This is the last of a series featuring three Southminster residents who became fully immersed in other cultures when they lived abroad. Meet Beth Wicander who has lived at Southminster for more than a dozen years, Dee Eaker, a resident for seven years, and Dick Welch, living here for almost 15 years.
Sweden, England and Switzerland: Beth Wicander
Beth Wicander didn’t just live abroad. In 1958, the Lancaster, Pennsylvania native married into a family of Swedes who had owned an international cork company for five generations. She met her husband when the family sent him to the U.S. to get experience with a new product made in the U.S.
Her husband’s family had five factories in Europe, so in addition to living three years in Sweden and one year in England, they lived for 13 years in Baar near Zug, Switzerland (see above photo). In their multi-lingual household, her children spoke English with her, Swedish with her husband, and Swiss German (Schweizerdeutsch) when they were talking to each other. “I took German, and even though I couldn’t understand everything my children were saying to each other,” she laughed, “they didn’t get away with anything.”
She distinctly remembers her year in England because they had the coldest winter in memory. “I got pregnant with our third child there because English homes were not well-insulated, and we had to stay in bed to keep warm.” Eventually, they sold out of the private cork company, so her husband could go out on his own, a venture that resulted in a U.S. company named WECORK, formerly in New Hampshire and now based in Tega Cay. “My daughter brings a sixth generation of knowledge in the cork industry, and our grandson represents the seventh generation.”
One of Wicander’s fondest memories of living abroad was starting bridge groups in Switzerland that included eight or nine nationalities of people, including friends who had survived the Holocaust. Today, she still plays competitive bridge online internationally.
Wicander also remembers challenges along the way, such as being involved in a large family business, learning languages, differences in weights and measurements, and being viewed as ugly Americans during the Vietnam War. “But there were also so many things that enriched our lives abroad– especially the people and European food. “If you have an opportunity to live overseas like I did, my best advice is to be patient and experience as much of other people’s lives as you can.”
Germany: Dee Eaker
One day in the early 90s when Dee Eaker was a school music teacher, she was intrigued by an afternoon announcement that came across on her classroom loudspeaker: “If you want to be an exchange teacher, call the office.” Although she figured someone else, like the German teacher, would get the opportunity, she called anyway. “I got it because I was the only one who could go quickly enough, and my ‘pistol’ of a mother jumped in to take care of my house and cats.”
Maybe it was fate, because Eaker ended up teaching English in a public German high school in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern for two years. It was near the Palace of Mirow in the little-known principality of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, where Queen Charlotte, namesake of our own Queen City, was born. “It was closed when I got there, but I noticed a man in a yellow hardhat who turned out to be the head of building restoration. In a bold move that was very un-German, I got him to take me and my new friends inside—we just had to wear hardhats too. They got the idea that Americans don’t play by the rules,” she laughed.
During her two years there, she lived life to the fullest. She recalls going canoeing with friends, including an Australian man who was the only English speaker in their little town. “We paddled through five different lakes and had to portage our canoes over one lock and go through another one. It was a choppy motorboat lake, and we were in folding boats made of rubber and canvas that fit in the trunk of the car. We didn’t have life jackets, but fortunately, I was a good swimmer. After it began to rain, we decided to stop at a nearby camp to take a break and eat lunch. It turned out to be a nudist camp. The Australian said that was lucky because all the doctors and lawyers would be there, so it would be safe.”
Eaker had many takeaways from her experience of living and teaching in Germany. The choir director at the school got her involved in the philharmonic choir that afforded her a chance to perform in Copenhagen. She taught a girl who was missing two fingers to play piano chords with three fingers. She sang at a stone church where she learned to wear long, silk L.L. Bean underwear under her blouse and skirt to keep from freezing while performing. She even got a chance to go bobsledding in the Olympic Village in Innsbruck with professionals. “We went very, very fast!”
