Sometimes You Get What You Wish For
Mike Sanders’ dream of visiting Germany not only came true, but changed
the trajectory of his life.
He was only four years old when his father Cal was drafted into the war. He shipped out to Germany as a medic on the same day Mike’s sister Brenda was born. Mike had no idea where Germany was, but he knew even then that he wanted to go there like his father.
“I remember he would wake up screaming from nightmares,” Mike’s younger brother Randy said.
Life was not idyllic at their home in the small town of Gaffney, South Carolina. They were poor, relying on Cal’s work as a carpenter, farmer, and any other odd jobs he could find. He wasn’t living the standards of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, of which they were members, and this caused tension between his parents. No matter his flaws, Mike loved his father and enjoyed working alongside him when he could.
Then on April 8, 1953 tragedy struck. Cal was plowing a field at dusk and overturned into a ditch. His tractor landed on top of him killing him instantly. Mike was twelve years old.
Relatives came to the house to tell his wife, and while she was being attended to, her three children sat on a bed trying to figure out what happened.
“No one came to see if we were okay or to tell us anything,” Brenda recalled.
Mike and Randy left the house around 10:00 pm and walked up and down the street letting the neighbors know that their father had died.
Viewings at that time were held in the home and Mike remembered very clearly his father’s body laid out in the living room.
“The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life was walk across the room and look into that coffin,” he said, trying to hold back his emotions.
He hid in the bathroom so no one would see him cry.
Not Giving in to Disappointment
When asked what Mike was like as a teenager his brother Randy couldn’t help but laugh.
“He was a nerd,” he said affectionately. ‘Everyone was listening to rock and roll and Mike listened to classical music and reading."
His appreciation for classical music and books stayed with him his entire life.
He had the same ups and downs all teenagers have and he felt the absence of his father very deeply during those moments.
He would look through his father’s scrapbook from World War II and he read books on the war as well, becoming quite an aficionado. Cal had gruesome pictures of dead bodies and bombed out cities. There were also scenes of the beautiful countryside. Mike had wanted to see it since he was four years old.
He joined the Army out of high school. Shortly before his time was up he received a letter from his mother informing him that the bishop of their church congregation, Edgar M. Poole was planning on sending him on a mission and he shouldn’t make any plans.
“I sat straight up when I read that,” He said. “I had never really considered a mission until then.”
He sent in his mission papers to Salt Lake City and prayed he would be sent to Germany. The call arrived as a letter in June 1961. It wasn’t what he had hoped for. Instead of Germany, he would be going to Texas.
“I have to admit that I was disappointed when I saw Texas on the paper.”
Despite his disappointment, he was willing to go where the Lord needed him. The Saturday before he was scheduled to leave, he returned home from buying a suitcase in town to find his mother waiting. She informed him that he had orders to go back to active duty.
Edgar M. Poole was not only the bishop but a neighbor as well. He had looked out for Mike after his father’s death and Mike turned to him again. Even though it was the middle of the night, Bishop Poole called church headquarters in Salt Lake City to see what they could do. They informed him that if Mike were already in the mission home he could get a ministerial deferment, but since he wasn’t he would have to return to the army.
This was a huge blow. He did not want to go back into active service. The one upside was they were calling up reserves to the crisis in Berlin after the wall was built. There might be a chance to go to Germany after all. He reported back to Fort Bragg for ten and a half months. He was assigned to a Mississippi National Guard unit as a radio operator with men who were only thereto keep from being drafted and were violently opposed to serving on active duty.
“I felt like I was wasting my time and I wanted to get home so I could serve my mission.”
Since he couldn’t accept his first call, he had to resubmit his papers. This time when he opened his call, almost a year later, he saw the words South German Mission, headquarters in Stuttgart/Feuerbach.
“I was elated,” he recalls. “It was where I wanted to go and it was surprising that after all I had been through that year, I was going to get to see where my father had been.”
He and his friend Dan Foxx were the first missionaries to serve from Gaffney since the 1930’s.
“After we went, a number of younger members from the ward went on missions.” He said proudly.
