FORTUNATELY, ON THAT JULY MORNING IN 1936, THERE was a Scotsman in the Madrid office of Thomas Cook and Son, Travel Agency. I came to inquire whether the best route to Rome would be south through Gibraltar and thence by ship, or north by railroad through France. I decided on Gibraltar and then remembered something of importance which I wanted to say to Mrs. Monica Owen. I asked the Scotsman to call her on the phone.

Putting in the call, he reported, "There is no communication outside of Madrid." Then he went on: "You know, things cannot go on like this!"

Alarmed, I asked, "Like what?"

"When I was coming to work this morning," he said, "someone was shooting at two of the Guardia Civil from the house I was passing. They shouted to me to lie down. I did."

What to do next? Since the group seemed to be in good hands under the care of Spanish teachers---a more favorable situation than mine---I decided to continue on my travels and leave them to their fate, which proved to be exciting but not dangerous. I would have been happy if my train to Gibraltar had left immediately, but it was not due to go until eight o'clock in the evening, so I had ten hours of trying not to think about where the next shot would come from. Finally, the train left, and I had an excellent meal in the dining car, complete with a fine red wine. I felt noticeably better.

Although I never traveled first-class, feeling this time that I would like to get some sleep, I made an exception and had the whole first-class compartment to myself. I slept well and was apparently awakened by the stopping of the train. It was just barely dawn, but I could see we were not in a station, but among the fields, with ever-present olive trees. It seemed that I was going to be here for a long time. I got out a novel on the Russian Revolution, and was reading at the point where the Russians were just beginning to shoot one another, when I looked out the window, and there was an army officer brandishing a large automatic pistol. Standing close to the train was a handsome young Spaniard in a blue mechanic's jumper and a rifle in his arm. He gave me a motherly smile and said something. Unfortunately, my Spanish was nonexistent. He obviously wanted to protect me, so I took the advice that the Guardia Civil had given the Scotsman the day before and lay down.

What he had said to me was, "Hands up!" and when I disappeared he thought I was going to fight. I did not stay on the floor a long time, but taking care not to show myself at the window, I sat down and started to read again, which meant that my hands were already up when the soldier came rushing down the corridor, opened the compartment door, and jabbed the muzzle of his rifle against my chest. As soon as I recovered from fright and surprise, I exclaimed, "Americano," and the man relaxed but marched me off the train. If I had been reaching for a toothbrush in my suitcase under the seat, my chances of being alive now would have been very, very poor.

Soon all the suspicious characters were together outside the train, with our hands in the air. This was the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, when General Franco and the Army attacked the Republican Government. They were searching the train for Republican political leaders. They soon saw that I was a harmless foreigner, and when the others were marched off, I was left.

I climbed back on the train. It moved on, and in a few moments we were in the station of the city of Córdoba, from which it did not move during the next week.

On the platform, there were the strangest-looking lot of men, with bulging shoulders, flat noses, and cauliflower ears. They were a group of professional wrestlers, and they and two French girls who were teachers of Spanish became my comrades for the rest of the stay. Our common predicament soon brought us together, and not knowing how long we would stay, we decided to save our money and slept every night on the train, quite unmolested. No one touched our baggage, which lay in the racks.

It was a tense situation; one never knew when or where shooting would break out. Moreover, it was hot, so that we moved about as little as possible, spending all morning under the one revolving fan in a restaurant that had been a Gothic church with a sixty-foot ceiling.

Afternoons we spent in the shade of trees beside a small swimming pool.

The Algerian troops that Franco had intended to use to attack Madrid didn't arrive because the Navy was loyal to the Republican Government. When the Moorish troops did come to Cordoba, we went to Sevilla in their buses. There we learned that there was a French gunboat waiting to take refugees out of the country. But I decided to carry out my plan to go to Gibraltar, and although there were a good many interesting adventures, none was quite so dangerous as the incident with my handsome Revolutionary.

In the meantime what had happened to Mrs. Owen and her group? Almost immediately the palace was occupied by improvised local troops because it was by far the strongest position for many miles. Unfortunately all thought of leaving was made impossible when Mrs. Owen became very ill. Meanwhile, improvising an American flag and courting the local officials to get their assistance, the group started off cross-country to the northward so as not to have to pass through Madrid: Now riding in a bus, now on a troop train, often waiting the better part of a day and night sleeping in the railway stations. (The contact with the soldiers on the train was illuminating if ironical for the soldiers asked them what the American flag was.) They finally arrived in France and found themselves very much in the news since they were among the first foreigners who had escaped from the revolution.

The first American group in Spain could hardly have been called a successful Experiment for the sudden collapse of the program meant that they did not make any permanent friends. The boys and the girls each in their own dormitories enjoyed the contact with the Spanish young people but found themselves very much out of harmony with the Hitler Jugund group that was organized like a military unit and had nothing in common with the Spanish and the Americans.

War is not the time to search for the soul of a nation. I had come to Spain inspired by the people I had met in Mexico. That first Spanish venture had made me feel that the people in Spain were very different from those in Latin America. Although I really knew nothing about them, it was easy to jump to the conclusion that the Moorish tradition had closed their homes and had given them an unbelievable jealousy about their women. I came to the conclusion that in Spain we would have the same answer that we had in many other countries, "Your plan can't be carried out here" and because of the revolution it couldn't be carried out at that time---so I had to wait.

