33 years ago this month Monica and I moved into our first apartment in Düsseldorf, Germany.

The flat was in the Behrenstraße, house number 25, in a section of town called Flingern. The building is still there today. The location was convenient for us, being only about a ten minute walk from the WCG office, which at that time was in the Grafenberger Allee. We lived in a small 2 room apartment on the top floor (our window on the front side of the building is circled). The roof was slanted, making the rooms seem quite small. When we moved in in June 1974, Monica did not speak any German yet, which made the first couple of months interesting. Among our neighbors in the building were a family from Turkey and a family from Greece. That summer (1974) the Turkish military occupied the Turkish-speaking part of the island of Cyprus. American military aid to Turkey was then suspended, since the Turkish military had apparently used equipment supplied by the U.S. to make its move. So the Turks were said to be upset with the U.S. because military aid was suspended, and Greeks were said to be upset with the U.S. because U.S. military equipment supplied to Turkey had been used to occupy part of Cyprus. So I told Monica not to speak English with me in the stairwell for a few weeks. Since she couldn’t speak German yet, that meant that we would climb the five flights of stairs in total silence. 🙂

Sometime that fall we invited the small group of local church youth over for a pizza evening on a Saturday night. If I remember correctly, there were about ten of them. We were probably glad the group was small, since we could not have fit many more into that small apartment. At the time we were on a bit of an extreme health kick in the church, so Monica made the pizza dough from scratch using whole wheat flour. She had taken off her wedding ring and placed it on a towel she was using to clean the flour off her hands. Once the pizzas were in the oven, she took the towel and shook it out the back window (circled in the rear view photo). She then heard a tinkling sound as the ring bounced out. We thought it might be in the rain gutter, so I held Paul Schnee (who must have been around 12 at the time) by his ankles out the window. However, the ring had fallen to the roof below, belonging to some kind of insurance company. Since it was a Saturday night, nothing would be open again until Monday morning. On Monday I went down right at 8 a.m. and asked one of the fellows at the company if he would be willing to get on the roof to look for my wife’s wedding ring which she had thrown out the window on Saturday evening. He immediately got a ladder and climbed onto the roof and quickly found the ring. He had a concerned look on his face when he gave it to me, and then I realized that I hadn’t explained anything. Oh well, I thought, he won’t believe me now anyway, so I just thanked him for his help and returned the ring to its rightful owner.