Christmas 1944 is the moment which signals the beginning of my growing sense of abandonment. It is the last holiday that my parents, sister, and I would spend together. Right thereafter, my father, as general practitioner in medicine, was called to the “Volkssturm,” a German national militia established during the last months of World War II for men who were too old for conscription to the regular army. We did not see him again until late spring of 1946.

In February 1945, my mother and my aunt, who had come to visit to escape the threatening invasion on the western border by the Allied Forces, received the order to pack whatever they and their children could carry and be ready to vacate the village in eight hours, caused by fear that Russian troops soon would overrun the area. We had to leave immediately, abandoning our dog, my best friend. He was killed by the authorities, because nobody had the time to take care of animals, which, when left by their owners, would become a nuisance. We left on a two-week snowy and freezing trek to the west of Germany to escape the Russian onslaught. My sister, mother, and aunt delegated to walk on foot, and my two cousins, a baby, and a toddler, and I, because of age, were able to ride on a horse drawn, canvas-covered wagon filled with other children and the old and frail. It was a very frightening experience. The trek moved relentlessly. There were no rest stops. If one got off the wagon, nobody was there to help you get back on. So one morning, I had gotten off the wagon and saw it become smaller and smaller, until it was lost in the distance, between other treks going into the same direction. The country road ended in a “T.” My wagon was no longer in sight. I asked a military policeman to direct me. He just shrugged me off: which wagon; what kind of horses; to him, all seemed to look alike. Very frightened, I took my chance in the left direction, and after a frantic search I thankfully found my wagon and my family. This gave me another feeling of what it must be like to be abandoned: what if I had searched the other direction by mistake and had gotten lost in the general confusion?

After catching several trains, just in time, we were lucky not to be bombed by the Allies, as we arrived at the Hannover main railroad station, right at the moment, when bombers overhead flew towards Dresden, and to everyone’s surprise did not unload their bombs on us, and towards what soon became known as the conflagration of that city. Roughly a year before, they had nearly erased the whole city of Münster, which was located roughly just some thirty miles from our goal. We finally arrived late at night at my aunt’s in-laws near the Dutch border, who graciously took us in. Just a few hours before we had arrived at the train station in Hannover, air raid sirens ushered us hurriedly into a bomb shelter and hundreds of planes were heard flying over the city without dropping a single bomb to the surprise of the air wardens. The next morning, the newspaper explained that they were on route to Dresden, where the center of the city was largely destroyed.

Then in fall of 1945, my mother became sick, overwhelmed by being alone in an unfamiliar region, having to raise two children without any connections to the community or owning objects to aid the barter for food and clothing, the Reichsmark having lost all its value, and becoming fully aware of not having the necessary skills for survival. In her pride, she rejected any and all gifts unless she could barter her handiwork in embroidery, knitting, or sewing. We were labeled “refugees” and treated as unwanted, as a nuisance disturbing the routines of an otherwise small sleepy town. 

For many years, I could not believe the family’s saga of my mother dying as a typhoid patient in one of the insanesanatoria of Osnabrück, Germany. She was whisked away, so shockingly sudden, when I was at play with children in the neighborhood. I did not understand and could not believe it. True, she had a major mental breakdown, and yes, the last time my sister and I saw her, she was incoherent, did not recognize us, and was jolted into short moments of reality by my aunt. We were clearly aware of the facts and signs that there was something terribly wrong, but none of us would have thought that these few minutes with her would comprise the last time we would ever see her.

While in the hospital, she contracted typhoid, and never recovered. Because of the aggressiveness of the disease, no one was allowed at the funeral. Hospital records show her demise, not as mental, but as physical. Also, because of the immediate post-war times, there was only sparse or no information disseminated. I came to the conclusion that the adults of my family had secretly hidden her away from us, using too many convoluted and abbreviated reasons, which lacked any ability to persuade. It took many years before I gave in to the reality. At that point in time I was a teenager.

During the same time, my father was still missing, either dead, a prisoner of war, or lost somewhere in the east of Europe. The Catholic church decided that my sister and I could not live with my aunt, because she had married into a Protestant family. I know that my aunt tried very hard to keep us together and with her, but to no avail. So, my sister was placed in the house of the church custodian, a person whom I thought of as terrible. I fared better. I was placed in a family of affluent but overly pious apothecaries and their six sons, whom I disliked from the outset, even though they treated me very well. It did not occur to me to be thankful. I did not understand. I felt deserted by my family. Why did they leave, and where were they? My aunt and her family lived just a stone’s throw away, some ten houses farther down the street. Still, I was forbidden by my foster family to visit her. Did she not want me? Did she cast me aside? If time and circumstances allowed, I would sneak a look at her house from behind her neighbor’s wall, afraid of being seen or recognized.

