Red Baron Memorial in France

 

Beside a narrow road Vaux-sur-Somme, France, is a modest memorial to the most well-known fighter pilot in history: Baron Manfred Friedrich Freiherr von Richtofen, the Red Baron.

Richtofen scored 80 victories in air-to-air combat before being killed in his last dogfight over France. Even in his last moments, fatally wounded, he landed his plane before dying in his cockpit of a chest wound on April 21, 1918. The previous April, von Richtofen scored 22 victories in air-to-air combat.

The single-engine, three-winged plane had a top speed of just over 100 mph. It was built on a steel-tube frame covered with canvas.  

The memorial is a series of four monochrome metal panels at reveal the image above only when the viewer stands directly in front of them.

The Ace of Aces of World War I was born on May 2, 1892. We share a birthdate. His remains were finally interred in Wiesbaden, Germany, in 1975, a year before I began a three-year tour in that Germany city with the American Army.  I was 26 years old when I left Germany in 1979.  The Red Baron was 26 years old when he died in his Fokker Dr1 fighter plane in France.  

There are only 365 days in a year, so I know that coincidences are simply what happens when one lives a lot of years, but I love coincidences anyway. 

 Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

A Visit to Chartres Cathedral

 

On the was back from visiting the Circuit de Sarthe, the race course of the 24 Hours of Le Mans, I stopped at Chartres Cathedral. It is one of not the greatest example of French Gothic architecture. The cathedrals at Reims and Amiens also have a claim to French Gothic supremacy.

I first heard of this cathedral from Professor Theodora Graham in one of my first college classes at Penn State.  She explained the architecture and the devotion of those who built it, many of whom would not see it completed.  

The cathedral sits atop a steep hill in a little town that is 80 kilometers southwest of Paris. The narrow roads and remote location keep the tourist traffic to a tiny fraction of the millions who swarm Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of Paris. 

Forty years after I first heard of Chartres and saw images from a slide projector, I finally got to walk around the cathedral on a sunny afternoon. I spent most of the time looking up, which is what the designers intended.

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

Cars in a Corner of Underground Garage Near Versailles

 

1970 Ford Mustang Mach I 351 with original paint in a Paris Garage

A few days ago I drove from Paris to Le Mans to visit the museum and track of the annual 24-hour race.  On the way back I stopped at Chartres Cathedral then got a hotel near Versailles.  In the far corner of the second lower level of the underground garage was a 1970 Ford Mustang Mach I with original paint and a Florida license plate.  

It was a delightful surprise to see a vintage American Muscle Car in a French parking garage.  Of the forty cars, trucks and motorcycles I owned during my 52 years of driving, Ford Muscle Cars were some of the best.  I owned a 1969 Torino Cobra, 428CID, Hurst shifter, Holley carburetor and functional ram air. Then I owned a 1972 Mustang Cobra Jet, 351 with a Carter Thermoquad.  Seeing that Mustang after visiting Le Mans was a real moment of nostalgia. 

Also along the back wall of the garage was an Aston Martin DB9 under a cover (marked with Aston Martin and DB9).  

Between the Mach I and the DB9 was a Peugeot RCZ, a lightweight (1404kg) powerful (250hp) little two-seat French missile.

In the far corner of the garage was a mid-1990s Jaguar XJ convertible.  

One of the oddities of the 1970 Mach I was louvres on the back window. By 1972 Ford dispensed with the sun-blocking slats, I wished they had not. My Mustang CJ had a back window so near horizontal that it was useless whenever the sun shined on it.  

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

50th Anniversary of My First Enlistment is This Month

 

Twas the night before Basic, and I drank way too much. 

I have no photos from my Air Force enlistment.

Fifty years ago today I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio. I was hung over with shoulder-length hair and at the beginning of an on-again off-again relationship with the United States military that would finally end 44 years later in May 2016.  The story of that first haircut is here. 

Since my first of my four different service branches was the Air Force, basic training was mostly marching and learning military culture.  We had one afternoon on the rifle range, one hike, and one meal outdoors--at picnic tables.  In the nearly three years of my Air Force enlistment I never saw C-Rations let alone tasted them.  Decades later I did a comparison of C-Rations and the current MRE meals that got 100,000+ views on YouTube. Here is the video.

When I left my home in Stoneham, Massachusetts, the Beatles were still together, Elvis was still alive, the Vietnam War was still raging, the Cold War was heating up, the draft was in its last full year, the Muscle Car boom of the 1960s was nearly over, and Donny Osmond had two songs in the top ten singles of 1971.  

