old – at the antiquariat there. On a reunion trip I found a reprint of a history of Lichterfelde that answered a lot of questions. For example: it turns out that the Imperial cadet school that became Andrews Barracks was part of a real estate scheme. That info made me feel right at home.
-- rwr
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Another brief tale from the RTO from my brief duty as “PFCIC”:
The RTO staff, military and civilian, had several different work schedules. After I’d been oriented I was assigned to cover the “information clerk” duties for the morning arrival of the Duty Trains. Passengers from the earlier Bremerhaven train were on their own in 1969 but the Frankfurt train delivered all sorts of people with questions. I was to be the only GI on duty until 8 a.m., along with a German ticket clerk and German baggage room staff. I was briefed on some common issues and told how to tell an Airborne soldier to take their pants out of their boots.
I was quite pleased with this assignment. What the Army didn’t know was that in college I had been an Assistant Tour Director (go-fer) and before that had spent lots of time in the Vancouver, Washington and Portland, Oregon train stations waiting for newspaper shipments and listening to customers and clerks. I felt flattered that I was being asked to represent the Brigade even though I was a newbie.
When I couldn’t answer a question or had an inadequate answer I made note of it and tried to be ready for the next time — most questions are repeated over and over. I noticed what the favorite pensions were for budget travelers and even visited a couple of them on my own time to see them first hand, like a travel agent would. I studied the transit system.
Most of the time things ran smoothly. On one morning my ticket clerk was late because her S-Bahn train caught fire. On another I was chewed out by a SMOD for the litter on the platform. I explained that we would have police call after the other GI staff arrived. He told me that he would talk to the TC people in HQ, who I’m sure told him the same thing.
Then the bottom dropped out. My sergeant told me that the Transportation Corps had received a commendation from some visiting higher up from the “Zone” for my work. Why was that a problem? He confessed that TC wanted to dispense with that duty due to the work load of Vietnam-induced household goods shipments. I had been assigned the information duty because I was new and the hope was that I would screw up and then they would discontinue the service on the grounds that no one else was available.
“Now,” he complained, “we’ll be stuck having to do this for a while!”
As it happened another assignment came up so I left Transportation. Ironically, the things I had learned about getting around the Divided City paid off in getting a better job than being PFCIC at times in the RTO.
-- rwr
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I don’t remember having the band send off at the RTO. Perhaps that’s because in 1969 we were sending people back to the States on Pan Am 707’s from Tegel. (I’ve got a short tale from that operation, too.) In 1971 we were sending people back to the States on Pan Am 727’s from Tempelhof to Frankfurt and then Pan Am 747’s to JFK.
Allen Lawless might know more about this. If they did play something specific it was probably Auf wiedersehen.
As with many of us on those flights I had mixed feelings as we took off.
-- rwr
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