Post date: Aug 12, 2014 9:53:31 PM
12 December 1965 - Sunday evening
Here I am in Berlin. We left Monday and have been working ever since. Well, almost ever since. Evenings we drove into the city (half-hour away) and saw the sights. Of course today was also free. We went to church in the Gedächtnis Kirche (Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial). The Evangelische service is almost identical with the Episcopal morning prayer. We are not working in Berlin proper, but in a village on the Zone border [Heiligensee]. The church is very small and quaint—built first around 1250, not changed for the last 300 years. It was a problem to install the organ with no parallel walls to line it up with and a tilted floor and very low ceiling in the gallery. [All the organs I’ve seen in Germany are in the gallery over the entrance.] This village is seemingly untouched by Berlin, the border [with the Russian-controlled East Germany] 100 yards away, or the war. It is a resort town in summer and rather closed now. The carpenters and electricians speak a rather thick dialect.
I finally bought a locomotive for my 9-mm narrow-gauge railway. I can use it as a mine railway on my HO layout. So far it runs up and down my windowsill, and stops automatically when it gets to the end. When I buy a bell transformer it will automatically reverse. The Germans have many model old-style house models that look very good. I am tempted to fill my car with toys before I ship it back. [I built about 60 model houses while in Germany.] As it is the car will be full of stuff. There organ builders and two or three others would like to come also.