?How did you feel when your first child was born?
I had rented a two-room furnished apartment inside a German home when Miriam arrived on 18 March 1962; it had no refrigerator, we used the outside window sill, but things froze, so we rented a refrigerator without compressor or even an electric plug, it worked by difference in diameter of the pipe, so refrigerant would evaporate and condense in its unending cycle; it would not freeze, for that we still used the window sill, but it cooled.
Heat, as in most if not all German homes at the time, was either turned down very much or off altogether at night, we slept under a featherbed that kept us warm. To take a bath in the bathtub there was an adjacent water heater, with coal and kindle next to it, so we had to make a fire a little before to warm the water.
After our Colonel Chaplain, a very nice Catholic Priest took care of Miriam's problem with German immigration and no longer had to go to the police station each week, we moved to a very small apartment on the third floor of a small building at the far end of phaffen-schwabenheim; At the apartment on the first floor lived an Air Force guy named Billy who had just bought a new Volvo. We were the only two American families in the village, on which appeared, upon the wall of the first house as you approached from Bad Kreuznach, a Swastika each Sunday morning. The police would come and paint over it, only to reappear next Sunday. We joked with Billy and his wife that one day the Nazis would lynch us.
On 17 September 1962, while living in that apartment, I was on guard duty. We guarded the POL Dump and Ammo Dump that were off-base, the MPs guarded the base. Guard duty lasted 24 hours, two hours on and four hours off, so you did four two-hour shifts in the 24-hour period.
Both the POL and Ammo Dumps were on a barren hill a couple of kilometers from the base, a windy and cold place, even in September, for a recently arrived Floridian. A 3/4ton truck took us to each post to replace the previous guard and picked us up two hours later, whereupon we return to the guard house and tried to sleep for about three hours.
One day, a crazy lieutenant who was Officer of the Day and supervised the guards, I say crazy because we were young and had an M1 Garand rifle with live ammunition, wanted to surprise me while I was guarding the POL Dump. I was supposed to walk around the compound, inside the fence, every half-hour and had a guard shack where I could be the rest of the time. While on the shack I saw the headlights of the jeep of the Officer of the Day approaching a long way off, which they shut off before getting near, so I began to walk around the compound. The crazy lieutenant tried to sneak over the fence on the other side of where I was walking, I noticed and from far away and, in the dead silence of the night, I cocked my rifle and gave him the challenge:
-?Halt! who goes there? ?
To which he replied quickly:
-?Officer of the guard! ?
-?Advance to be recognized! ?
Then I waited longer than necessary to identify him, all the time thinking that he must have been nervous, for I would have been when facing a young inexperienced soldier with a loaded M1 rifle in a desolate place.
Getting back to 17 September 1962, I was again on guard duty at the POL Dump when Miriam went into labor. She got her bag and asked our neighbor Billy to please drive her to the Second Army Evac Hospital at Bad Kreuznach, for delivery. Miriam told me later that Billy was worried about his new car, drove fast while asking her to please hold on until they got to the hospital.
When the Guard House was notified, they went and got me from the cold hilltop and drove me to the hospital. It was a small hospital, I went in, the lobby was dark but I kept going until I found a nurse and asked about Miriam. She told me that she was fine, still having labor pains, that I had to wait in the lobby. They would not let me see her or be present at birth, as was usual then.
I had to wait in the dark lobby, wearing as I was, winter gear, it was quiet and warm, I sat on the large and comfortable sofa there and next thing I knew, the nurse was waking me up around four thirty in the morning and telling me that I had a beautiful baby boy. I was very happy and got to see both Miriam and Humberto Jr. for a moment, was assured both were doing fine, then back to the lobby.
I must admit, much to my retroactive shame, that when Miriam and Humberto Jr. came home, I not only did not help Miriam with the baby, but expected her to keep doing all the cooking and housework. Maybe it was my upbringing, maybe that I was only 20 years of age, neither one a valid excuse, Miriam was only 18 and we were far from family that could help. Nevertheless, Miriam coped without complain, trooper as she is, things went well thanks to her.
On 31 December 1962 we were still living at phaffen-schwabenheim, Lieutenant Norman Ramírez, ROTC from University of Mayagüez, whose wife had not yet arrived, was at the little apartment, sharing a bottle of rum with us; at midnight we heard commotion downstairs at the street of our normally quiet village, people were on the street laughing and drinking, so we took the bottle of rum and went down, while Humberto Jr. slept placidly.
German neighbors were friendly for a change, invited us into their homes, gave us to drink new wine or brandy; inevitably there was a picture of a Nazi soldier, a son, brother or father, but we invariably were told ?he fought in the Eastern Front? never against our troops.
We never stayed long in a house, the village was on the road to Mainz and had only one other street, which left from a T-shaped intersection and went downhill. All of a sudden, Miriam was on a snow sled that some were playing with, going downhill. It turned out we had fun that New Year?s Eve. I then drove Ramírez to the BOQ in Bad Kreuznach in my 1953 Mercedes 170 under a severe snowstorm and minimum visibility; coming back, when I took the fork to the village, while barely moving, the car still made a 360 turn, luckily, I managed not to get out of the road and bogged down on the ditch, made it home safe.
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