Dear Marion,

Thank you for your letter and for the list of questions.
With respect to the latter, your answers to all of them
would be of much interest to me. Why don't we take them
in order, one at a time, starting at the beginning:

(1)  What are your favorite things to do in life? 
What have you enjoyed most?

Then, when we've processed that, I'll ask you the second
question, and so on, down the list. However, please feel
free at any time to repudiate your offer, to write about
other matters or not to write at all. And don't be disappointed,
if my answers happen not to turn out to be specific to what you
tell me. In some instances, a contrapuntal reply might be
more meaningful than an echo.

Obviously, in your own way, or in your own baby-carriage
or stroller, you started out in life als etwas Besonderes.
Not everyone is privileged to have an officially certified
spy for a nanny. I wonder if he really was. It must have
been several years later, when history had already had the
opportunity to morph into myth, that you were told about
the ominous circumstances of your infancy which already then
distinguished you from the rest of us. Do you know what
happened to your shepherd? It was a time of wild hysteria,
when anyone with a German name was in danger of being accused
of espionage. A classmate of mine in the senior class at
Germantown Friends School was a nice German-American boy 
Klaus Molzahn,  whose father, Rev. Kurt Emil Bruno Molzahn,
had been pastor of Old Zion Lutheran Church - die Lutherische
Kirche Alt Zion in Philadelphia heisst Sie Willkommen, - had
just been released from Federal penitentiary where he had been
imprisoned for (allegedly) mailing a letter for a German spy
ring. The other four members of the ring had pleaded guilty,
but Pastor Molzahn protested his innocence. Nonetheless Thomas J.
Dodd, an ambitious Federal prosecutors, who later became US Senator
(and was himself censored for wrongdoing) won Molzahn's conviction.
The family of course was devastated; and it was Quaker humanity
which opined that Klaus and I might find consolation in each others'
company.  Burton Fowler, our principal, visited the Federal Court
House in downtown Philadelphia, reviewed the trial transcripts, and
pronounced Kurt Emil Bruno Molzahn innocent, a reversal that made Klaus
and the rest of us feel much better. Pastor Molzahn never gave up.
In 1963 he persuaded the Lutheran publisher Muhlenberg Press to print
his apologia "Prisoner of War." I can buy it for 89 cents at Amazon.com,
and I just might, the next time I order some books. To advance our
academic prospects, Germantown Friends School hired Frau Springer -
can't remember her first name, I guess, because I didn't use it
to address her, but I can remember her hair which was very dark,
and looked dangerously abrasive, although I never tousled it;
may have been the first genuine wig I ever saw.  - Frau Springer
was the wife of a cob-webbed professor of German philology at Penn,
who assigned Klaus and myself various items of German literature
to read, I remember only three, Lessing's Minna von Barnhelm, and a
short story by Gustav Freytag, can't remember the title and can't
find it on the Web, but it concerned a family that was going to
get rich by investing in an enormous steam engine of one sort or
another, and was ruined by their investment. There was also a story
by Gerhart Hauptmann, Bahnwaerter Thiel, about a family tragedy, which
I should reread before I comment on it. These efforts made Klaus
and myself eligible for the German aptitude tests. I don't know how
Klaus did, but I did o.k.

The other spy story I have to report concerns one Heinz Meyer, who was
observed by a local fisherman, Harvey Sheets, taking a photograph of
Straight Branch as it cascades down a narrow gorge immediately adjacent
to the dusty single lane dirt road with turnouts that once connected
Konnarock to the outside world. Loyal, patriotic American that he was,
old Harv reported his observation to the FBI, who one day, when we were
still living on the second floor of the Konnarock Medical Center appeared
there unannounced, to search for illegal books, weapons and explosives.
They dutifully confiscated a book that looked suspicious, - they couldn't
read German of course, - and they later returned it, but their big
discovery was a small bottle of 1/20 grain nitroglycerin tablets,
which my father had on hand to treat patients with angina pectoris.
This they recognized as an explosive too dangerous to leave behind.
They confiscated it. What happened to the patients with chest oain,
I don't know. Fortunately the Agents never found the paraphernalia of
my electricity experimentation, else we would all have ended up in an
interment camp. A postscript to this comedy is that Harvey Sheets'
son who was named after Charles Lindbergh, but wants to be called Buck
rather than Lindy, comes every two weeks on his riding tractor and
considers it a pleasure and a privilege to mow our lawn.

We were enemy aliens, no two ways about it; and because we weren't
allowed more than 5 miles from home, we had to get permission from
Hon. Frank S. Tavenner, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of
Virginia, who lived way up the valley, 275 miles away in Woodstock, for
each trip to Marion to buy groceries, and Marion was 30 miles away.
Last month in Konnarock, when I was looking, unsuccessfully, it turned
out, for correspondence with Fritz, I came upon the exchange of letters
with Mr. Tavenner. It brought it all back to me. We finally obtained some
sort of semi-annual or annual permit and had permission to visit Marion,
Chilhowie and Abingdon to our hearts' content. Children must have been
exempted, because I can't remember, and found no letters concerning
permission for me to travel to Philadelphia in 1942 when I was trying,
without success, to be an eighth grader there.

And now back to the legal brief.

Jochen