New Life in Germany

Lacking funds to rebuild my burned-out home, (after the cost of my daughter having had 4 open heart surgeries before dying from her stab wound), I made up my mind to buy a motorhome. Young Bill, a high school junior, had an invitation to attend West Point that summer, and I wanted to do some dissertation research in New York. I also wanted to take my son to visit various Ivy League colleges, and he picked Yale as his favorite. After being interviewed, he went there a year later on a "zero parent financial contribution"!

I made up my mind to leave Texas and take the kids to Europe. I wanted to get away, give the kids something new to think about, and show them where I had been so happy many years earlier. I wanted them to learn German and go to schools there, but they were very worried about their futures, and did not really appreciate what I was trying to do for them. We did have some memorable times though, and spent several summers going everywhere from Rome to Oslo and every country in between. I even sent Martha to Israel and Moscow on tour groups sponsored by the military, although I could not afford to go myself.

When I moved back to Germany in late 1979, my old German friends from many years earlier were all happy to see me, though they were sorry to hear Bill had died in 1972. They helped me secure a position as piano teacher for the Kreismusikschule in Kaiserslautern. I enjoyed the job. And I also played organ at the army chapel at Vogelweh, where I had played twenty years before, and occasionally at a german Lutheran Church we attended. Each of the kids made at least five round trip flights to Germany. We spent one summer in the motorhome in Norway, looking up relatives. (See a coming link on our adventures all over Europe for the next eight years.)

The kids grew up and returned to the states for college. My son, Bill Shauck, graduated from Yale in 1984 with a major in computer science, and was immediately hired by Xerox in Dallas. My daughter, Martha Shauck Lundberg, graduated from Texas A&M University in 1987, and got her Ph.D. in biomedical physiology there in 1995. My son now has two of his own corporations as a software consultant and developer. He lived in Overland Park, Kansas, about 35 miles from Kansas City, Mo. heading a computer programmer consulting group for Sprint in their new World Headquarters there. He formerly worked for Lockheed in Sunnyvale, California, writing programs for satellites, I believe. His wife, Cristy, gave birth to their first child, Elisabeth Kathleen Stephanie,on June 23, 1998. She is now two years old,and talks constantly. My daughter, Martha Jo, lives in Annapolis, MD, and has three daughters: Natalie Megan, 13 yrs, Rachel Danielle, 5, and Heather Juliana Reed,3. Martha worked four years at Johns Hopkins doing post-doc research for the National Institutes of Health in Baltimore. Now she works in Bethesda for the NIH, and is project manager for government grants in cardiology and human genome research to cure diseas. My mother is 94, and lives near me in a nursing home in Florida.

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