In 1948 my problem was how to get started. I got in touch with Miss Mary Sweeney, who had been instrumental in arranging for our first group in Spain. Miss Sweeney, having led an Experiment group to Mexico, changed her mind about the impossibility of getting Spanish families to accept Americans in their homes. It was through her that we got in contact with Señorita Arguelles. By the greatest good luck, Laura Arguelles was living in a perfect city for an Experiment group, ancient Segovia.

I was so convinced that young Americans with their free and easy informality would find the adjustment to Spanish homelife extremely difficult that it would be necessary to send a very highly qualified group if it were to be successful. I did have the perfect leader in Betty Gatchell of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where she taught art at Miss Hall's school. Music was also one of her great interests but her sensitivity to beauty was matched by her tact in dealing with people. Leading Experiment groups two summers in Mexico made her aware in great detail of how American young people must be prepared to enjoy the customs of families whose culture, I was sure, was very different from our own.

Betty Gatchell. agreed with me that the members of the group must have the highest qualifications, be able to speak Spanish well and be socially mature. Therefore, only upperclassmen in college should be accepted. I was astonished that when the time came to depart for Spain, the group far exceeded our expectations. It consisted of fourteen members---eight boys and six girls. This seemed like a good start; but Betty Gatchell, on getting acquainted with them, found them highly individualistic---the kind of people whom she believed would quite naturally resist becoming a cooperative unit. On receiving her first report letter, I was quite convinced that our second Spanish group would be doomed to failure.

Nothing could have been farther from the truth. Those few Spanish families that were willing to take an American showed them a warmth which was only rarely matched in the history of The Experiment. The report of Herbert (Obie) Kaiser makes a typical experience clear. He wrote:

I was fortunate enough to live with the Arquelles family at their summer home at Miraflores, 40 kilometers outside of Madrid. The family was just perfect for me. They had the gift of making me feel at home immediately. They treated me as though I were quite a prize and gave me the feeling that they enjoyed having me as part of the family. Señor Arquelles always kept me working at my Spanish. I had no freedom whatsoever to speak English. If I did, I was told very pleasantly that I had come there to learn Spanish and I was astonished to find that I never enjoyed myself more than being subject to this sort of isolation.

Señor Arquelles was an expert on Arab affairs, having grown up in Morocco where his father had been an Army officer. Every now and then he would teach me some Arabic expressions. Señora. Arquelles went out of her way to spoil me, always insisting that I eat more---especially a rare delicacy, honey, when she found out that I liked it. The rest of the family consisted of Kitty and Laura, who later became representatives of The Experiment, and Aunt Henrietta, who was a valued member of the family. In fact, it is impossible for me to express adequately how much a part of the family I felt both then and now.

Obie's experience was nearly paralleled by the other members of the group and this was not because of any physical comforts, for Spain was an exhausted and disorganized country following the civil war and in contrast to the comforts to which the group members were accustomed at home, living in Spain that summer meant that they shared the universal hardships. A few glimpses of their experiences must suffice.

Betty Gatchell wrote just after arriving in that country after a long, slow train journey in comfortless third-class coaches (This is not an actual quotation):

We arrived in Córdova at 4:00 o'clock in the morning chilled to the bone. Nevertheless, the group set out cheerfully to watch the sun rising over the Great Mosque with its row upon row of Saracenic arches, one of the finest pieces of Moorish architecture in Spain. At the same time we were finding out what it meant to live in Spain for there were no restaurants to be found. We might have felt very sorry for ourselves had it not been for the fact, as we passed through the station, we saw about three hundred people in a cue waiting to buy railway tickets. Why should all those people be standing there at 4:00 o'clock in the morning? Had they been waiting all night? As a reward for being such eager sightseers, near the Mosque, we found street venders selling hot chocolate, which filled our empty tummies and made us forget our discomfort---and so did the smell and taste of the hot churros (long and crispy doughnuts).

Both while traveling and while with our families, we found that black market high prices were a way of life. For us, with plenty of money, it was not a problem but we did hear that for some families one loaf of bread cost the quarter of a daily wage. This was a challenge: not to feel sorry for ourselves at the quite limited diet that the families had to give us; the complete lack of sugar and the daily presence of low-grade olive oil which, at first, we found nearly inedible.

Segovia. At first we were all stunned by its beauty, the Roman Aqueduct, from the time of Trajan; the incomparable Romanesque churches; the Alcazar, where we learned Columbus had come to pay his respects to Isabella. The city was strikingly beautiful and---although not all of the group had their homestay here---the original impression was thrilling but soon we were so engrossed in our families, their relations and friends, their problems and, in spite of it all, their joyousness, picturesque values soon seemed less important than human ones.

The group members were living with families of all political aspects who had not known one another until we got them together for little parties. Then, at least while they danced and ate with us, they forgot their animosities; the Falangists and Republicans were able to be polite to one another.

As the summer wore on our families seemed to be more and more fond of us. They said it was like a breath of fresh air to have in their homes these carefree people from abroad, unburdened by the years of stress. Three of us were unusually lucky. The family with whom I stayed, the Arechagas, invited Obie, Arnold and me to spend a week in their summer home in the high Pyrenées. I was very proud of the two boys, who outdid themselves in their enthusiastic participation in everything that the family did, whether playing tennis or that insidious and fascinating form of bridge called "nullos."