My father returned in late spring 1946, and my sister and I joined him immediately. Although much of life seemed to become normal, we had to move from my aunt’s house. We lived for three years in a single furnished room offered to us by Pastor Nordbeck, a very kind and aging Protestant clergyman. When he died, people could not wait until his funeral. They came and took several pieces of furniture from our room that they were promised to inherit, making it nearly bare. It seemed as if the good pastor had, without knowledge, abandoned us.

Luckily, my father was deNazified just about that time and therefore was able to reenter his career as a psychiatrist. In Germany at that time, there were no private psychiatric practices. Psychiatry was linked to state-run hospitals, asylums, and sanatoriums formerly administrated by the clergy or the nobility before the modern state took over. He received an appointment to the sanatorium in Marsberg, a beautiful small town in the Sauerland. I loved living there. We were away from the former daily insults and indignities. I enjoyed going to school, catching up, achieving, making friends, becoming part of different circles.

Then, my father, after two years, was bumped up on the career ladder, becoming head of a small sanatorium in Geseke, not the most wonderful area. This time I felt as if I had abandoned my newly found friends, the school I loved, and the beautiful region. It seemed as if I had found home again, a decent and roomy apartment, and I did not want to move. Losing my friends hurt. My family lived in Geseke for just a short time, as my father was appointed again to one of the largest sanatoriums in the state of Westphalia, in the town of Gütersloh. I never lived there, because I had completed my high school education while still living in Geseke, and was newly enrolled at Kunstschule Amsterdam in Hamburg to study graphic design.

After Amsterdam, in 1957, I was hired as a graphic designer by Chemie Grünenthal GmbH, a young pharmaceutical house, established after WW II. Grünenthal was an amazingly positive experience for a young designer. The firm offered all kinds of opportunities in all areas of product promotion, from advertising, direct mail, package, to exhibition design. In 1959, with administrative permission from Grünenthal, I was accepted at Rhode Island School of Design as a professional Fellow in Graphic Design to study American visual metaphors in advertising, with the idea to return to my original job after one year of study.

However, two important reasons helped change the plans. First, my English was relatively poor when I arrived. For instance, when the RISD instructor handed out the first assignment, I would not have understood a single word unless helped by a patient fellow student. Luckily, I roomed with an elderly genealogist who allowed use of her whole apartment and extensive historical library. It became clear that one year was not sufficient to explore the much less formal English in relationship to metaphors, puns, synonyms and antonyms, especially within regional contexts. At least another year was necessary.

Then, at the same time, Grünenthal became involved in what became known as the “Contergan Affair,” an ethical dilemma that could have been easily avoided by not withholding negative research results. Thalidomide was first marketed under the trade-name Contergan in 1957 in West Germany. Grünenthal developed and sold the drug. Primarily prescribed as a sedative or hypnotic, thalidomide also claimed to cure “anxiety, insomnia, gastritis, and tension.” Afterwards, it was used against nausea and to alleviate morning sickness in pregnant women. Thalidomide became an over-the-counter drug in West Germany on October 1, 1957. Shortly after the drug was sold in West Germany, between 5,000 and 7,000 infants were born with malformation of the limbs. Throughout the world, about 10,000 cases were reported of infants with malformation of limbs due to thalidomide. Those subjected to thalidomide while in the womb experienced limb deficiencies in a way that the long limbs either were not developed or presented themselves as stumps. Other effects included deformed eyes and hearts, deformed alimentary and urinary tracts, blindness and deafness. The negative effects of thalidomide led to the development of more structured drug regulations and control over drug use and development. I was the designer for much of the direct mail campaigns directed at audiences in Germany and other European countries, because different product names were applied. For me the behavior of the company’s administrators seemed totally unethical, in trying to withhold critical information that altered the lives of many families. I decided not to return to Grünenthal. I abandoned my first design sponsor.

Looking back at my career in America, it becomes quite clear that I either felt vulnerable to being abandoned or I made sure that abandonment could not happen again by quitting before abandonment.

In 1960, for a short year, I was appointed as assistant art director by a Boston advertising agency, Reach, McClinton and Humphrey, with accounts like Beautiful Hair Breck, Acushnet Titleist, Prudential Insurance, and others. I was assigned to work for Egerton, Germershausen and Grier. In the early sixties, most agencies farmed everything but magazine and newspaper advertisements out to freelance designers. I was trained as a designer of collateral material like brochures, pamphlets, posters, corporate signets and institutional identities, stationery, exhibitions, and product displays, and experienced my first success at Grünenthal. I yearned to get out of the repetitive advertising world and left.

I joined the newly formed Leverett Peters and Associates, of which I became a charter member, with a small group of illustrators and designers. Peters was the business manager and client contact. I would not have considered him an outstanding designer because he seemed very old-fashioned in his outlook. I saw him as Victorian, with interests, at the most, to include the British Arts and Crafts movement, but lacking any insight into international styles of Modernism. The very talented illustrator soon became frustrated with how he was managed as well as with his small salary. He quit and began to freelance successfully, then settling his family in Oregon, where he became a well-known artist.