Learning Through Experience
There was no Missionary Training Center to learn the language ahead of time. Instead, foreign missionaries were required to serve two and a half years rather than the standard two years.He reported to the Feuerbach mission home in September. His mother had been working since her husband’s death and she willingly paid for the mission with her meager income.
“The cost was $75 or $80 a month and she paid from her work checks. At the time the German Mark was worth four to the dollar, so it was a lot cheaper to live there”.
The mission home was in a mansion designed after the castle that sat on the other side of the valley. It was impressive, but his first day was less so.
“They sent us all downtown in Feuerbach to do street interviews; wasted our time. We couldn’t do anything because we didn’t understand what anyone was saying and couldn’t respond,” he said, shaking his head.
It was a different world than the small town he grew up in. They housed the new missionaries in a hotel in Feuerbach and he was awakened by church bells ringing around midnight.
“For the first time I felt like I was in a strange land far from home,” he remembered. “The bells were beautiful, but not at midnight.”
The bathrooms took the most getting used to.
“A lot of places didn’t have hot running water and there were no places to bathe. You had to go to a public bath and pay ninety pfennig,” he said. “The average person took a bath once a week.”
He also found it odd that people walked in the middle of the street.
“The streets were so narrow that sometimes it was easier to walk on the road,” he recalled.
The food took some getting used to, but he loved it, especially spätzle, the noodles that are a regional specialty in Southern Germany. It was fun to watch them being made. The dough is placed on a board and scraped into boiling water with a knife to form the noodles. He especially enjoyed them with goulash or sausages, called wurst in German.
The Germans also ate a lot of yoghurt, which he had never had. He would combine plain yoghurt with instant pudding mix to make it less sour. For breakfast he and his companions would eat Weitzen Flocken, or wheat flakes, which they treated like oatmeal, eating it alongside bread and jam. He drank a lot of milk those two and a half years.
“There was very little German food I didn’t like,” he said.
His most important lesson was to wear earmuffs in the winter.
“It was the coldest winter they had had in twenty-five years. I had frostbite on the tops of my ears before I got smart enough to buy a pair.”
Since he had studied World War II for years, he was eager to search out historical aspects of the city. “There were a lot of ruins if you knew where to look,” he said. “Germany was still rebuilding from the war.”
One of his biggest shocks came from air raid sirens. They tested them once a month and it left people dazed.
“After the sirens went off the only thing people talked about for the rest of the day was the war.”
He had seen the effects the war had on his father, and he could see it in the people who had
lived through it in their own country.
Making Friends
Above all, he loved the German people. They were honest and could be trusted.
“In 1963 when I was in Germany, our bikes were never touched by the Germans. It was always Americans who would mess with them.”
There was one German he had trouble becoming friends with though. His name was Otto Weller. His daughter Herta had been baptized into the church. After seeing the difference it made in her life, his wife Gertrud also wanted to be baptized but Otto wouldn’t give permission, a requirement at the time for wives.
Although she couldn’t be baptized Gertrud loved having the missionaries in her home in Reutlingen. Otto told her the next missionary who showed up on his doorstep would get thrown into the street. Mike was that missionary.
Otto never threw him into the street, but he would sit in the corner and watch TV, ignoring them as much as he could.
Sometimes Herta would join them if she was visiting from her apartment in Stuttgart where she worked as a secretary. Later she returned home to live and worked in Reutlingen.
“I thought she was attractive, but I had a girlfriend waiting for me back home and didn’t pay attention to her,” he said.
Otto still wouldn’t come around. The day before Mike was transferred to another city, he spent the evening in their home and asked Herta and Gertrud if they would leave a recording on his voice recorder if he brought it by. He dropped it off the next day and Otto told him very sarcastically to bring it in and set it down. He would be sure to get the recordings.
“I didn’t think I would ever see the recorder again, but I got it back with the recordings.”