The Arechaga family was a very wealthy one. Their huge summer house was very like a palace but they spent only a month every year in it and, in addition, had a ranch near Toledo. Naturally, being aristocrats, they were on Franco's side during the war and when the subject of war was brought up---although they did not get excited---they soon changed to some more pleasant subject, but we were able to see there had been a great deal of destruction since the house had been occupied by the Republican troops for a long time.

Señor Arechaga was my idea of the perfect aristocrat. The village and the territory around it belonged to him. As far as the villagers were concerned, as well as his family, there was no question about his authority. He treated them all in the same paternal manner, but he was calm and pleasant at all times, directing everyone with a constant smile.

Every morning while we were there, the family attended mass in a chapel which seemed to belong to them. We learned that there was a priest in attendance, apparently paid by the family, only during the month that the Arechagas were there. While the family members were very devout, we soon learned that the townspeople seldom went to church and for eleven months of the year had no opportunity to do so. We naturally attended the mass with everyone else in the morning and, although the two boys were not Roman Catholics, it never occurred to them to suggest they were not glad to do so.

Señora Arechaga was, of course, accorded great deference and her household was conducted like a well ordered world of its own; always pleasant and happy. To us all of them were the soul of hospitality.

The great event of the visit was climbing the highest mountain in Spain. We set off one morning at dawn, eighteen souls and, to carry provisions, two donkeys, at first through fields of golden wheat and then above the timber line we passed broad patches of purple heather. From the top we could see the Bay of Biscay below us and sixty miles to the north.

For me, the experience of one of the boys, Dave, was the triumph of the summer. He was a sophisticated college junior from the Bronx and being Jewish had the luck to land in the most pious Catholic family. At first he did not hesitate to tell us that he took a dim view of being stuck in this small provincial town and stated that he could hardly wait for the end of the homestay when he could enjoy the bright lights of Madrid.

Astonishingly, when it was time to leave Segovia, Dave decided to come to Madrid on a later train explaining that: "I sure hate to leave my old man." And it was Dave's Spanish father who gave him his photograph inscribed "To my other son."

When the Gatchell group left Spain, they left behind them families who no longer had any fear of accepting American young people to stay a month in their homes. While it was contrary to Experiment procedures, they insisted on having an American year after year. When I protested to Louisa Montaro, our representative in Spain, that at that time we preferred not to have the same family act as hosts two years in succession, she replied that they were so firm in insisting that she could not do otherwise than give them their wish. In this case, it was I who thought that, "It can't be done." Of all the countries which The Experiment has visited, in no case was there such a great difference between our expectation of great difficulty and the success of the groups following that second year.

When one thinks of the centuries during which the English speaking and the Spanish speaking people were mortal enemies; when we think of the recent century of dislike which each had for the other, it gives us courage to believe that within a reasonably short period of time, the countries of the world will learn to enjoy and to trust one another.

WHEN WE MOVED OUR FAMILY FROM SYRACUSE TO PUTNEY in 1937 and built our house at the edge of the woods overlooking an old pasture and the pond, one of my more knowing women friends, Monica Owen, Sr., said,

"You surely don't expect that your children will be content to live on that abandoned hillside!"

So it was with a great deal of satisfaction that we accepted the name which Joe Tosi, one of daughter Barbara's admirers, gave to it: "Himmel (Heaven) on the Hill." It was war time; the name couldn't be entirely in German. All three of the children really loved Himmel. Our oldest child, Donald, had trouble getting rid of his baby name, Donnie. When he came home from the Pacific as a twenty-six-year-old war veteran, he was still Donnie, in spite of his protests. I was surprised and pleased when he said he wished to work for The Experiment, since I had assumed that he would want to do graduate study. One morning after he had been on The Experiment staff for some months, he told me that the Putney Women's Club wanted to see Himmel and hear all about it.

Although in those days every minute was valuable and all of my time was dedicated to The Experiment, a talk was arranged, and the ladies arrived at four one afternoon. So I set out to explain what I thought would be of interest. Someone took notes which indicate that I said something like the following:

We had no trouble in deciding where to settle. There were only two farms near enough to Putney School so that our children could walk; one was not for sale, and so we went to see the other. The whole family was attending the fourth annual mid-winter reunion of The Experiment. One afternoon, putting on our skis, all five of us started over the open fields in search of George Holt's farm. There were quite a few sites on the farm which would make beautiful locations for a home, but we quickly decided on the present one, at the edge of the woods, which was a sugar bush. The boundary trees had been allowed to grow and we guessed they were between one and two hundred years old. One had fallen, however, and we planned to slip one corner of the house into the woods at that point so that it would be half in the shade and half in the sun. The living room of the house was designed to look southeast where it would catch the full strength of the winter sunshine, while the northern exposure was protected by the woods and the hill.

