Born To Be a Newspaper Man

by Martin J. McGowan Jr.

Anniversary Trip to Europe

For our 25th wedding anniversary Betty and I took a trip to Europe. It was financed in an unusual manner. I had what I considered to be an efficient and trusted bookkeeper at the Appleton Press. So when I was in the legislature I trusted her to check the time cards and write the checks. All I had time to do on the weekends at home was to sign the checks and pay the bills.

After I sold the paper the new owner, Bill McGarry, mentioned that he was suspicious of the conduct of the bookkeeper. He said he noticed that she would come to the back room on press days to gather a bunch of papers to be sold over the counter. It was assumed that counter sale money went in a small box by the cash register. He was amazed, he said, that there was so little money in the coin box considering the number of counter copies that had been sold. McGarry suggested that I might want to check out some of her other work.

So I got some of the time cards for the period and began to add them up. They seemed to be all right but I wondered about the number of hours the bookkeeper had put on her card. It didn't seem that she could have been working those hours at the office. So I confronted her about it and she said she had added some hours for bookkeeping done at home. I charged her with padding her time, which she finally admitted. I said the extra hours added over a period of time came to about $2,000. She asked me not to tell her husband about it or it might break up their marriage. I said I wouldn't do that if she found some way to pay me back. She did that and we used it to pay for our trip to Europe.

We flew to New York and from there we flew on Sabena Belgian Airlines to Brussels. There we rented a car and set off for Bonn, Germany, our first stop. There we went to a restaurant for a meal. The menu was in German and we didn't know what it was. The waitress saw we couldn't communicate so she called a patron in the restaurant to come and explain the menu. By that way we placed our order.

Our son, Marty III, who was stationed in Turkey with the National Security Agency (NSA), came to join us. He guided us for the first week. He found rooms for us and did most of the driving.

We found a family whose daughter had been a pen pal with our son, Sean, who was studying German in school. The family put on a lunch for us and invited another daughter who had studied English in England to come home and do the translating. The parents did not know English and the pen pal was not certain enough of her English to be alone with us. They also showed us their yard and flowers. It was a pleasant visit.

We drove on south with brief stops in Austria and Switzerland, then back to Frankfort, where Marty III had arrived and returned to Turkey. Betty and I drove on and it was a joke that when I drove and Betty guided us by the map we ended up at a dead end in a farm field.

When Betty and I arrived at the border with Luxembourg we stopped and Betty went to check in at a border station. It took a while so I slammed the car door and went to see what was happening. When I shut the door, the car locked. It was a Sunday in the rain and I wondered how we would get out of that. The border official said to walk to the end of the main street where there was a mechanic who could open the car. So I walked to the end of the street in the rain and the mechanic drove me back and got the car opened again. We drove on to Brussels. There we caught a plane to London.

In London we obtained a room in a large, older hotel. The room was comfortable but Betty stayed in it for a while to recover from a cold she had caught. I went off to Buckingham Palace to see the Changing of the Guard. We also got a look at No. 10 Downing St., the home of the prime minister.

Then we took a short hop to Dublin. We drove south looking for a place to stay for the first night. We came to a place that was named the Royal Hibernian. It was a disaster. A young man in a dirty white jacket took our bags and led us in to a room that was not very clean. The next morning the meal was also questionable but we paid our bill and went on to Kinsale, a charming clean place, so nice we stayed an extra day and had good meals.

It was here that I forgot that cars drove on the left side of the road. One morning I started out from the hotel in our little Morris Minor and whiteout thinking about it took the right side of the road. I looked up and saw I was headed for a collision with a tractor. Fortunately, the tractor was moving slowly and I had time to correct the situation and move over to the left before me met head on.

From there we went along the south coast to Bantry Bay and then north to Shannon and finally across the country back to Dublin. The roads were narrow and had many turns. There were hazards from the horse drawn milk carts moving along the road.

We visited Phoenix park. I bought an Irish wool hat and we attended a theater, not the Abbey theater, which we had hoped to attend. On our way to Dublin we stopped at a tavern in the hills to try some Irish coffee. It was late in the season and they did not have all the whipped cream topping but we could say we had some authentic Irish coffee. Then we flew back to Brussels and returned home.

The trip ended in an unusual manner. We took a cab from the airport to a downtown hotel in New York City. This was during the 1968 presidential election when Hubert Humphrey was the Democratic candidate.

The cab driver started talking politics. He also expanded into critical comments about Humphrey. I responded in kind. When we arrived at the hotel we were getting rather loud about the merits and demerits of Humphrey. We ended up shouting at each other across the top of the cab. As a consequence, the cabbie did not receive a tip from me.

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