Sandy Glysteen: To and from that small school on Logan Drive

To and from that small school on Logan Drive

Sandy Gleysteen

My sister, Andrea, and I attended DSW from September 1968 until January 1971. We were in the minority as American kids at the school back then. But I, in particular, loved it. I loved how small the school was, how well we all knew one another, how we were in a makeshift, non-air conditioned, prefab building in the countryside, how everyone spoke half English/half German, how kids came in and out of the school year depending back then on their was real parents horse tours of duty. Potomac country, and most days, neighboring dogs would wander onto the campus during Pause, anxious to have us play with them and often gross each other out by removing their ticks. All of us students shared the same teachers, the same gym equipment, the same need to bring a paper bag lunch. There was no cafeteria, no vending machine. If you forgot your lunch, you had to bum from someone else. I loved that we shared a school where some brought Leberwurst on brown bread and some peanut butter and jelly on white. Most of all, I loved our long bus rides from Washington out to Maryland. For over an hour every morning and every afternoon, a group of kids of all ages got to know each other, tease each other, learn from each other and grow up together. The kindergartners shared the ride with the 12th graders (no Abitur class had yet made it through the school.) Boys flirted with girls. Homework got done. Dares made. Judgments passed on everything from wardrobes to the latest gossip on the yard. There was real solidarity between all those of us who drove the bus from inside the District out to Potomac. We were an odd assortment of ages and backgrounds, even languages. Yet we all shared a similar journey.

But the greatest impact for me of riding that bus every day was meeting my best friend for life, Barbara Thomas. She and I were inseparable from 7:30 in the morning when she got on at Reservoir Road until 4:30 pm when she got off. I lived only two stops and three miles away from her, but until she got on in the morning and after she got off in the afternoon, the bus ride to me was empty, wasted time. On the rare

Marianne Karper (1968), & Eva Hendriks (2007) Photos courtesy of Sandy Gleysteen (2010),

Clockwise from upper left: Barbara Thomas and Sandy Gleysteen in a recent photograph (2010); gymnastics on the Logan school grounds (1968); a class trip to the Washington zoo (1968); horsing around on the Logan parking lot (1969); paradise lost: the demolition of the Logan campus and construction of a typical Potomac mansion (2007).

Situated in a bucolic setting in rural Maryland on Logan Drive, Potomac, Maryland: The German School, Washington, DC (1. Nov. 1966)

occasions our parents permitted us to visit each other on a school day, I would get off at her stop so we could sneak down to Cola floats with the local High s store cheap chocolate chip and buy Coca ice cream. Or she would ride with me into Georgetown, where we would promptly break all parental rules by walking barefoot down to M Street, visiting all the incense-ridden, hippie poster shops whose black lights made our us feel so t-shirts and teeth look so white and made cool. Barbara was fun and adventurous, and while we both thought of ourselves as bold and did sometimes get into trouble (usually Barbara), the truth was, we were quite innocent in how we explored the tumultuous world around us. Our antics were mild by any standards today.

The bus, emblazoned with the words, The German School, Die Deutsche Schule, sometimes drew unwanted attention. The Vietnam War might have been the focus of the real world and the protests all around us, but on television, Hogan s Heroes was the hit show. We would often be met with a salute and Heil Hitler from American kids on the remember how our Latin teacher, Herr street. I Gommel, fumed at the inanity of Col. Klink and Sgt. Schultz, and how offended he was that their bungling ineptitude was the picture of Germans portrayed by Hollywood. We understood his frustration, and definitely felt somewhat disloyal and guilty by laughing at those caricatures of Nazi Germans anyway.

Barbara and my friendship faced near catastrophe when my father was transferred to London in January of 1971, but salvaged by her father being posted to Bonn soon thereafter. The bus rides of DC gave way to the trains and ferries across the English Channel. Barbara and I managed to see each other constantly throughout our teenage years. Our bond was friendship mixed with an understanding shared by kids who live life in the chapters ordained by diplomatic or military tours of duty. We got plucked from one school and country and plopped into another, usually in the middle of a semester. We all understood that there were advantages to bridging cultures, but we also empathized with each other at the hardships brought on by abrupt change.

It was no surprise to me that Barbara ended up studying for a degree in English literature at a German university while my parents pleaded with me to not follow my English classmates to a British university, but to go to college in the States. I did, and pursued a BA in comparative literature. To this day, Barbara and I acknowledge Mr. Padaroff as the reason we have been

instilled with our of love reading and language. He was our English teacher at a German School when we were only 12 and 13 years old, but his impact remained profound.

I went on to become a journalist for NBC News for 27 years, six of which were in the DC bureau. During that time, I occasionally rode by the new, fancy, definitely now air- conditioned something lost when DSW, wondering you gave up the if there wasn t small, country school we shared for the large, established institution into which it had grown by the early 1980 s. Barbara s husband became the Washington correspondent for ARD, and so when she moved back to DC in the late 80 s, her daughter, Lilly, attended the our lives were coming full circle. I was DSW. late in We felt having a child, and it makes me sad that my son, raised in Los Angeles for all of his 18 years, doesn t speak a word German and never had a school experience that felt of as communal and purpose driven as mine.

Along with a few other hats, I continue working as a journalist, a career that has taken me around the globe, including to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. I attribute much of my success in network news to the skills and values I learned at the DSW. Everyday life there reinforced an understanding that there are many ways to view the world and to live life, many languages to master, a purpose to discipline and an unending need to adapt to change. Today I look back at those years and have nothing but gratitude to all the parents and teachers who develop- ed that little school in the middle of the Maryland countryside. For it was there that I was encouraged to straddle different cultures and language; and most important, there that I met Barbara and established a truly international friendship. Usually now we speak English, because she really is totally bilingual, and my German takes more effort. But sometimes when we are both too tired to think, we will fall into a conversation in which she speaks German, and I, English. It may sound schizophrenic to the eavesdropper, but it works for us. The bond that grew on the bus ride to and from school has supported us through the illnesses and deaths of loved ones and our parents, seen us cele- brate marriages, mourn divorce (mine, not hers), welcome our children into the world, and watch them struggle their way through adolescence and teenage years as we once did. I watch the relationships they forge with their friends, and I wish for them the great fortune of a relationship as close as the one Barbara and I developed going to and from that small school on Logan Drive. If I close my eyes, I can still feel the stickiness of an un-air conditioned bus ride on a humid Washington day, and see Barbara bounding between seats, cooking up the next adventure for the two of us. I am so grateful for every one of those exploits, even those that landed us in trouble with Herr Kleinschmidt. But the best part of all those memories is that we are still laughing about them together four decades later.

Das große Einzugsgebiet machte die Anschaffung von Schulbussen erforderlich; hier sechs Busse mit der Aufschrift "German School - Deutsche Schule - Washington D. C. in Logan Drive Parkplatz.