Doris Day

Que sera.

The older ones amongst us will remember her before she became a virgin.

Dr Crippen I love your first post
I also loved calamity Jane


I remember going to Douglas in the isle of man in the 70s with my four mates riding on one of the horse drawn trams  along the promenade with us all singing the deadward stage is heading right over the plains

Just one child, a son, Terry Melcher, who died in 2004.

Crip and DWD missing And still no Show from Slippy

When my dad was 18, and fled Ukraine after the Russian invasion in 1939, he was assigned by the Germans to work in a Czechoslovakian coal mine. Knowing he wouldn't survive that, he added two years to his age and joined the Wehrmacht instead.

All right, it meant he later had to fight his way out of Stalingrad, spend two years fighting in the Carpathians after deserting, and another year fighting Tito's communists after being captured and rejoining the German armed forces. But it did mean he got to retire two years early, so it was all worth it in the end.

Even Slough must have seemed like paradise after Stalingrad.

Well, it still had a dog track in those days, which Stalingrad didn't.

He died in 2006. Not many stories. His English was awful for one thing. A lot of it I only pieced together after he'd died, when the grandson of his sister tracked me down, and we began corresponding.

He did actually try to register his real birth date (22/6/1921) when he was moved to Scotland as a PoW in 1947. The trouble was, the only document he had was the German one stating his date of birth as 2/2/1919, so he was stuck with it. At that time neither he nor the British officers processing the thousand or so Ukrainians in German uniform had any idea what the future held, so nobody considered the future retirement implications.

He chose 2/2/1919 as it was easy to remember. But note the date of his real birthday - 22 June. It meant that he celebrated his 20th birthday going over the top on day 1 of Barbarossa.

My mother spent hers sheltering from bombs while working in a sorting office in Wolverhampton. I spent mine with my mate Interrailing through Paris.

We really are the most fortunate generation ever to walk the Earth. Probably the first fortunate one ever.

Yes. A bus ride actually - we lived on the other side of Slough. But that's where we spent Monday evenings. "Join the army and see the world."

My mother and I used to make fun of him, because it seemed that every time there was any sort of travel documentary on the box, he'd announce that he'd been there at some point. We assumed that he must have been making it up or exaggerating, but since gaining contact with his family, and with the help of online resources, you can see it was all true.

The part of Ukraine he came from was the area in the west around L'viv, known as Galicia, where his family had a farm. Until 1918 the region had been part of the Austro-Hungarian empire, and even modern L'viv has the look of Vienna about it. But of course the Austro-Hungarian empire ended up on the losing side in 1918, and the region was handed over to Poland.

It did mean that the Germans were seen as liberators in 1939, and it wasn't until after 1942 that it became apparent that there was never going to be any chance of an independent Ukrainian state under German plans for Europe. Hence my father's desertion and years in the mountains fighting Germans, Russians and Poles. Then the subsequent re-enlistment in the face of the Soviet advance.

One of the consequences of that background was that my father evidently spoke fluent German, but because he kept most of his adventures in a German uniform firmly under wraps, I only became aware of it very late on. Which was a right pain, because German happened to be the subject of my degree, and it would have been handy, to say the least, to have had the benefit of a German speaker in the household.

I had no inkling of his fluency until I spent the third year of my degree course teaching in W Germany. I was living very close to the border with E Germany, and when my parents came out to visit for a week towards the end of the year, my landlord drove us out to see the border on the final afternoon.

It was the most jarring thing you've ever seen in your life. Everyone knows the wall which divided Berlin, but this was on a far greater scale, and stretching for a thousand miles. Layer upon layer of fencing, barbed wire, minefields and tank traps, all with giant watchtowers and two armed guards peering through binoculars the whole time. And this in an area of complete rural tranquillity.

The western side had no agriculture there, as the soil on Lueneburg Heath is poor, and only sheep were farmed. But you could see a poor attempt at crop-growing on the Communist side. Some bureaucrat in Berlin had presumably decreed an increase in production, and when it failed, it would just be put down to sabotage, with the usual consequences.

Anyway, we could see a huddle of miserable buildings on the horizon, and my mother asked me to ask my landlord what they were.

"Das ist ein Kolkhoz," he replied. (A kolkhoz is the Russian abbreviation for a collective farm.)

"Da auch Kolkhoze?!" my dad suddenly chimed in. "Ach! Viel Arbeit, kein Essen!" (Collective farms there as well?! Oh. loads of work and nothing to eat!")

And then he went on conversing in German with a fluency that I've never been able to muster. And that was it. The one and only time he ever spoke the language.

Real name. Doris von Kappelhoff. Ohio. Car accident at age fifteen ended her dancing ambitions. She also was seriously ill as a young girl. She took up singing later. At age seventeen she married a psychopathic musician, this is her own description of him. 
Pick a bad boy?

Do wah Diddy08 Oct 19 19:33Joined: 24 Jul 06 | Topic/replies: 41,697 | Blogger: Do wah Diddy's blog
I wanted to live in a world with people like her .or one with people like snow white

Come back Do wah, you're missed!

probably correct, speaking German to a German about something random is one thing, having a discussion about how you came to speak German is another, I could not imagine living through that period, very few can relate. Let's hope WW3 does not kick off, always feels like it's around the corner.