On December 17, 1961 my wife Martha and I drove over San Marcos Pass Road and descended down the south slope of the Santa Ynez mountains. We stopped at a point along the road, looked down on Santa Barbara with the Pacific Ocean and offshore islands in the background. As was looking at our new home country, my mind went over the long path that I had traveled to ge there. My bout with osteomyelitis, problems with Nazi Germany, World War II, being a German soldier in Russia, and my six month trek back to Germany. The loss of my family, my friends, my home and my country came to mind, and I hoped that life would be better in Santa Barbara....

Grinding Lenses Again

IRI hired me a month later and I entered a training program that was teaching future employees how optical components were manufactured and vacuum coated. Russell, a manufacturing engineer of Simpson Optical Company, was in charge of this training program. He was a very pleasant, quiet, and unassuming person, with extensive experience in grinding, testing and coating of optical components. He was not prepared to cope with the antics of some of his pupils however. The training program was in a Sunkist lemon packing plant and was separated by heavy vinyl curtains from the Sunkist operations. In an area of about 1,500 square feet, curve generating, rough and fine grinding, polishing and testing equipment had been temporarily setup. The whole facility was on the primitive side, but it served the purpose of introducing "lemon pickers" (as they called us) to the fine art of making optical components....

A Promotion into Nightmares

Since I had a solid background in ophthalmic optics rather than industrial optics, I had to learn the differences in processes. One day Gary,who was in charge of the overall plant relocation project, called me into his office, and asked me if I would be interested in being the manufacturing engineer for the optical department. I would work with Russ to set up the optical manufacturing facility at the new building, now under construction. I said yes. ...

The next morning she said that as soon as she was finished with college she was going to have surgery, and that she had contacted a specialist at the Medical Center at UC Los Angeles. He would take skin grafts from her buttocks to generate what nature had denied her....

My alter-ego was giving me other thoughts, and they weren't very nice. I Thought, my God, here Iam having my first love affair on this continent with this beautiful woman, and what do I get, awoman without a vagina. The odds of this to happen must be at least one to ten million. After a lengthy search in the medical literature I read that more than 20,000 female babies are born each year with this birth defect....

Martha's brother in Germany had introduced her to a wealthy client of his,and he had driven her to Berlin in his Mercedes 300 SL and had shown her city. She claimed that there was no sex involved. I thought, she could tell that to somebody who puts the pants on with a pair of pliers. I was happy about her adventures, because now I didn't have to feel guilty about mine. She was also so impressed about the improvements in Stuttgart that she wanted to go back. Instead of encouraging her, I made the second dumbest mistake in my life. I told her that she had been treated as a welcome visitor over there,everybody had pampered her and catered to her,but that the hard realities were certainly not that rosy....