The Hofbräuhaus Convergence

In about 1976, Joan and I decided to take a vacation to southern Germany as a precursor stop to a business trip I was on.  We would be starting in Munich.  Fate brought a wonderful triple convergence.

I was familiar with the city, and it’s still one of my very favorites.  From 1958 – 1960 I attended Munich American High School for my freshman and sophomore years.  My father was stationed at Bad Tölz, just south of Munich.  Each week of the school year, a bus would pick up students from Bad Tölz and take us to Munich, where we stayed in a 4-day dorm, returning on Friday evening. 

One of the teachers had tickets to the dress rehearsals of the Bayerische Rundfunk, the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and occasionally she would give me a ticket for a performance.  I loved the experience, both the music, and the chance to get out into the city on my own.  So, Munich is a fond memory.

Now Joan and I would have a chance to explore the city in a different way.  We arrived on a Saturday.  For Joan, a diligent Catholic, the first priority was to find out where to meet her obligation to attend mass.  We learned there would be a service at the Frauenkirche that evening.  The Frauenkirche is a wonderful iconic church just off the center square, now much restored from what I remembered from the late 1950’s.  We strolled down the aisle and found open seats.  As we were making ourselves comfortable, waiting for the service to start, a gentleman came in and sat next to us.  We nodded to each other.  A moment later, Joan started to nudge me with her elbow.  Eventually, I looked where she indicated, at his hand.  I’ll be darned!  He’s wearing a “Brass Rat”.  That’s a school ring from MIT, featuring a Beaver, the engineer of the animal world.  The service had just started, so we had to wait to start a conversation until afterward.

Joe Binsack was indeed from MIT, both as an alumnus and as a current professor.  He had just been in Kenya, launching a satellite.  He was on his way back to MIT, and Munich was his layover stop.  We quickly agreed to continue to a dinner together in a nearby restaurant.  As dinner progressed, there was the question – where is the Hofbräuhaus, a well-known brewery and beer hall.  I was pretty jet-lagged and would have been OK with going back to the hotel to get some sleep.  But Joan and Joe felt we had to do the Hofbräuhaus, and what the heck, it’s one of the checklist items to do in Munich.

We found a table with 3 seats, across from a man and woman who looked like they had been definitely enjoying the ambiance and the beer.  As we sat down, I said “grüß Gott”, a Bavarian hello, to the couple, with no real response.  Joe, Joan, and I sat down and started talking about Boston.  Joan was a native of Boston, and Joe and I certainly had good impressions and lots of favorite things about the city.

At some point, Joe mentioned the Combat Zone, a once seedy and dangerous part of Boston.  And at that point, the man across the table chimed in with “Combat Zone!  Are you folks from Boston?”, done with something of a British accent.  It turns out that Dick had just completed an executive MBA program at the Sloan School of MIT.  He was on his way back home to South Africa, where he was executive director of a major construction company.  His wife Sheila had come up to Munich to meet him and spend some time in Southern Germany. 

Dick and Sheila Glanville were absolutely a delight, and adventurous.  Before the evening was out Dick was on the podium in front of the oompah band, baton in hand, directing vigorously as they played a polka.

Dick and Sheila, Joan and I also realized that we had very similar plans for the next few days.  And the plan was hatched.  We joined up to explore in southern Bavaria.  We went to the Zugspitze, highest mountain in Germany; to Oberammergau, an incredibly charming town nearby; Linderhof, one of mad Ludwig’s palaces, and eventually to Schloss Neuschwanstein, Ludwig’s best-known castle.

One of the very interesting parts of the time together was the comparison of cultures.  Apartheid was still very much entrenched in South Africa.  Dick would comment on his reaction in seeing white laborers on a road crew, for example, and describe how different that was from his home country situation.  We had those discussions without judgment, yet I felt that Dick sensed the forces at work that would eventually bring change to South Africa.  It was not a case of clinging to the past, yet certainly there was a sense of anxiety about what the future would eventually mean.

We exchanged Christmas cards with Dick and Sheila for a few years afterward, though eventually lost touch.  The memory remains a vivid and fond one.