Speaking of music, while my shoulder-length hair was shorn from my head in the Air Force barber shop, Merle Haggard's "Okie From Muskogee" played in the background. The only country songs I heard up to that point in my life were some Johnny Cash breakthrough hits that ended up on Top 40 radio, like "A Boy Named Sue." In one of the ironies of military life, Fort Sill, Oklahoma, was the place I trained to deploy to Iraq 37 years later in 2009. In one of the many coincidences of dates in my life, my basic training and pre-deployment training both began on February 1. 

In 1972, phones had wires and were often attached to walls. Every Sunday at basic training we lined up at phone booths to call home.  Cameras had film. Barracks had liars.  Extravagant liars.  My basic training flight was forty men either 18 or 19 years old, from more than twenty states across the nation, living in one big room.  Before lights out, we would shine our shoes in groups and talk.  Some conversations were about training or life in the barracks, or the food we ate, but when the subject was home, the lies swelled to the size of a Goodyear Blimp.  I wrote about those lies and how Facebook killed the barracks liar.  

When we marched we sang songs about killing the enemy, Viet Cong mostly, occasionally a Russian, we sang about our nearly infinite appetites for sex and alcohol, and we sang about Jody--the guy who was back home sleeping with our wife/girlfriend, driving our car, emptying our meager bank account, and in its best country version, alienating the affections of a favorite hunting dog.  

At my last military training school in 2013, we were not allowed to sing any of those songs.  All five military services were in our marching formations, and none of them were allowed to sing any marching song that could be considered sexist. And even though we were in two active wars, we could not sing about an enemy. Jody was off limits.  I wrote about the change in the songs for the New York Times At War blog.

The world in which I enlisted is gone.  I am writing this in a cafe in Paris on a computer with more processing power than the computers that put a man on the moon in 1969.  The flight from home to basic training fifty years ago was the first time I had been west of Cleveland or south of Pennsylvania.  It was my first flight on an airplane.  Earlier this month, my flight to Paris was the beginning of what may be my seventieth trip to another continent either on business, pleasure or a military mission.   

I have a love/hate relationship with the military. Three times, I got out, and said I was done: in 1974, 1979 and 1985.  Three times, I re-enlisted: in 1975, 1982 and 2007.  I finally left the Army National Guard in 2016.  Now I am far too old to change my mind again.  And I am happy with that.  I spent some of the best years of my life in the military, but even if I were not too old, I am happy to let the men and women born in this century defend the country.

 

Fathers, the Army and Career Paths in America and France: A Delightful Conversation at Lunch

Professor Christian Amatore of the Ecole Normal Superieure

At an award lunch at a history of science event in Paris, I was seated with Christian Amatore, a professor emeritus of electrochemistry at the Ecole Normal Superieure (ENS). Christian is a bright, funny and out-going man who smiles easily.  He said he lived in America for two years early in his career in Bloomington, Indiana.  

We talked about how much we liked visiting each other's country then turned to the differences in growing up in America and France in the middle of the last century.  Christian had a straight career path that began at ten years old, when a teacher identified him as having potential for a science career.  

Christian was born in Algeria in 1951 and spent his early years on French Army bases.  His father emigrated from Italy after World War II, his mother from Sweden.  Service in the Foreign Legion was a rapid path to citizenship for his family.  Christian's father was a career sergeant who told his son to get an education and be one of the leaders, "or you will be a nobody."  

In 1970, he started college at ENS, beginning his PhD program in 1974 and completing it in 1979.  He was a professor after completing the PhD and three years later began two years of research and teaching at the University of Indiana.  

As we talked about his linear career path I told him of the twists and turns of mine. Christian never served in the military. His father looked back on the Army as something he did to have a better life for his family.  During the years Christian was completing his PhD I was 600 kilometers east of Paris in a tank on the east-west border. I started college in America in 1980 when he beginning his first professorship.

For my father, world War II was the best years of his life.  He went in the Army on the eve of the war in his mid-30s with an eighth grade education.  When the war began, the Army sent Dad to Officer Candidate School. He was commissioned, commanded a several small units and ended the war a captain, commandant of a Prisoner of War Camp for 600 German Afrika Korps prisoners. My father loved to tell stories and loved to tell war stories most of all. From the end of the war to his retirement, he worked in a warehouse.