Leverett Peters, as far as I am concerned, was not a good business person. He had the bad habit of pre-billing work that would be done sometimes in the future, which is why we worked on projects for which the client had already paid and the moneys were already absorbed by our salaries and also spent. In our first year, as small as we were, we made an annual profit of about $17,000, which was outstanding, especially if one translated that figure into comparative values of then and today. However, all kinds of expansions threatened the survival of the association. Not satisfied with one floor, we suddenly had nearly two floors. We hired a secretary, whom we let go very early. We could not afford her, and we really did not need her. We hired, against my wishes, a salesperson who did not bring in any work for quite a long time. The same mistake was repeated again by hiring another. One designer was hired as production supervisor, delegated to follow all projects to fruition. We hired two designers, directly after graduation, which were not up to par. It seemed as if I was the primary source of direct income for the association. Our cash-flow became more and more bizarre. Peters would withhold required social security payments from our salaries, but not submit them to the IRS, using the funds instead to pay off suppliers and debt. Peters also had a close friend who was building an extravagant home, and needed money. We were in serious financial trouble. Still, when Peters brought in a very well-paying project, he did not inform us or keep it in-house. He gave it to his friend. I set an ultimatum for 2:00 pm that day to have the project brought back. Peters laughed: “What do you think? Where are you going? You have no money in the bank,” which was true. At 2:00 pm, I resigned from the association. I had five dollars in my pocket. I bought a bunch of flowers for my wife, picked her up at the train station as I did every night, as she commuted to Brown University in Providence, and informed her of my decision. The epilogue to the story was that, within a few years, Leverett Peters and Associates closed its doors due to bankruptcy. Rumor had it that he had moved the annual debt forward every year by paying off the oldest suppliers and debtors. Finally the difference of $17,000 forced his demise.

In early 1965, I ran a very successful freelance design office from my house in Easton, Massachusetts, thirty miles south of Boston. I immediately became overwhelmed with work. The specific problem of losing too much valuable time when called by Boston clients for meetings was obvious. I also became aware that the constantly increasing workload could not be handled by one designer with the same quality results to which I had become accustomed. Carl Zahn, the design director at the Museum of Fine Arts, made me aware of a position at the MIT Office of Publications. I applied with three extensive portfolios and was appointed to the staff by John Mattill, the originator of the office, an excellent wordsmith and editor. Editorial fidelity was one of the very reasons why I accepted the position. In the small studio arena of Boston, most freelance studios had no input into the quality construction of the text, and I always believed that a good design should not be mirrored by mediocre text and visa-versa. I stayed at MIT from Memorial Day1965 to fall of 1970. The salaries at MIT were very meager, which was fine, because there were great opportunities for great design and typography. However, the savings would not have allowed me to build a more interesting house. To accomplish that I needed to go on to a higher salary. Also, the writing was on the wall. In 1965 most design projects were paid by the institution, but slowly the design fees were sent to the clients, who had to pay themselves for each project. Also, the office was overstaffed (1 director/editor/writer, three designers, 2 copy editors, two production specialists and one secretary) in relationship to the output. I was the youngest and, in case of retrenchment, I would have been the first to be asked to leave. I decided to preclude. I had also been worried about the overall decline of office productivity and efficiency over the last year at MIT. It made great sense to leave.

My story about WGBH is pretty bizarre…very American…

In the early 1970, Stan Calderwood, through Dr. Land’s art director Bill Field at Polaroid, contacted me, inquiring about my interests in working with Calderwood for the WGBH Foundation. Stan Calderwood had resigned from his role as chairman of the board of the Polaroid Corporation, and was on the way to being appointed president of the WGBH Educational Foundation. He invited me to make elaborate design presentations for him about concepts for upgrading the station’s visual identity and graphic systems. We met several times over the summer, and things looked great. I received my appointment and was looking for forward to the first day. However, in what I recall was the latter part of July, Stan Calderwood would be embroiled in a situation with activists in Boston’s black community. It was about the use of socially unacceptable profanity on prime time television. He had cancelled the Say Brother show because its producer would not edit out the expletives. Responding to public pressure, the WGBH board reinstated Say Brother and called the prior cancellation a “mistake.” Calderwood felt slighted by his own WGBH board and resigned on the spot.

