By Walter Wills, March 22, 2019 — Birgit was the most gorgeous woman I had ever seen. I sometimes hitchhiked all the way from Cornell to Wells College just to be with her. We had some fantastic dates… One of them being a huge jazz concert to see a famous band – Dizzy Gillespie. Birgit asked me why everyone was standing in the beginning of the show. Everyone was standing for the Star Spangled Banner, but she didn’t know the song.
We spent a long time apart when Birgit had to return to Sweden. I had to put at least 6 months into the army and was stationed in Aberdeen, Maryland on active duty. We wrote letters to each other every day and rarely talked on the phone – it was $15 for 3 minutes of conversation over the phone. This frankly just left me sad.
I decided to go to Sweden in May of 1959. I first flew from New York, to Copenhagen, and met up with Birgit. She was going to school right across the water in Lund. We toured Copenhagen, went to a couple of castles, and then took a ferry ride to Sweden where we stayed in her home. I had to sleep on the flour in Lund, in a tiny room, but everything was worth it for her.
The next day we took a train to Gothenburg, where we met Birgit’s parents and we took their car over to Woodpecker street, where I could stay for a year. We had an amazing Summer, driving to Onsala, where we stayed in the family’s summer home and did many fun activities such as swimming, taking boats to islands, and getting to know one another more and more everyday.
I eventually received a job in Sweden for technical engineering, and even studied as a graduate student there. Everyday at 3, we broke for coffee, and I would learn Swedish with my coworkers and fellow students. I asked a lot of questions, and would come home and ask Birgit what certain words and sentences meant. I eventually got a job offer at Chalmers to work in the chemistry department, and on June 18, 1960, Birgit and I got married at a church around the corner in a small church.
We had an amazing honeymoon, driving 4 days north in Sweden. We eventually arrived in a town called Kiruna (200 miles north of the Arctic circle). We went on trips everyday– celebrated midsummer around a maypole, took a boat trip to visit a Lap home and learn about Lapmen and women, climbed a mountain, and then one day took a train to Norway where we learned a lot of history of WW2.
In 1964, I graduated, and my mother passed away in the US, so I went home. I interviewed with a few companies and then eventually took a job in Morristown, NJ. I rented a home in Cedar Knolls which we eventually bought, and eventually Birgit joined me with our first daughter Ingrid, who was three and spoke fluent English and Swedish. We had many adventures following, but this was an extremely exciting time in my life and I cherish all of our memories.