Talking about our fathers and the Army led us to talk of Napoleon, who talented in mathematics and had a high regard for science.  We talked of how math was the basis of his success as an artillery officer.  Napoleon restored many of the academic institutions leveled during the Revolution. On Christmas Day in 1797 he was elected in the seat of Lazare Carnot in the Institute de France. 

Talking about war led us to talk about the peace in Europe during our entire lives. "During my entire lifetime there has not been a land war in Europe," Christian said. "That is unprecedented in European history."  We talked of Putin and the threats from Russia.  It was comforting to hear Christian discuss President Biden. He was simply talking about the decisions of the American President.  During the Trump presidency, no one I spoke with in Europe could quite believe what kind of person America elected.

Amatore in his habit vert of the Institute de France

Near the end of lunch, Christian gave me his email, writing it in my notebook. Neither of us had business cards, really showing we are fully retired people.  I said I would look at his work on the internet.  When he wrote his name he said, "If you look me up on Google, use my full name. If you Google Amatore, you might get a porn site."  Amatore is Italian for Lover.

We already exchanged email messages.  I was fascinated with electrochemistry a couple of decades ago when I worked for Atofina Chemicals so I will look up some of his research.  Christian has published more than 500 papers in electrochemistry and related fields, so there is a lot to look at.  

When I am in Paris, I often have lunch or coffee with friends. I hope to catch up with Christian on a future visit to Paris. 

Posts about traveling in France and neighboring countries in February 2022:

My favorite restaurant is a victim of COVID.

The Museum of the Great War.

The Waterloo Battlefield.

The Red Baron Memorial.

Chartres Cathedral.

High Performance Cars in a garage in Versailles.

Talking about Fathers and Careers at lunch.

A Healthy Culture Includes All of its History

The French flag waving in the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile on November 11

Few great cultures have been more self critical than French culture.  When revolution swept France in 1789, they even threw out the seven-day per week calendar. They invented the guillotine in 1791 and used it on their king two years later.  The French people analyze and criticize all of their long history and celebrate the best of French history.

Last year, I was in Paris on November 11. I walked around as close as I could to the Arc d'Triomphe de l'Etoile. I saw French people from kids to people in their 80s watching the celebration of the victory of the France and their allies in World War I.  Napoleon commissioned the Arc in 1806. The design was completed the same year, but it would be three decades later in 1836 before it was completed.  

France has a long a long history of fighting wars at great cost in men and money.  The French celebrate their two millennia of history. The celebrate the great triumphs in World War I and many of Napoleons battles and other wars going back to the Roman Empire.  

The French, much better than America, accept all of their history. I worked for a French petrochemical company in the 1990s.  They thought American anguish over President Bill Clinton was amusing. No one in France is surprised when someone with the ego to stand in front of 300 million people and say "Elect me!" turns out to have some flaws.  

I am currently reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson along with the Federalist Papers.  I plan to read biographies of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton later in the year.  The men who founded America were not perfect, but they were great, mostly very young men, who began a nation with liberty for some in the hope of liberty for all some day.  

Jefferson wrote that the American colonies should end of slavery in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence in 1776. In 1787, Hamilton wrote the Federalist Papers to persuade New York and New England to unite with the South, knowing it would mean a slavery compromise. They did the best they could in founding a new nation. 

We should honor our founders knowing they were not perfect, but strove to bring real equality and freedom into a world of monarchy and despotism.  

What they did began a new nation that would lead the free world for much of the 20th Century. Their ideas held until January 6, 2021, when a petulant monster attempted to steal the election and ended the 240-year tradition of a peaceful transfer of power.

I was in London just before November 11. I got a poppy in London and a blue cornflower in Paris. I wore both on November 11. These little commemorative flowers grew in the devastated landscape where the war was fought. 

France and the United States 200 Years Ago

France in the person of Marquis de Lafayette and the troops he brought to Yorktown are the reason there is an America.  Without the French, America would have been defeated in Virginia and lost the war.  Coming to the aid of America added to the crushing debt France already had. That debt and its effects was one of the major causes of the French Revolution less than a decade later. 

Alexis de Tocqueville came to America and wrote a thousand pages about what he saw, praising self-government and the American spirit while unsparing in his criticism of slavery and the way we treated Native Americans.  His book was a call for change in France as well as the single greatest book written about America.  

Book 2 of 2022: Marie Curie--a graphic novel biography in middle-school-level French

(In past years I have written an essay about the books I read in the previous year.  As my list of books gets longer and my memory shorter, I decided to write about the books as I read them rather than 2000+ words at the end of the year.)