HIMMEL IN A WINTER MOOD	THE FIRST PUTNEY OFFICE BUILDING SEEN FROM HIMMEL ON THE HILL
THE APPROACH TO THE FRONT DOOR	THE PUTNEY CAMPUS FROM THE AIR (Photo by Richard L. Harris)

In the winter time with the trees bare, the sun flooded the living room, while in the summer the branches of the huge maples, along with the three-foot-wide eaves, meant that almost no sunshine fell on the house after eleven o'clock. People call this house a chalet, but it is really an Austrian farmhouse. Instead of the carved decorations of a Swiss chalet, the house depended for its beauty on massive construction and simple lines. This sort of house had evolved in the Alps for thousands of years, and its design, almost square, presented a minimum of surface to the sub-zero days of a Vermont winter. So it is much more suitable for the Vermont climate than the typical Vermont houses with their long, narrow ells, and which, in my opinion, are wooden copies of British seventeenth-century brick town houses. The Austrian farmhouses provide shelter for the whole farm under one roof. The cattle live on the first floor, the people on the second, and the third floor is for the hay. This is an ideal plan for conserving heat as the European farmers have to do. The only central heating is the bodies of the cows below the living quarters. The ceiling, on the other hand, was warmed by the slow fermentation of the blanket of hay, which also kept out the cold air. The nearly flat roof, with many rocks on it to hold down the shingles, also kept the snow from sliding off, and made another blanket. We had lived so much in Austria and had come to enjoy the Alps, its people, and their way of life, that we wanted that kind of a house.

There had been all sorts of exaggerated stories about large parts of this house coming from Europe, but apart from furnishings, the only thing that had been brought over were the doors. They are made of planks placed in designs, quite unlike conventional American doors. The star pattern of the front door is more elaborate than many in Austria. A carpenter in Alt Aussee copied it from an existing one in his village.

In Europe, only the houses which are high in the mountains are built wholly or partly of logs. By chance I happened to see an advertisement in House and Garden for pre-fabricated log homes. A Minneapolis Company dealing in telegraph poles had made them, because they could not sell their poles during the Depression. Since Minneapolis lay on the itinerary of my winter promotional trips, I made an arrangement with the company to make walls for the second story of the house, out of logs carefully fitted together.

The chief decoration is provided by four six-by-twelve-inch beams, which not only support the second story but, running through the end walls, support also the outside balconies. Paradoxically, in a land of wood, the logs and the beams were white cedar grown in Oregon and prepared in Minnesota.

Each room represents a different country, with furniture brought home from time to time from Austria, Hungary, Italy, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico and Guatemala; and somehow the result is neither a museum nor a hodgepodge.

My enthusiasm for beautiful old things started when I was a boy in my junior year at high school. I began collecting antiques and prints. Since the groups lived inexpensively abroad, Leslie and I did also, and saved money to spend on these furnishings. We were in Vienna on our wedding trip, working on a student relief organization, just after the First World War. In order to eat, for their money had lost all of its value, the wealthy people of Vienna were selling their objects of art. A municipal auction room called the "Dorotheum" provided an easy way to find treasures. Moreover, our American dollars provided fantastically great purchasing power. A pair of six-panelled Japanese screens was bought at that time for what I believe was a small fraction of what they would have cost in Japan. They were part of the collection of Prinz Heinrich von Bourbon, one of the non-reigning royalty of Austria. The Boston Fine Arts Museum, in their unusually fine Japanese collection, has similar ones, although frankly, I like mine better. They are from the sixteenth century, painted with tempera on a double layer of the toughest rice paper. Being tempera, their colors are nearly as bright as when they were painted. The subject matter represents battles of feudal Japan, when two great families, the Heiki and the Gengi, were fighting for the domination of the whole country, including His Sacred Highness, the Emperor. Six-inch figures in their medieval armor are so carefully drawn that each face is a portrait. Separating the scenes are clouds of gold leaf.

In order to protect them as much as possible, we have placed them in recesses on opposite walls of the Japanese living room, filling a space five by sixteen feet. When the house was being built, we sent them back to Japan to be put in first-class condition. First, the two layers of paper, the one on which the picture was painted and the one on which it was mounted, were separated. The old mount was then thrown away, and the pictures remounted on a new, resilient layer. We were told that they were now as good as the day that they were made. Fortunately, they came back to this country less than a month before the war with Japan broke out.

Our three Austrian doors had nearly the same adventure. The forwarding agent lost them for a year, and they arrived in August, 1939. A few weeks later, and we probably would not have seen them again. As it was, we went through one winter with temporary doors.

The Japanese room is the living room with a view of the pond and the New Hampshire mountains. Feeling that our guests would not be comfortable sitting on the floor, as the Japanese do, we had to compromise with true Japanese design, and so used the simplest kind of overstuffed furniture. The Japanese do not paint indoor woodwork, but rub it with oil. We found that finishing the beautiful, broad, white cedar boards with waterglass protected them without changing their natural color.

Japanese houses are made with a frame of lightweight timber, and the space between the timbers is filled with wattle, woven branches of trees on which is put a plaster made of clay, sand, lime and chopped straw.

In order to make the walls look "Japanesey," we asked the mason to put straw into the plaster. We had already annoyed the man to distraction by asking him not to use his straight-edge on any of the walls, so that they would have a wavy, old appearance. In his frustration, he said, "Here I've spent all my life learning how to make a perfectly flat wall, and you want them wavy!" He refused absolutely to have anything to do with the straw. Fortunately, the construction foreman was a man of all building trades, and he was intrigued to see if he could produce what we wanted.

It was a problem to know what to do with the floor, to imitate the tatami (compressed straw covered with matting) which the Japanese use. We decided that a linoleum-like cork floor came nearest in effect and feeling to the soft tatami. Our difficulty was that, unlike the Japanese, Westerners do not take off their shoes before coming into a room, nor did we foresee the dagger heels with which the modern woman destroys beautiful floors.