Since she moved to Germany just four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall reunified Germany, she describes the political situation as hot. “When the communists left, East Germans were no longer under an authoritarian regime, and they didn’t have jobs. I learned not to say I was a teacher from America, but rather that I was an exchange teacher, who had changed places with a German couple to give them an opportunity to teach in my hometown in the U.S. Everyone had an equal level of medical care under their single-payer system, so you had a card to present when you went to the doctor, which was really helpful when I got a big splinter stuck in my foot.
“I went there to become a German, not be an American who thought I did everything right. When I started dreaming in German, I realized I had achieved my goal.”
Melbourne, Tokyo, Aukland, New York, New England, Paris: Dick Welch
In one year during his long career with IBM, Dick Welch traveled 250,000 air miles. “I physically went around the world three times.” A wide variety of jobs moved him and his family to cities on four continents in all kinds of climates with all kinds of living opportunities. “We enjoyed every one of them. It was all fun.”
When Welch was manager of IBM’s Finance Industry Support Centre in Melbourne, Barb and Dick made the most of the reversed seasons. While living ‘Down Under,’ they could jump in the pool on Christmas Day. “The tour also exposed us to Aussie rules football, rugby, and long cricket matches,” Welch said. Their rented house in the village of Middle Brighton made getting to work easy. Welch took the train for eight minutes and connected with the tram for 20 minutes, while the car stayed home in the driveway. The “barbie” was a centerpiece of life, and Sundays were meant for cookouts. “On weekends I would pick up two crown roasts for 5.00A$ and cook them on the barbie, a.k.a. barbecue grill,” Welch said. “Most of the neighbors did the same and the smell of lanolin filled the air. The Package Store was next to the church, and on Sundays, a few folks stopped at the church on their way to the store. Australia has around 3% church attendance. Pub attendance is much higher. It occurred to me that the church may have been placed next to the Package Store to encourage church attendance.”
His long career with IBM also took the Welches to Tokyo for three years starting in 1966 on the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. His territory stretched from Japan to Singapore. Their two blond-haired girls were first to learn Japanese and were a hit in a neighborhood filled with dark haired children.
Their next three-year stop was Aukland, New Zealand where Welch was manager with 120 reports. Upon landing there, the pilot said, “Welcome to Aukland, New Zealand. Set your clocks back 20 years.” “The thing I remember most was that the pubs closed at 5 p.m., so our office emptied out at 4:45. The bartender would line up beer glasses on the counter, quickly filling them to get enough poured under the deadline. We had a lovely house overlooking the Bay of Islands, so we could watch the Half Ton Cup International Sailboat Races from our deck. We also hosted lots of visitors eager to go to Christchurch in South Island.”
Dick and Barbara Welch
When the Welches returned from France, they moved to Bearsville, N.Y., outside of Woodstock, where they bought a house and studio owned by Stanley Craine, an artist of the Hudson River Group, on eight acres of land on the side o a mountain. A major memory: a septic tank that created a drain field that grew massive squash and zucchini plants. Welch also worked in Charlotte with a group of developers on a project to capture people’s signatures, breaking little strokes into digital segments, to create the perfect signature. The experimental development became a basis for artificial intelligence (AI), was new territory for a history and government major.
Welch accepted an offer to relocate to France when one daughter was leaving for Vassar, and the other was about to start her senior year in high school. “She wasn’t at all happy about it…until she got a boyfriend in Paris and had more interesting experiences than we did. She once went to a concert by way of the subway. When they got off at the Champs-Élysées stop, they found themselves caught between police and rioters, were hit with tear gas, and retreated to the subway stumbling and coughing.”
Once their lives were even colored by international intrigue. When they were living in Tokyo, their maid Akani was suspected of being an accomplice to a soldier who went AWOL. Subsequently, three plain clothes police officers showed up at Welch’s office to ask a few questions about Mrs. Welch and what organizations she belonged to. Once while having a party at their apartment, they saw someone with binoculars looking in their windows. Another time, Barb Welch and a friend realized they were being followed while shopping. When Dick asked Barb what they did, she matter-of-factly said. “We lost him.” After that, Dick joked that Barb mostly likely had joined the CIA’s questionable character list.
His advice to anyone whose job takes them abroad is simple: “Have a team-player spouse and just let it ride.”