A liaison post, a rank for protocol, Elvis, and duelling scars
Recalled but not checked against any source. Treat everything here as a first draft awaiting correction.
In the late 1950s Bill Whitson held a military-scientific liaison post in Heidelberg during the later stages of the American occupation of Germany, with rank equivalent to Lieutenant General so that protocol could be observed. June was with him, and Jonathan Hare's mother lived there when she was not at boarding school or in Three Rivers.
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She met Elvis, who was serving in Germany at the time.
And the teenage and college-age sons of Bavarian nobility fought duels over her attention — fencing, but with sharpened tips, leaving facial scars they carried for life. That was how the Bavarian aristocracy maintained its warrior tradition across centuries after there was nothing left to fight.
Hare heard these stories from his grandmother's German live-in housekeeper, who moved to America with the family and stayed her friend until both were in their mid-nineties.
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Nuclear physicist, Titan II, ARPA — and a two-hundred-word obituary
Open →there with him1916–2015 — who carried the record, and taught the method
Open →Three Rivers, the alternative“Grandma” — an MFA from Berkeley, and the trailer below Sequoia
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