A Tribute to My Father

Born on July 20, 1937, as the youngest of three children, my father spent his early childhood years in Reichenbach/Görlitz, Germany, where his parents operated a residential school for children with special needs. After fleeing, together with the school's 100 students, from the approaching front lines during the last months of World War II, his family moved around to various places in Austria and Germany between 1945 and 1948. They finally settled in Delmenhorst in northern Germany, where my father attended secondary school and developed his lifelong interests in classical music, track and field, and mathematics. He took up the piano at age 15, nine years after his first musical instrument, a violin, and any dreams of playing it, had been crushed when one of his sisters plopped herself into the chair where my father had left the instrument after trying it out for the first time. Though not much of an athlete himself, he took to memorizing the track and field performances of both his classmates and the professional athletes of the time. He thus earned himself the honor of being designated "best theoretical athlete" by his peers at their high school graduation in 1957.