 

In November I visited the Institute Curie near the Sorbonne in Paris.  This book was on the shelf in the tiny bookstore inside the small museum.  I read kids books in French to keep some level of reading comprehension.  This graphic novel gave me a chance to practice French and to remember what I learned about the life of this remarkable scientist.  

I learned a lot about Marie Sklodowska-Curie's life because more than half the book is about her childhood in Poland and struggles to get to France to study physics.  When I read about her previously, it was about her research and life-saving work in World War One.  

After I finished the book, I looked up how many people have won Nobel Prizes:  962 laureates earning a total of 603 prizes (as of 2020).  Just 59 laureates are women and Marie Curie is the first.  

Just four laureates have received two Nobel Prizes:  

Linus Pauling won a chemistry prize and a peace prize.

John Bardeen won the Nobel twice in physics.

Frederick Sanger won two chemistry prizes.

Marie Sklodowska-Curie won the Nobel Prize in physics and in chemistry: the only person to be awarded to Nobel Prizes in two different fields.  She is extraordinary, even among the short list of multiple Nobel laureates.  

If you read French at all, the book is fun to read and not difficult.  

The summary on Goodreads:

Cette biographie de Marie Curie (1867-1934) retrace les principales étapes de son existence : son enfance en Pologne, sa scolarité studieuse et ses études supérieures, son arrivée à Paris, sa rencontre avec Pierre Curie, ses recherches sur le radium et ses découvertes sur les rayons X, l'obtention de ses prix Nobel en 1903 et 1911 et son engagement pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale.

Lunch in Paris Talking NASCAR!!

Nita Wiggins, author of Civil Rights Baby and I 

at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in Paris

In July of this year, I met professor Nita Wiggins at the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore in Paris.  We both arrived at the store just before it opened.  She was there to sign copies of her new book Civil Rights Baby.  She was born the year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 became law.  

A lot of the book is about her rise through the crazy world of sports journalism in America, particularly broadcast sports journalism.  She spent several much of the first decade of this century as an on-air reporter for Fox News.  

Then in 2009 she decided to leave journalism and all of the struggles a woman of color faces in that career and move to Paris.  She currently teaches journalism at the Institut Supérieur de Formation au Journalisme in Paris, France CELSA Sorbonne in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France.  She has also taught at the American University in Paris since 2009.

Earlier this month I was in Paris again so we met for lunch at a cafe near Red Wheelbarrow bookstore opposite Luxembourg Gardens.  We talked about Paris and America and living abroad and how much Nita was looking forward to seeing her parents for the Christmas Holidays after all the COVID travel restrictions.  

Then we talked about NASCAR.  Nita covered stock car racing early in the 2000s. She talked about interviewing Richard Childress, Roger Penske and other NASCAR luminaries and legends in the years she covered racing.  It was fun to hear Nita talk about covering NASCAR while it was in transition from a regional southern sport to a national sport.  I told her about being a NASCAR fan from age eight until about the time she started covering racing. The changes NASCAR was making were not for me. 

And I was quite sure we were the only people in that crowded cafe talking about American stock car racing.  

This post has links to Nita's website and info about her book.

Nita Wiggins in the Red Wheelbarrow bookstore.

Tragic Accident on a Beautiful Night in Paris

Iron poles along Paris streets prevent parking on the sidewalk. 

A human body flying into one of these poles from a scooter is instantly  broken.

Last night, walking in Paris, I happened on a scene of agony I found terribly familiar. A motor scooter was lying on its side, bent and broken, several feet from the road on the sidewalk. The rider was a dozen feet away, also on the sidewalk. The passenger was against the curb, in the street, partly underneath a parked truck. 

A few feet from the battered scooter, a Honda Civic with a dent and scrape on its left front fender was parked on the sidewalk, its emergency flashing lights adding orange bursts to the red and blue lights from the two ambulances already on the scene. A half dozen medics worked to move the rider and the passenger onto stretchers and into the ambulance. They moved the rider first. I could hear the deep pain in his moans as three medics moved him onto the backboard, then onto a gurney. 

 Last year I yelled and groaned in that same agony when a medic named Mohammed lifted me onto the backboard after warning me how much it would hurt. A woman on the medic team was talking into the ear of the woman under the front of the truck. The scooter passenger was partly covered with a blanket, but I could the white sneaker on her right leg twisted at an impossible angle. 

