Doctor Reinhold H.

During our first visit to Germany, in 1970, we drove to Euskirchen to visit Cousin Josef and his family. Cousin Josef worked for the Renault automobile company, and his son Reinhold was studying to be a dentist.

In 1970, daughter Linda and her friend Linda had not been too sure they wanted to spend a few days with relatives. But once they met Reinhold, Klaus, and Seppel, it’s possible they would have spent their whole vacation with those relatives.

We needed to get the VW Camper on a ship to Los Angeles, so Reinhold volunteered to drive the camper to Hamburg. We arrived at the Frankfurt airport in plenty of time, the Lindas kissed Reinhold good-by, and we flew home. Reinhold arrived in Hamburg about an hour before the ship was to leave, so the VW was loaded immediately, with all the dirt and bugs from the trip still covering the front.

When we visited in 1979, Reinhold needed to complete only one test to become an MD. If we remembered right, when we first met, he had intended to become a dentist. In 1983, Reinhold took me to his club for a tennis match. Can you imagine, the tennis club in Bonn has no water fountain? They drink Coke, beer, and it rains a lot, but no drinking fountain. Reinhold says if he just “looks” at the water in Rome, he gets sick, and he can’t imagine that we drink out of street fountains in Rome and Prague, and have no problem.

When we visited in 1988, Reinhold was associated with the hospital in Siegburg, Germany. He is a specialist in kidney dialysis, and took us to the hospital to see the many people being treated by those machines.

In 1995, I had a biopsy (of a funny looking spot on my back) taken at a hospital in France. To make sure the results would be understood, we made arrangements for Prof. Ernest Heid, at the hospital in Strasbourg, to FAX the results to Reinhold. We telephoned him from Dresden to get the diagnosis. (Results were OK.)

Some doctors still make house calls. When Emmy suffered small strokes in 2000, here comes Reinhold, direct from Bonn, Germany. He observed her for several days, then wrote a report to her doctors. We might add that while he was a visiting doctor, in his medical kit there was a complete set of golf clubs, so he could also analyze several golf courses nearby.