Denny Falk

Like many other members of the Mac Class of 1970, I landed in Paris in early June 1969 to participate in the Summer Work Abroad Program (SWAP). The initial plan was that I would work in Southern France for June and July and then travel during August. However, when I went to the address in Paris I had been given to finalize my job, they had never heard of me. Flustered, I reported that Dewitt Wallace had lined up a job for me (which may have been true). A flurry of activity followed, and a chauffeur-driven limousine pulled up outside the building I was in about five minutes later. The limo whisked me to the outskirts of Paris where I soon found myself in a very large office on the top floor of a tall building talking with the President of “Selection,” which was the name of Reader’s Digest in France. The President explained to me that Dewitt had not told him that I was coming, but that he was sure he could arrange a job for me. After some discussion, I was to return to “Selection” to work for the month of July, making about as much money as I would have for two months in my original job.

Now having an unexpected month to travel in June, George Lindall, Marilyn Biel, and Jan Meier were kind enough to allow me to join them as we drove a rented car around Southern Europe for the first three weeks of June. We drove to Geneva and continued down to Genoa, Florence, Salzburg, and Vienna. Pictures of the salt mine tour we took near Salzburg and a picnic lunch in the Vienna Woods appear below.

We had an exciting entrance into Czechoslovakia, as we were pulled over by a machine-gun-toting soldier who explained to us that we had been apprehended driving too fast in a built up zone and could either pay half the Czech money we had just been forced to change at the border or spend the night in jail awaiting trial. We chose to pay, as did all the drivers with foreign plates.

After a couple delightful days in Prague, we drove toward Germany, where I left George, Jan, and Marilyn to hitchhike back to Paris for my job that was scheduled to start in four days. The first day I hitchhiked about 500 miles and wound up getting a final ride into Amsterdam from a young couple with whom I wound up staying for three nights before taking a train back to Paris. While in Amsterdam, I ran into 15 people I knew, mostly from Mac, and along with Charlie Grady, met a Prince of the Netherlands who visited us at Mac four months later.

My July job with “Selection” involved working with computers to send out promotions to French folks who might want to subscribe to the magazine or perhaps order some condensed books. After they determined that I could not program computers in COBOL and BASIC (I knew a little FORTRAN), I spent the rest of the month doing non-skilled jobs with the computers and playing chess with my colleagues during down times.

While in Paris, I roomed with Bobby Anderson in a hotel in the Latin Quarter. On the night of the moon landing Bobby and I went to join Liz (Kiesow) Aase and Julie (Jackson) Schlueter in watching Neil Armstrong take “one small step for man” on a blurry eight-inch black-and-white TV screen.