________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
we could then try to address, justly, the image impact of Americans living in the German
populace.
There were things like, for example, when I arrived we were operating a Sunday stock car
race out at the trash dump on the other side of the airfield. This was very obtrusive to the
Germans because the dust clouds and the noise on a Sunday afternoon were abhorrent to
them. The noise was very annoying. The roar, roar, roar as twelve to fourteen cars roared
around a tight circle and the cloud of red dust that rose--you could see it for miles--drifted
over and settled in their homes. The mayor brought that issue to me, with petitions. So, I
would have to deal with that kind of issue, as well.
There was a continuum of things that had to be addressed. Another was that I sat on the
school board for all the military schools along with the other community commanders. I tried
to be personally present in and about the school, to be helpful. We had community budget
meetings, and we had community commander meetings of the greater community. I mean,
there were all kinds of things that any mayor or community manager would get involved in.
So, which ones surfaced to me? Most of them. The contact with the Landrat or with the
mayor was always me, not the deputy--because that's who they wanted to talk to. I wouldn't
start the process of the discipline problems--we'd try to work them down at a lower
command level and save me to be the review authority and final determinant so those things
didn't have to go up to VII Corps commander. On those things I would become involved
only at the threshold level where they passed somebody else's authority.
Q:
What about facilities? By this time in the late '70s, I know, there were a lot of problems with
the state of the facilities in Germany, particularly barracks and family housing. A lot of
problems with quality and maintenance. Were those beginning to be addressed?
A:
Well, some of the programs were already started, such as the Modernization of U.S. Facilities
Program to fix barracks. That was ongoing and might have reached this community or that,
even my community, one set of barracks but not yet another. We would have some
undergoing the change because we couldn't do all of them at once. So, that was starting to be
taken care of.
The housing areas had had some general upgrades, but they weren't in the best of shape.
There was not a great deal of funding available. We were coming out of the Vietnam War
and, like everything, we all wanted certain things to make the community whole.
One of the problems in my large community was having a place where I could bring people
in to meet, a community meeting, so to speak. Then, when I'd been there four or five months,
the gym and auditorium at the elementary school burned down, so we lost that large meeting
facility. We wanted to get volunteers to contribute their time and draw together a community
feeling but we really were inhibited by limited space. How can you bring people together,
talk to them together, develop activities that get them all involved during long winter months,
with so little available inside space?
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