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Over Coffee
By Penny Fletcher
As a writer, I’ve found that very few words are written in stone. No matter who you are, or how much experience you’ve got, a good editor can usually make a piece better because I don’t think anybody is objective enough to do a good final edit of their own work.
In other words, I’ve heard the old expression, “well, it certainly isn’t chiseled in stone” more than once since starting in this business.
Last week however, I found some very interesting words written on stone. While in someone’s home I had never been in before (on business totally unrelated to this column) I spotted some rocks with writing on them placed on book shelves and the reporter in me just had to take a closer look.
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| Jerry Foppe of Sun City Center shows some of his favorite pieces collected from trips around the world during his Air Force and Westinghouse careers. Among those shown are a piece of rock from Hitler’s garage; a rock chip from a road built by the ancient Roman Empire; a Moslem Rosary from the Middle East; a piece of a German bunker captured during World War II at Normandy Beach; a piece of broken, ancient pottery from El Mataria, Egypt (the place Jesus, Joseph and Mary went during their Biblical “flight into Egypt”); a piece of a 5,000-year-old pyramid, and carved religious figures from Oberammergau, Germany, home of the annual world-famous Passion Play.
Penny Fletcher Photo |
Words like “Hitler’s Garage” and “Roman Road” were just too fascinating not to question.
If a writer ever says “I’d sure like to do a story about that” without being asked, it usually means you’ll get a call pretty quickly. In this case, I think I made it the very next day.
Jerry Foppe of Sun City Center picked up American Indian arrowheads and pieces of pottery – even tomahawks – as a child in Illinois. Then, during his two careers while traveling extensively overseas, he began to collect artifacts seriously; but not the kind found in curio shops, or in an archeologist’s dig.
No, Jerry’s collection is eclectic, hand-picked, based on things that interest him at the time.
In his first career, as an officer in the Air Force, he served in Germany for seven years working with NATO as commander of a forward air control post and director of operations of the 601st Tactical Air Control Wing and was responsible for the operations and training of 15 U.S. radar units in Germany. In short: his specialties were radar and communications, and because of this position, he was able to travel all over Europe. After retiring from the Air Force, he took his communications skills to Westinghouse Electric Corporation and continued to travel. By then, his son and daughter were grown and he and his wife, Jane, a teacher of children with autism, who is currently employed at Riverview High School, returned to many of the places he visited years before- collecting items of interest along the way.
“While stationed in Germany I just started picking things up,” he said. “I picked up a piece from the German bunker at High Point at Normandy Beach (in France) where they were shooting down at our soldiers. Rangers finally scaled up the cliffs and took it (the bunker).”
Now, a piece of that bunker rests on Jerry’s book shelf next to a rock from an ancient Roman-built road, a rock from the rubble of Hitler’s garage; a Moslem rosary from the Middle East; a piece of broken, ancient pottery from El Mataria, Egypt (the place Jesus, Joseph and Mary went during their Biblical “flight into Egypt”); a piece of a 5,000-year-old pyramid, and carved religious figures from Oberammergau, Germany, home of the annual world-famous Passion Play.
“This rock is from the very first pyramid,” Jerry told me as I stared at it, imagining the thousands of slaves working with leathered hands that each pyramid effort took. “The people over there tell a story that a designer stumbled on the pyramid process by accident. They buried bodies and put rocks on them to keep the animals from bothering them and then piled on more rocks. That gave this person – I can’t even remember his name– the idea to keep layering the rocks. After that, the great pyramids were built.”
Another story is told at the site of Adolph Hitler’s former mountainside home.
“They (forces that occupied after the war) had to destroy it because the Neo Nazis were using it like a shrine,” Jerry said. “But the garage was built into the mountain, so part of it remains.” While there, he just reached down and picked up a rock that had fallen from a wall. Now, that rock is labeled, like the one he obtained from another famous site taken by the Allies, the Eagles Nest.
But Jerry didn’t stop with rocks and rosaries.
On one wall he has a framed page from an ancient book hand-drawn by monks in Spain.
“I just happened to be in Barcelona when this guy was cutting pages out of it and selling them one by one,” Jerry said. “He was arrested pretty quickly and the book was put in a museum.”
That kind of thing couldn’t still happen today, he said. But in the early 1970s, security wasn’t as tight.
Next to the Latin calligraphy hangs a brass rubbing of Sir William DelAudley, an English knight from Horsheath in Cambridgeshire, England, who died in 1365. “This was done by rubbing over the figure on the top of his tomb,” Jerry told me. “The symbolism of him standing on a lion is said to mean he fought in the Crusades.”
Somehow, while also surrounded by everyday household items, I felt as though we had stepped through a trap door into the world’s long-forgotten past.
Jerry doesn’t do work overseas anymore. He now works from home, part-time as a financial advisor for Calton & Associates, and is the former secretary and still active member of the Board of Directors of the International Association of Financial Planning. The 68-year-old retired Major is also the past president of the Sun City Center Chapter of MOAA, a military officers association; on its board of directors; and serves as the 2nd vice commander of the Military Order of the World Wars.
“My job with those organizations is to interface with legislative affairs on a state-wide and national basis to keep our local chapters up on what’s going on that can affect them,” he said.
But he and his family still take time to travel. Just recently, he and Jane and their daughter Jennifer Lewis, her husband and their two grandchildren, went back to Europe so Jennifer could revisit the places she remembered seeing as a child.
Not liking the usual tour-guide stops, among other things the family visited a salt mine in Austria and the castle where the Council of Trent was held; drove across Italy, stopping at the Cathedral of St. Anthony; stayed in hotel converted from the 17th Century Villa Tacci; and in a 14th Century castle – part of which was renovated in the 1950s to have water and electricity, yet still with ramparts and a large moat, and no elevators despite a long upward climb.
No new rocks appeared on the book shelves, however. After all, most places don’t allow you to do that kind of thing anymore.
Being as this column is called Over Coffee, when I was invited back, I was told that Jerry would have the coffee on. Somehow though, between a story about George Clooney’s villa in Bellagio near Lake Como and a night spent in a monastery, I forgot all about it.
**Perhaps you have something you’d like to share. Or maybe you’d rather tell the community about your favorite charity or cause: or sound off about something you think needs change. That’s what “Over Coffee” is about. It really doesn’t matter whether we actually drink any coffee or not (although I probably will). It’s what you have to say that’s important. E-mail me any time and suggest a meeting place. No matter what’s going on, I’m usually available to share just one more cup. Or maybe you’d like to tune into the new radio show I’m hosting, “The Uncensored Reporter.” It’s available across the country on both AM and FM radio but so far I haven’t found out the call numbers for our area so I just direct everyone to www.themicroeffect.com on their computers Tuesdays and Thursdays from 3-to-4 p.m. It’s a call-in show so maybe you’ve got some ideas or comments you’d like to share on the air. Just click on “Listen Live” and give it a whirl.
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