During the summer of 1965, when I was a junior at the University of Arizona and thanks to the U of A Placement Office, another Pima Hall girl, Carolyn Niethammer, and I spent two months working in a calendar factory in Kempten, Germany. Naturally, there’s a song that goes with that:

Kempten down in the Alps,
That’s where I long to be.
My heart is still in Bavaria
You can see.

The calendar factory in question made the cardboard backing for Seiberling Tire calendars. It was an assembly line operation, with three components—a large piece of cardboard, a front side featuring an iconic photograph of the Alps, and a back side of plain white paper. The papers were slathered with glue on a moving conveyor belt and sent first to the front-side pairs and then to the back-side pairs. Carolyn was a front-sider; I was a back sider.

My partner, Frau Pomerine and I had to make sure the back side covered all the corners of the turned down paper that the front-siders had left behind. Frau Pomerine spoke limited English, and I spoke no German, but on our second day of work, she brought Carolyn and me full length aprons to wear to protect our “nice clothes.” She brought us homemade baked goods regularly, and before we left, she gave me an English version of a Doctor Oetker’s German cook book—which I still have, by the way. Before we left for home, she invited Carolyn and me to a Sunday dinner at her house in the next village over where she lived with her thirty-something developmentally disabled daughter.

While there I asked her in my stumbling German why she was always so nice to us. She replied, “After the war, I have no money, no food for my kids. A woman from America sent care packages. By helping you, I thank her!” For someone not quite twenty years old, that was a real life lesson.

Carolyn and I worked in the calendar factory four and a half days a week while living in a youth hostel. On the weekends, we hitchhiked around Europe, hitting some of the high spots in Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria. One of the most memorable of those was on a trip to Munich where we visited the Deutsches Museum. While there we encountered a life-sized diorama of copper miners working in an Arizona copper mine in the 1880s. Suddenly I understood the sacrifices our father had made for us by leaving farming behind and becoming an underground miner in Bisbee, Arizona.

At school Carolyn was a Journalism major and I was an English major. Before leaving home, she had negotiated a deal with her hometown newspaper, the Prescott Courier, to write paid-by-the-inch dispatches for them from our trip abroad. While she was busy writing those, I spent my time writing Aero-gram letters (the folding kind) and post cards to the folks back home. What I didn’t realize was that my mother took them straight to the Bisbee Daily Review where they were published almost verbatim. That was another life lesson. Journalism majors get paid. English majors don’t.

Shortly before we left Kempten, a reporter from a local newspaper came to interview us, and we told her all about our travels and adventures. When the article came out, it was in German and we couldn’t read it, but we sent clippings of the interview home. Naturally, my resourceful mother managed to find someone to translate the article into English. When she got to the part where we talked about hitchhiking, she said that couldn’t be true, but of course it was.

On Saturday my nephew, Dale, reached out to me saying that, while sorting through his mother’s things, he found an envelope that he thought was intended for me. When he dropped it off, it was a large manila envelope with my mother’s handwriting on the outside. Inside was a treasure trove of printed material—newspaper coverage of my graduating class from Bisbee High in 1962, the letter from the U of A inviting my parents to attend my graduation ceremony in 1966, clippings of me at my Brownie Fly-up ceremony and our troop selling sodas for Senior Scouts at Bisbee’s Fourth of July parade.

At the very bottom, however, was a much smaller envelope. In it were all the Aero-Gram letters and post cards I sent home that summer along with clippings of everything that had been printed for free in the Bisbee Daily Review. Just for completness sake, the article from the Kempten paper was also included.

Today, I read through some of those postcards and letters, done in blue ink and tiny handwriting. It’s a bit of a surprise to encounter my arrogant youthful observations—arrogant and innocent both—some sixty years later. While we were traveling, Carolyn’s boyfriend proposed, setting a wedding date for after we arrived home but before school started. I was her maid of honor, and my mother ended up making my dress and had it ready for me to wear before I got home from Europe.

So that was my mother’s Mother’s Day gift to me this week—an envelope chock full of all those memories. But reading through those long ago and very youthful musings, I’m reminded of something else Evie Busk used to say. “She who laughs last laughs best.”