A year after he was transferred, he ran into Herta at a church conference in Stuttgart. She told him excitedly that she was immigrating to America. He suggested she write to him and let himknow how she liked it. When she sent him a letter he responded, but his interest went no further. He still had his girlfriend waiting for him, and his focus was on his missionary work.
One month before the end of his mission Mike returned to his apartment in Aalen from a mission conference in Stuttgart. He had received two letters: one from his mother and one from his girlfriend. He hadn’t heard from his girlfriend in a couple of months so he was excited to read the letter.
It began with “It seems I owe you an apology and a few letters, so I will deal with them in that order. What wasn’t going to happen has happened.” He quickly realized what he was reading and yelled out to his companions “Holy cow, this is a Dear John!”
She had begun dating someone else and accepted his proposal at Christmas. Mike was in shock. This was not what he expected. He wrote to her a few times but stopped just before the wedding.
“I still have the letter in my mission journal. My mother kept it for me. She kept all my letters,” he said.
Life After The Mission
After returning home and readjusting to life, Mike had been accepted as a student at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. It was another adjustment, but he had a friend already.
After a lot of challenges, Herta Weller had finally fulfilled her goal of living in Utah. He drove up to Salt Lake City to see her. He may not have paid attention to her on his mission but that changed.
They were married a year later in the Salt Lake Temple.
The man who swore he would throw the next missionary off his porch was now the father-in-law to that same missionary. Otto never joined the church, but was pleased about the marriage and eventually gave in and allowed his wife to be baptized.
With Herta’s parents in Germany and Mike’s mother unable to make the trip, they were married with just some friends in attendance.
“Our friends held a reception for us in their backyard. We would have loved to have our parents there, but it was a nice reception, and we were happy.”
After graduation they moved with their three children back to Gaffney. They added four more children to their family and included German traditions when they could, but it was a challenging time for them. They moved back to Utah in 1986. It felt like they were starting over.
Germany's Siren Song
Mike wouldn’t realize how much of a blessing it was to move back to Utah until later in his life. They sent all three of their sons on missions and were overjoyed when one of their daughters was called to serve in the Frankfurt, Germany mission.
“It wouldn’t have happened had we stayed in South Carolina,” he said.
There wasn’t enough money for them to travel to Germany together. Herta started working and saving to make yearly visits to Germany and Mike would use the frequent flier miles to return to South Carolina to visit his mother. He was also able to visit Germany through assignments to regular army units from the National Guard where he was a German linguist and CI agent. He taught himself to speak Dutch and became a Dutch linguist, but Germany always had his heart.
And it was still calling.
In 2014, when he was seventy-four and Herta was seventy-six, they were prompted to serve a mission as a senior couple, and they knew where they wanted to go. Concerns about Herta’s health kept them from submitting their papers right away. Just when they thought they were ready, Mike broke his ankle. They were visiting his sister after her husband had been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. It had snowed and as they were leaving, he slipped on the walkway leaving him with a bad break. He attended his brother-in-law's funeral two weeks later on crutches.
They were discouraged and thought maybe it wasn’t meant to be, but their love for Germany was a siren song and they pushed forward. Finally in February of 2015 they received the call to serve in the Frankfurt temple.
“It was the perfect call,” Mike said. “We were elated to be in Frankfurt.”
It wasn’t all perfect though. Four months into their mission they had to be reassigned due to the temple being closed for major reconstruction. They asked to stay in Germany and were sent to Dresden, but their first apartment had rats. They were only able to get it resolved after Herta’s brother Wolfgang called the mission home and complained.
But Dresden was a beautiful city with a captivating history and they enjoyed being able to tour it once they got a car. GPS made finding their way so much easier than the first time he had served in Germany.
They eagerly returned home to Utah after eighteen months to settle into retired family life among their seven children and eight grandchildren. They had been the oldest couple missionaries in the field and felt it. It was time to slow down.
Being sent there on his first mission to Germany had been a dream come true for Mike. Of all the things he loved about the country, it was the people first and foremost, beginning with his wife.
“If you become friends with a German, you have made a friend for life,” he said.
Not only for life as it turned out, but for eternity.
Comments
Post a Comment