Well, for me the situation could not as easily be resolved. MIT had already advertised, and I would have had a crack in my pride to ask for my old assignment back. So, when I arrived on my first day at WGBH, Stan Calderwood was gone and the whole administrative landscape had shifted, with David Ives now taking command. David Ives had no clue about my discussions with Stan Calderwood, and so all bets were off. The politics were heavy. When before I would have worked directly with Calderwood, I was asked to report to Robert Larsen, general manager, a very nice person, but unfortunately without much design sense. Most of the crucial design decisions were unravelled by Sylvia Davis, Director of Promotion and Publicity, with a heavy advertising background. She was the divorced wife of David Davis, a former WGBH staffer who ended up at the Ford Foundation and was frequently responsible for providing WGBH program grants and general funding from the Ford Foundation. Nobody dared to cross Sylvia. A free-for-all ensued, decision powers were assigned according to the politics of the day or to whoever had the ear of either Michael Rice, vice president, Robert Larsen, general manager, or David Ives, at that time interim or permanent president. There was no regard for central design integrity. Every producer could override any of the decisions made by the design staff. When we tried to implement some of the Calderwood solutions for “The French Chef with Julia Child,” which received serious underwriting from Polaroid, Calderwood was very disappointed. He did not understand that Paul Child, the husband of the cooking star, had opted to instruct the producer to abandon the original proposal. What was left was a truly emaciated design, with only minimal portions implemented. Also, during that time, there were no directives to clarify the framework for the station’s identity—as local or national. I learned quickly that “public television” had nothing to do with the public. The station catered to the special interests of audiences consisting mostly of the educated classes of Harvard and MIT and the many other institutions of higher education and people living mostly in the northern and western suburbs of the Boston area. The larger segment of the blue-color communities, including the Blacks, were not seriously considered. Although some attempts were made to deliver general nightly news, the larger community did not find a true voice.

The WGBH employment picture was very bleak. The station had the bad habit of letting unpaid volunteers, the sons and daughters of the affluent, like the Morgenthau and Rockefeller families, compete with regular salaried staffers. I am sure the affluent were kept on with the hope that there would be heavy family donations in the future even though at the moment there was little productivity. The volunteers depressed the salaries of the rest of the staff, which meant that highly qualified designers would not even think to work for those meager pittance. It got so bad that the station’s employees were forced to unionize.

The other reason for resigning from the WGBH position was that Sylvia Davis, without ever discussing it, made contact with Chermayeff & Geismar, the design studio for Mobile Corporation, sponsors of Masterpiece Theater, who without providing collegiate support for a pretty well functioning design team at WGBH, took the assignment behind the staff’s back while the staff itself was involved in preparing a major presentation for the station’s identity. Chermayeff engaged Mr. Marsden, a young Yale graduate, who took advantage of one of our design staffer’s (Gene Mackles) experiments. Gene, for some of the show titles, tried to give bold san-serif letters some spatial dimensionality by adding strong double shadows as if the letters were hit simultaneously by light from front and back. Mackles also implemented this style for the on-screen logo of the “Advocates” show. In retrospect, I don’t think Gene was ever given credit for evolving the style or the logo. Chermayeff and Geismar took it all. If one would ask about the appointment of Chris Pullman, who followed me, I would think it was by Davis and Rice on recommendations from Chermayeff, who just before at a design conference had lauded my design efforts at MIT. I don’t think that moving across town diminished my design ability. But there was quite a different administrative support for design at MIT, without political interference. Also, I would not think that Calderwood would have persuaded me to work with him if he had not seen some value in my design approach.

There were other signs of public manipulation. Whenever there was a threat that the funds usually received from federal sources would be curtailed, the station would energize the community with erroneous messages that all children shows would be cancelled. Also, to my surprise, some members of upper levels with high salaries lived in government-subsidized housing. So much for social responsibility? From where I sat, WGBH had little interest at that time in the public at large. Its constituencies were the intellectual communities of Harvard, MIT, and the many other area schools and universities, as well as the affluent families of North and South Shores or living northwest of Cambridge and Boston. WGBH administrators made very healthy salaries, which were never openly published. If true, that one of the presidents lived in social housing, as the Boston Globe reported, then this outfit was also short on social ethics. 

Working at WGBH became unbearable, and I left to work as design educator at a recently established design program at a new public institution, SMU Southeastern Massachusetts University, located between Fall River and New Bedford. Both cities were flourishing when their industries, like fisheries, whale oil, and textile production were healthy. But as soon as their zenith sank, both of the once vibrant cities declined into states of isolation and poverty, with large groups of under-educated citizens and a large group of disadvantaged immigrants from Portugal and Cape Verde. Even today, there are no reasonable transportation or train systems in the area to connect with Boston, where this isolated constituency is represented. It was the ideal place for socially responsible education of young people. The academic administrators had established a very strong philosophy to guide the institution—“Everyone is responsible for everything on campus. No secrets! No surprises! Open communication with all university constituencies, internal and external to the campus,” which made my first decade in education an amazingly idealistic and productive experience. Quite different from WGBH, SMU walked the talk of upgrading the lives of the surrounding communities. I was proud to be a part of these efforts. I still look back in great fondness to those days as so much was accomplished.