In the fall of 1963 I was getting ready to graduate from college at Long Beach State College (now California State University at Long Beach). I planned to take a trip to Europe after graduation, scheduled for February 1964. In those days men who were subject to the military draft had to apply for permission to leave the country, which I did. I was told that permission would almost certainly be granted because my draft group wasn’t scheduled to be called up until we had reached age 23 (I would be 22 in February 1964).
It was all lies. The escalation of the counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam during late 1963 changed the game. In January 1964 I received two letters from my draft board in the mail. The first was the reply to my request for permission to leave the country: denied. The next envelope I opened contained my draft notice – “You are ORDERED to report…”, etc.
I couldn’t see myself as a cannon-fodder grunt slogging around in Vietnam, so I postponed my graduation to June 1964, got a deferment from the local Draft Board, and during the spring signed up for US Naval Officer Candidate School, which I was scheduled to enter in September, 1964. That left me all summer to take my long-awaited trip to Europe. I had taken Russian during my last two years in college, reckoning that I would eventually go to graduate school and earn an advanced degree in Russian history or Slavic studies, and that led to me signing up for a Russian Summer School in Munich, Germany, sponsored by the University of Oklahoma. The program involved six weeks of Russian classes at the Institute for the Study of the USSR (in German, Institut zur Erforschung der UdSSR) in Munich, followed by a two-week trip to the Soviet Union, with a finale of three days in Paris.
As it happened, the academic part of the program turned out to be a bust. The professor originally scheduled to teach the Russian class to which I was assigned had to cancel because of an illness in the family (he did show up later for the trip to the Soviet Union, and turned out to be quite good). The instructor who was hired to take his place was, shall we say, less motivating. His idea of teaching Russian was to have us read and memorize large blocks of text from a book, which, he claimed, was the method successfully used at the US military’s Defense Language Institute. That may have been so, but for college students and graduates who wanted to enjoy the attractions of Munich and not confine themselves exclusively to boring rote memory exercises on their summer evenings, it was a big disappointment.
At least we had the weekends free. I soon made the acquaintance of a fellow sufferer named Bill, then an undergraduate at Connecticut Wesleyan University, who was taking delivery of a car, a new Volkswagen Beetle, for his dad; Bill was planning to use it for weekend excursions, and he wanted company. I was only too eager to join the company, which also consisted of two Canadians, a lovely young woman of Latvian origin named Zoja, and Jim, a genial native of British Columbia.
On our first excursion, we drove north through western Germany, skirting the Black Forest, then cutting across northeast France (Alsace) to Luxembourg, where we spent the night. We then came back down the Rhine, taking in the hilltop castles and stopping briefly at various picturesque ruins along the way. Jim had a nice new camera, a Yashica, and I found myself deeply regretting that I hadn’t brought a camera too, and was missing my chance to record all the splendid vistas. So when we got back to Munich, I went to a photography store which had a clerk, an attractive young woman about my age, who spoke English well and helped me pick out an inexpensive camera. My choice was a Voigtländer Vitoret, a very basic 35mm film camera, but quite adequate with the aid of a lightmeter, which I also purchased. It stood me in good stead for all of our subsequent excursions, and I continued to use it for years afterward.
So here is the chronicle of my summer 1964 adventures following the camera purchase. I’ll begin with Munich, which was the starting point for all our expeditions.
Munich, Summer 1964
Berlin, July 1964
Austria and Italy, July 1964
Austria and Yugoslavia, Summer 1964
Greece, Summer 1964
Kiev, Summer 1964
Moscow, Summer 1964
Leningrad, Summer 1964