While we thought of it as a two-story house, actually it has four, since we were to make good use of the entire basement, as well as the attic. We thought in 1938 that the basement room, which we called the playroom, would be large enough to hold all Experiment groups of the future. (Now it will not even hold all of the leaders.) It is decorated in Austrian peasant style in conformity with the exterior, and furnished with peasant furniture brought from the Austrian mountains. In one corner is the characteristic Herr Gotts Winkel (the Lord God's Nook) with a crucifix, a picture of Christ, the Virgin, or one of the saints. This nook is a direct descendant of the place for worshiping the household gods, the lares and penates of Latin times. Benches built along the walls provide seats on two sides of a huge table. It is the gathering place for the farm family when they are not at work.

The big room is cooler in summer and warmer in winter than the rest of the house, because half of it is underground. Moreover, since there were big field stones scattered over the farm, it was not expensive to make the cellar walls almost two feet thick, as can be seen at all the windows.

The main entrance to the house is approached on steps made of huge slabs of eroded stone. Above the door with its striking star-shaped design, there is a half-circle transom which we filled with a fine piece of wrought iron made for the purpose, and herein lies a long story.

Twice every year in the city of München (unfortunately called Munich by most of us) there is an antique fair. Since my nose for beautiful things is not only one of my best gifts but has been carefully trained, I soon found an antiquarian of excellent taste. He offered for sale saints of all sizes and shapes, resplendent in red and gold. Naturally, I selected a beauty. It was a magnificent St. Florian, the protector of houses against fire, and Herr Schmied, the owner, won my undying admiration by his response. He replied that he had only one St. Florian, so he could not possibly sell it. As it turned out, this was not bickering for a higher price, and his very shabby appearance made it clear that he loved his saints better than he loved to sell them.

There was a pile of wrought iron objects in the shop, and among them I saw a beautifully wrought piece roughly in the shape of the letter S. Herr Schmied informed me that there were six altogether, and I immediately visualized them put together in the half-circle space over the front door of Himmel. All that I needed now was a craftsman to make my dream a reality, and by pure chance, my feet---or was it my roving eyes?---were guided directly to the shop of Joseph Geier, Kunstschmied. (This word has a color and quality for which there is no adequate translation, "artisan of wrought iron" is literal, but inadequate.)

Hoping that I would have the luck of finding a Kunstschmied, I had brought with me a full-sized drawing of the transom, and soon we had it on the floor of Geier's shop and he was placing the six S-shaped pieces now in one pattern, now in another, until we found one on which we both agreed. Geier explained that he would add the necessary parts, and also said that it would be as beautiful as the best wrought iron to be found in the artistic city of München.

Joseph Geier had a white beard and a spiritual face which one would expect to find only in a medieval religious painting. He must have been in his late sixties, and as it later turned out, his days of forging iron were numbered. It was a year later, when we returned to see him and met his friends, that we learned that they had named him Der Liebe Gott (Beloved God), and this was not only because of his appearance, but also because of his character.

Fortunately, he had no typewriter, or I should never have known what an enchanting object of art could be made of a letter when written by the hand of Joseph. Since no description would do them justice, one of them and its translation is reproduced on the following pages.

We were deeply touched to think that Joseph had, in that short time, acquired such an attachment for us that he wanted to reduce the price by one-fourth. At the time, we had absolutely no idea how badly he needed the money, but we sent the original amount and told him that we felt he had given us a great bargain.

Before we returned to Germany the following year, Der Liebe Gott had moved from the city to the village of Hohenschäftlam, west of München. it was not exactly easy to locate his home, for this village used an old system of numbering houses. Each house received a number at the time that it was built, and number 102 might have been next door to number five. Finally, we located the number, and the agreeable lady of the house said that Herr Geier lived in their cellar, that she had not seen him for several days, but she believed that we could find him at the inn. The inn could not have been more improbable if one had found it in a fairy tale. In the middle of the woods, a number of houses were built into the ruin of an ancient monastery. The old and the new were mixed in delightful good taste.

The keeper of the inn was a woman. When we found her, she was busy, but at the mention of Joseph Geier's name she relaxed and smiled in a way that clearly said that as a friend of Der Liebe Gott, we were not just two more customers but, instantaneously, friends.

Sitting down at a table, she told us how they fed the old man, although he could pay nothing. She mentioned with special pride that he took a daily bath in the nearby brook, even when the weather was very cold. He finally came in, and we had a delightful lunch together, and after that a walk before saying good-bye.

Leslie and I did not realize to what an extent this lonely old man was depending on us for friendship. Now and then we would send him a postcard or a brief note, and toward the end of the following year, we received a letter reproaching us for being so remiss. Joseph did not realize how many letters to all parts of the world we had to write every day.

The next visit to Joseph found him moved to another village and a different inn. Again, the innkeeper was a woman. She told us how she not only fed him, but paid for his weekly trips to the village bath house and bought him some much-needed winter clothing. But we never saw Joseph again for he was dead. Toward the end of his life, she said, he had been lonely and sad, but it was too late for us to repair our unknowing neglect. However, we did repay the innkeeper for the clothing and for the baths. A small portrait of Joseph hangs beside the front door of Himmel just under one of the last of his beautiful creations. It had been a privilege to know Joseph.

