11/14/2017
The following is a letter we received from a host brother of the Krefeld 1965 program site:
It was 1965, US vs USSR and all that, and we reckoned we were on the eve of destruction, and an upcoming poet preached, that the times were a changing…
And we, the 49ers cold war generation in West Germany, 20 years after WWII, were listening to these phrases we adored so much these days…
And I, 15 years old, had decided to learn how to play these great songs on the guitar…
America was a dream far beyond reach!
And then, there was an elderly lady, Mrs. Marianne Gatzke - God bless her for her foresight and engagement - who brought this program on the way:
Sommerakademie Indiana/Krefeld!
We heard about it in school.
So my sister and I convinced our mother to be a host family for one of those students, and so it came to pass, that we welcomed Scott Arrowsmith from Munster, Indiana in our home.
And the greatest thing of all : he was a gifted guitar-player, 12 string Gibson, and he, after a couple of days in our house, started to teach me how to play the music I had wanted to play.
It was an extraordinary time we shared.
His favorite dishes were “Leberwurst” and “Apfelpfannekuchen” —my mother was a Master cook!
All too fast, they returned to America for their Junior year, but they left one seed:
All I wanted to do, was to get to the US, too.
One year later, on August 8th 1966, I boarded the old liberty ship “Seven Seas” in Rotterdam, Netherlands, together with 1100 teenage ambassadors to cross the ocean to disembark in New York City ten days later, thanks to a foreign exchange scholarship, granted by the American Field Service.
Your program certainly changed my life!!
Dr.med. Herbert M. Specht
Neuss, Germany
