...and speaking of beer

My roommate from Berlin is in town and staying with us two days (a shout-out to Brian M from Henry here!). Whenever we get the chance to catch up in person, there is plenty to rehash and rationalize. And true to the title of this post, beer's part of it - while we are talking and probably has a role in the story that unfolds.



I thought I would use the occasion to post a couple of the photos I have begun to accumulate about where we lived and worked back then. This first one is an aerial view of Tempelhof Airport in Berlin from the 1950's. Tempelhof, or TCA, was where most of the single Air Force enlisted folks lived. We called our quarters "dorms" in the Air Force rather than barracks, and there were areas throughout this building that were used for dorms.


This next photo is from the 1984 "Open House" - I was at this one, I think I was volunteering some time to cook hamburgers in one of the fundraising booths near the grass in the upper right. At the end of the post, there's a picture of the dorms we lived in, in this photo that building is near the white tower, top center.

The last time Hank was in town (real name, Greg, we nicknamed him Henry on his arrival in Berlin) we were able to get four or five of the old gang together for a night out at the Flying Fish bar, which went pretty well, although it did wrap up at 3am, about 5 hours earlier than it might have in the old days (it was a favorite thing of mine to walk out of wherever we were into broad daylight before catching a cab home).

This time with the holidays on, we're not finding a lot of folks available to get out for this kind of thing, so we're doing more respectful things like a night out in Old Town Alexandria, and then tonight we'll meet up with another friend, Stan, from those days.

Here is the building where Henry and my two bedroom "suite" was; Brian and Stan were in this building. This is a photo from the '50's, with war damage still evident, it was cleaned up over the years and used intermittently as dorms, remodeled a final time just before we all moved in in the 1984 timeframe.

Last image is a page from the base phone book, showing where all the little shops were on Tempelhof - our exchange, the barber shop (run by a woman we called "Conan the barber"), and stuff like that...

In future posts, I'll put up some I've found of the place I worked, and where some friends worked.