THE SUMMER OF 1951 FOUND LESLIE AND ME VISITING our Austrian representatives, Manfred and Friedl Kaufmann, who lived in Salzburg, on an Austrian schoolteacher's salary. Their little home was an apartment tastefully decorated with antiques inherited from the days when Friedl's father was a representative of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire in Herzogovina, where the influence of the old Turkish culture lingered. Whenever we visited the Kaufmanns, after dinner we were always offered two souvenirs of those good old days: Turkish coffee milled at the table by Manfred, and Mondkuchen, which consisted of a roll of pastry well filled with poppy seeds.

Salzburg had been known to Experimenters from the earliest Experiment years, since we had always attended the Festspiele (Opera Festival) before it became so famous that tickets were impossible for us to afford. We had come to make arrangements for The Third Annual International Meeting. Knowing the hotels of Salzburg would be crowded in September because of the Festspiele, we explored the neighboring villages to find an inn which had the genuine Austrian atmosphere and was not filled with foreign transients. Of course, we were unwilling to admit that we too were just that.

We used the railroads in our exploration, because in those days no Experiment director dreamed of the luxury of an automobile. We searched for Austrian charm and found it in the village of Kuchl. The word Kuchl was the name of the hoods which the monks wore in ancient times. This village had been the site of a monastery, remnants of which were still to be found. But even more intriguing was the fact that the inn we selected, called the Römischerkeller (Roman wine cellar) had beneath it an abnormally deep cellar which, according to the saga, had been a Roman wine storage long before the days of the ancient monastery.

Austrian inns have a Gemütlichkeit (atmosphere of friendliness and comfort) which is soothing. Herr Seebald, the Wirt (host), a fine-looking man clad in the traditional leather shorts and a green and gray peasant jacket, presided over his hospitable inn with dignity and alacrity. The men who dropped in for a meal or just a beer, a wine, or a Schnaps (brandy) often stayed to spend the evening seated around the Stammtisch (the regular customers' table) for a game of cards or an exchange of gossip. It was the center of companionship for the village, a sort of club. How often I have deplored the fact that we can achieve nothing like it in the United States! Our group of forty-five people was not too large to be absorbed into this neighborliness, for quite a number of us spoke German.

Three of our number were types not often to be met in an Austrian inn. Among the representatives of France that year, there were three good stout men from Brittany: Jean Manis was the Mayor of Chateaulin, whence also came Pierre Moulin, the well-fed wholesaler of the farmers' butter and eggs, while from neighboring Treboul came Pierre Le Ninivin. How appropriate that they came in their Breton costumes, and that Pierre brought his bagpipes, for Austria and Brittany represent two European regions where not only the women but also the men have successfully resisted the march of the modes and still wear their eighteenth-century clothing.

On the evening that the village band came with their friends to teach us polkas and quadrilles, Pierre and his friends were urged to put on their Breton suits and bring their bagpipes, and the squealing of the Breton reels alternated with the whirling Ländlers (waltzes).

This unusual night went down in the history of the Römischerkeller as a significant international event, but these Bretons were also responsible for another significant event in the history of The Experiment. Although they knew neither English nor German and Walter Gaupp, the Director of the German Experiment, no Breton and little French, somehow they found a way to communicate throughout the week of The Meeting. The old habitual animosity broke down. Pierre told Walter, "Of course, we have always hated the Germans, but we have come to like you, and driving back, we would like to visit your home for a few days. We want to know you better."

The visit of the three Frenchmen in the beautiful old walled town of Soest in Westfalen was long remembered by the townspeople, and enhanced the respect they had for Walter Gaupp, a sterling character.

Another unforgettable event of this Meeting was finding The Experiment symbol. I had gone to Wien (Vienna) before The Meeting and, as I always did, visited the antique shop of Herr van der Fecht, the only Hollander in Wien. I had been introduced to him by the well-known Austrian etcher, Luigi Kasimir, whom I was lucky enough to know for many years. Van der Fecht specialized in antique statuary and wrought iron, and many of the Austrian pieces in Himmel came from his shop.

For several years I had been hoping to find a figure which should become The Experiment's symbol. I was actually looking for I knew not what, when from a pile of dusty, rusty fragments, one piece fairly leaped out and struck my attention. It was a piece of wrought iron six by eight inches, reminiscent of a pretzel, now so well-known to us all. I acquired it for a song.

A few days later, I held it up before the forty-five people attending The Meeting and asked, "Does this speak to anyone?" Their expressions extended all the way from blankness to polite incredulity. Burgl (short for Walpurga) Gewessler, a young Austrian woman schooled in the folk art of her country, to my delight said, in German, "I think it stands for people living happily together."

Later, referring to her books on peasant design, she justified her statement by saying that the endless figure might have stood for endlessness (in German, Endlosigkeit) to prehistoric people---not infinity in the mathematical sense---but in the sense of the human family going on endlessly, generation after generation. Burgl explained that when two identical designs were drawn in parallel, this represented the idea of cooperation, hence two streams of life flowing happily on. She said that, with the dangers which threatened primitive man, a major preoccupation was how to keep alive and keep one's children alive. This meant that much of their religion was concerned with fertility rites, the magic which made man and his food grow. The symbol, she believed, was part of the magic.

During my travels I looked for and found the symbol all over the world. I was delighted when other Experimenters sent me the evidence of their findings from countries as widely separated as Ireland and Turkey. Moreover, it has become so generally used by Experiment national organizations that Experimenters should know how incomparably ancient and interesting a symbol we have.