I did not want to remain among the gawkers longer, and a moment later a policemen pointed and told me to move. I left. From what I could gather watching the witnesses, the car and the scooter were both driving downhill from the Pantheon toward the traffic light opposite Luxembourg Garden. The car made a legal, but possibly unexpected left turn toward an underground parking garage. 

The scooter, I am guessing by the dent on the car, was passing the car on the left, on the wrong side of the road, thinking the left turn signal was for the upcoming intersection rather than the garage entrance thirty feet before the intersection. Scooters often swerve around cars briefly to get to the front at traffic lights. In all of my motorcycle and bicycle accidents 

I have had the amazing good fortune not to hit anything solid: no cars, no curbstones, no iron poles along the edge of the sidewalk that prevent parking on the sidewalk in Paris. The unfortunate riders hit all of these. Worse, I did not see a helmet anywhere. 

As I walked away, a third ambulance pulled up. I think it was a fire department rescue team. Extracting that poor, broken woman from under the truck was going to be awful. 

I continued to walk on a beautiful night in the City of Light hoping the scooter riders would survive the night.

 

A Cathedral and a Holocaust Memorial Share the East End of an Island in Paris

The most famous Cathedral in Paris, Notre Dame, sits the east end of the most famous island in the Seine River, il de la cite. 

The grand cathedral is currently in the midst of a many millions of Euros makeover. It will be closed for years.  

Behind the soaring cathedral on the very eastern tip of the island is the Holocaust Deportation Memorial. The entire memorial to the 200,000 Jews deported to death camps is underground. 

The entrance is a steep stone staircase down to an open area with a barred opening looking east along the Seine.  East is, of course, the direction of transport the victims took to their death.

For me, the beautiful view of the Seine through iron bars is what deportation would look like--passing through a beautiful countryside in a cage.

In the summer when the setting sun is north of west the shadow of the cathedral falls on the Holocaust memorial, not for long, just minutes.  I was overcome with sadness the first time I visited this memorial in 2017. I was in Paris in late June and early July and saw the shadow fall on the memorial after 9pm near sunset. During the Nazi era, 400 million Christian labeled people were either participants, complicit in or ignored the Holocaust. 

Inside the memorial is a map with the number of  Jews from each department deported to death camps.

The death camps are listed in blood red.

The barred opening seen from the north bank of the river is just a dark rectangle on a gray wall.

Another map shows all the Nazi camps to which people were sent to die.

IN the midst of the memorial is a flame of remembrance.

The view to the east up the Seine River is lovely.

The open courtyard of the memorial feels very vertical and forbidding.

Inside is a long tunnel with names of the victims.

Each time I visit Paris I visit the memorial to those deported. Usually there are just a few people inside.  

A few hundred meters away thousands are usually visiting Notre Dame.  Even now dozens of people were looking at the posters on the walls enclosing the cathedral during its restoration.  

 

Last Day of the Trip was a Beautiful Day in Paris

Jardin Luxembourg, the garden ringed by statues of every queen of France 

After two weeks of traveling across central Europe visiting four concentration camps, I arranged my trip so I would spend the last day in Paris. The day turned out even better than I could have hoped. 

First, I woke for breakfast at 9am then afterward went back to bed. I finally got up at noon and on the train to the area of Saint Michel, Luxembourg and the Pantheon. All my clothes, which isn’t much, were dirty, so I walked form the Seine in brilliant sun up the hill toward the Pantheon. I stopped on the way to eat Sushi then walked over to Boulevard Saint Michel. 

When I arrived in Paris two weeks earlier the five-floor bookstore Gibert was closed—I thought forever. 

Gibert librairie

But the doors were open and I went inside, to every floor. 

I bought a little book of Greek grammar and Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Mercy.”

I walked further up the hill and started washing my clothes. I went back to the laundromat where I met an Australian couple who were in France for the 24 Hours of Lemans. But this time I met no one. Only one other machine had clothes in it while I was there. With the clothes washing I walked further up the hill and had cappuccino at Columbus Café, opposite Jardin Luxembourg. 

Next I walked around the corner to Red Wheelbarrow bookstore and visited there. After folding my clothes, I walked around Luxembourg for an hour. 

Then I had an early dinner at Au Pere Louis, one of my favorite restaurants in Paris. I walked more and finally went back to the hotel. Following two weeks of shared seeing the worst of humanity, it was good to spend the last day in civilization at its best.