I wrote an article for the winter and spring issues of the Odyssey, The Experiment journal, in 1964, as follows:

The design was never voted the official symbol of The Experiment by the Council, but was adopted by acclaim. Denmark led the way when engineering student, Jurgen Christiansen, drew the symbol for their letterhead. The United States followed closely but designed a wavy variation which, in the opinion of the writer, detracted from the beauty of the simple pattern.

When we started using it, I made the mistake of saying that it was related to the runic alphabet, and this error appeared for a number of years in Experiment booklets. We now know that the runic alphabet was invented in the second century B.C., while our symbol is definitely dated at 3000 B.C.; in other words, the symbol is two and a half times older than the runes.

As Leslie and I traveled around the world the symbol appeared in the most unexpected places. Clearly, it had a very wide distribution, and on a trip to Wien in 1952 I visited the National Museum for Folklore. My hope that it had been described in scientific journals was confirmed by the Director.

During the Hitlerian period with its belief in the superiority of the Aryan race, not a few books and journals carried articles written by Germans who were more enthusiastic than scientific. However, perusing the literature, I found trustworthy art historians whose statements were based on adequate evidence. The most extensive study of the design was written in German by Wilhelm Holmquist of Stockholm, in a book called Kunstprobleme der Merowingerzeit (Art Problems of Merovingian Times). He wrote: "The knot ornaments came to Europe during the second half of the first millennium. . . . Dated monuments show that the knot designs go back to 3,000 years before Christ." (Translation mine.) He traced the travels of the symbol beginning in northwestern India, in the city of Susa in Iran and in Iraq. The figure reached Egypt in the first century A.D., and here its course split. One branch became closely associated with the Coptic Christian Church and went with it to Ethiopia. One has the impression from the frequency of its use in Coptic art that it is on a par with the cross as an important religious motif. From Ethiopia it seems to have scattered to many parts of Africa, but thus far, we lack accurate information.

The northern stream moved through Italy and Western Europe to Ireland and Norway. Clearly the design must have been "powerful medicine" to be capable of traveling such long distances. Moreover, we know that it not only traveled westward but eastward into China and Japan, and there is a likelihood that it was brought via Central Asia to Asia Minor where it was found in the fourteenth century in the culture of the Seljuk Turks.

Most surprising of all, the Smithsonian Institution is the authority for the fact that it was found in pre-Columbian America.

What did the symbol mean to the Stone-Age man? Reliable art historians have steadfastly refused to hazard a guess as to what the symbol meant five thousand years ago. On visiting the British museum, I was told emphatically that it had no symbolic significance but was only an artistic motif. While this may have been true for Britain, a Swedish archaeologist stated flatly that all prehistoric designs were created to convey a meaning before an alphabet existed. Scholarly work done on such symbols has been largely published in the German language. Emerich Schraffran in his book Die Kunst der Langobarden (The Art of the Lombards), published in 1941, says: "When the early Europeans want to represent an idea, they present a symbolic design. The symbols arose from the fact that prehistoric human beings were always threatened by demons." He further states, "Folk art has a great stability of form and consists mostly of symbols which are representations of beliefs." In the case of our symbol, the stability of form lasted five thousand years.

Holmquist, to whom I have already referred, has written, "One may easily assume that the knot-patterns existed and were used by the 'folk' of all lands. One has strong reasons for believing that all 'knot' designs had a religious meaning and were brought from their ancient oriental home to other peoples."

While I am unable to prove that the symbol meant what Burgl Gewessler said it did, by showing its distribution throughout the world and describing how it was used, I am attempting to show that for a period of four thousand years, not counting the last thousand, the symbol was an important feature in the lives of people, probably meaning different things in different countries and different centuries. Sometimes, when it was used as a decoration on a capital in a Christian Church the meaning of the symbol is fairly clear---a holy sign against evil. On the other hand, we sometimes have to guess what its meaning was. When I was calling upon Professor Holmquist, he told me he was sure that he could prove what meanings the symbol had, if he had the funds to do the research. Because they seem to provide the most fruitful field for tracking down our symbol, I shall start with Germany and Austria. Excavations in south western Germany exhibited in Stuttgart's Ethnographisches Museum show our knot ornament decorating numerous objects. The most significant are golden pendants, presumably for wearing around the neck, decorated only with the symbol in its simplest form. There are still more examples of an ancient safety pin called a fibula, worn on the shoulder to hold together the toga-like garment of that period. And finally, there is a brooch on which the symbol appears in a somewhat different form, intertwined with the heads of grotesque animals which are particularly common in Scandinavian art. The date of these relics is placed by the museum at about the seventh century.

QUIDLINGBURG, GERMANY, AN ELEVENTH CENTURY CHURCH	A MARBLE PANEL, ELEVENTH CENTURY WORK OF THE SELJUCK TURKS
A SHOULDER PIN TO HOLD IN PLACE THE TOGA-LIKE GARMENT OF SEVENTH AND EIGHTH CENTURY EUROPE	A VARIATION Of THE SYMBOL FROM A TRANSOM OF THE HOF KIRCHE, INNSBRUCK

Chronologically, the next example of the symbol decorated a capital in the tenth-century crypt of a church in Quidlingburg in the Harz Mountains which I have not been able to visit because it is in the Russian zone. It was pictured in one of the journals.

A number of people started sending me the results of their searches. David Dickens, leading a group to Germany, sent a photograph of an interesting variation of the symbol along with the date 1586, on the keystone of a small gate in the idyllic town of Rothenburg. A United States group to Austria, led by Otis Wickenhaeusen, sent the photograph of a grill of the Hofkircke in Innsbruck in which four parallel lines formed the design.

In later centuries, the symbol appears as the central decoration of wrought-iron grills for windows and transoms. The wrought-iron figure which I originally found has holes showing that it was probably part of such a grill. To enclose numerous caves at the foot of cliffs in the city of Salzburg, which are now used as tombs, are wrought-iron gates, each one bearing the symbol prominently. This use of the symbol on grills continues in Germany and Austria up to the present time, but those who use it give it no symbolic meaning. Experimenters searching for the symbol in Europe will find it many times over between the eleventh-century church in the Swedish university town of Lund and the city of Aquila in northeast Italy, where it forms a design in the mosaic floor.

Moving farther north, we come to Finland and Norway where, presumably because of the late arrival of Christianity, the old magic lived longer than in Central Europe. In Finland, it still has a name, St. Hans Wappen, which in English is the coat-of-arms of St. John. The name of Helsinki's principal hotel is the Finnish equivalent of monogram and our design is used as a decoration throughout. It appears on their one- , five-, and ten-mark coins; moreover, they are now making bronze brooches with the symbol reproducing the ancient jewelry now located in their museums.

In Norway, it is reported to be painted on the lintels of cattle sheds, but we do not know whether this is now explained as keeping out evil spirits or sickness. Curiously enough, long before we were interested in the symbol, my wife and I purchased in Norway a brooch representing two snakes, each grasping the tail of the other to form an endless intertwining circular figure. It has been suggested that the inspiration of the symbol was exactly this pattern of snakes. Since the snake is an object of great veneration in India, this seems a not-unlikely source.

From Ireland, Mrs. Sarah Gamble sent us a brooch which alternates the design with colored pebbles. Ireland is outstanding in making use today of the elaborate band decorations which were the principal form of ornament for early Irish Christianity. Dr. Heinz Willkomm, our most productive symbol sleuth (excepting myself), sent a photograph of a Kastillo taken on the Island of Rhodes, showing the symbol in gigantic size, forming the only decoration on the walls of the castle which was built by the knights of Rhodes about A.D. 1300.

In 1956, Leslie Squier, many times an Experiment leader, sent a photograph of a panel with the symbol carved in white marble, belonging to a sarcophagus located near Bursa, Turkey. Bursa was the capital of the Empire of the Seljuk Turks who dominated Western Anatolia in the eleventh century. It is especially interesting that this Turkish tribe, converted to the Moslem religion a short time previously, made use of the "charm." In other words, our design not only knew no geographic barriers, but was equally dear to the hearts of early pagans, Christians, Moslems, the Taoist practitioners of early China, and Buddhists in India, China and Japan.

Africa is probably a rich field for research. While visiting the Valley of the Queens near Karnac in Egypt, we found the symbol painted in red on the most prominent building of the valley, which is known to have served as a refuge for Coptic Christians in times of persecution. The Coptic Church of Ethiopia probably makes the most active use of the design today.

Turning to Asia proper and to India, we find the probable place of its origin. While we were living with our Indian family, the wife of the eldest son showed my wife her puja (personal shrine) which had the symbol as one of its many designs. From her we learned that it is the custom of India, especially in the south, to make all sorts of designs on the ground in front of their homes with wet rice flour. At the time of weddings, our symbol seems to be used invariably as a good luck omen for the new family.

In a volume entitled Chinese Textiles by Alan Priest and Pauline Simmons of the Metropolitan Museum of New York, we find illustrations of the "eight precious things" of the Buddhist religion. Here the symbol takes a form in which it is found in Chinese culture with six loops instead of four. Priest and Simmons call it "the Mystic Diagram" and "the thread which guides to happiness." Furthermore, Edouard Chavannes, the leading sinologist of the period 1893-98, in his L'espression des voeux dans l'art populaire chinois, cites the figure as "the mystical mark" on the chest of Vishnu, the Indian god. He notes that the original meaning is lost and now it is called "the knot," as it was in Europe; the Knot of Wotan in pagan times, and the Knot of St. John when the symbol was incorporated into Christian art after the fathers of the church found it was impossible to stamp out its magic power.

From the Director of the National School of Design in Tokyo, Professor Nasagi Sudo, we have the statement that the symbol was important in the Taoist religion which preceded Buddhism in China, and according to whose teaching, eternal life was a possibility for human beings. He said that now it was a sign of longevity or a wish for happiness. In Japan, we found the design decorating the gable of a business building, and. on textiles as well. It appears in a very unusual form on the now obsolete ten yen note.

Most extraordinary of all, it existed in pre-Columbian North America. In the Bureau of Ethnology of the Smithsonian Institution, I found an article by J. W. Powell who, in 1898, reported on his excavations in Mississippi. The article contains an illustration of four similar gorgets (buttons) which probably decorated headdresses. They are all engraved with a variation of the symbol.

For Experimenters today, our sign has the magic and the charm of a beautiful and simple pattern. It is with interest and pride that we realize we share its use (as far as we now know) with the Coptic Church, the government of Finland, the farmers of Norway and the women of India---a symbol which has spoken to people since the dawn of history, five thousand years ago.

Chapter Twenty-Five
Table of Contents