I served in the Personnel and Finance Office from Sept 1964 – sometime in 1966 when I was sent TDY to the 18th F&AO in Frankfurt to help set up a new computerized payroll system that the Army was instituting.

Our officer was WO4 A. G. DeParis. He was quite a fellow, Old Army, very soldierly. He knew his business. I recall an event when we’d had a fire just outside the safe door that was the entrance to our office. (We were in the top floor of the I G Farben Building in a group of offices that was really a huge safe.) There were communications centers on either side of us. The skylight had exploded from the heat produced by the fire. Mr. DeParis was in his shirt sleeves. I’d never seen that. He had blood on his shirt and a bandage on his head. Apparently, when the skylight exploded, he had been under it and was cut by the shower of glass. It also seemed that Gen’l Prices’ secretary was in the midst of cleaning blood off of his uniform jacket…. which he put on as soon as was available to wear. He was a soldier who you could respect. A. G. was a lifer, but a man about his mission. I really like him a lot. 

S/Sgt Kunkle was a good man, too. He was our NCOIC.  He was a little “up tight” and a retread, as well.  But he saw the military as his career. He later was promoted to Warrant Officer and moved out for his own command. I remember him as being from PA somewhere, Berwick maybe. He was a good man.

I was just 21 years old when I got to Germany, a country kid from Southern NJ with an Assoc. of Arts in Accounting and Economics and a couple of credits from Penn Military College (Now Weidner College, Chester, Pa).  I’d joined up with the ASA for 4 years…. right count ‘em 4 years, with a promise of 4 years of service in Germany.  What a sales job the guy at the recruiting station did on me in Philly. Anyway, training at Ft Dix, NJ for basic and for personnel school and then off to Germany for a 42 month tour. The Vietnam War was heating up then. I was so lucky to have been able to stay right there in Germany enjoying the suds and the safety. And, the Army kept their word… I did manage to stay in Germany all that time.

I remember that one of our Commanding Officers was Major Thorpe…..Jim Thorpes son.  I have the pleasure of meeting him on his first day in the job.  He told us what it was like to have been Jim Thorpes son and then asked, or ordered us, to never ask again and that we were to tell the same story through our company which was really a battalion sized unit between HQ & Svc and the Comm Unit that was in the same billets with us.

It may be interesting to note that at least one other person, including me, did not remember that the building you refer to was called Kennedy Kaserne.  We referred to it as “The White House”. 

Some of those who worked in our office where:  Albert C. Meyers, Tony McMichael, Jim Rice, “Pike”, (I can not remember his name right now. He was a fellow from Detroit area and married a very nice girl who was a WAC. They went home; “Pike” went to college. I remember that he’d been awarded the Army Commendation Medal and because of it was able to get some scholarship money). There was a fellow named McFarland, who re-upped. And a Master Sgt. Wentworth who was finishing his career in the military.  He’d come through Frankfurt years earlier as a young soldier fighting in WW II. He had some interesting stories to tell. There was a big cowboy from Montana with a bad knee from playing college football who should not have been there because of his injury. I cannot remember his name. And a surfer from CA who rotated out soon after I arrived.  Jay Hurlbert was with us, too.  He was from Rochester NY, as I recall.  I can not remember the others. Maybe someone reading this will. 

There was a lot of time spent in Alt Sachsenhausen at the winestubbas and a place called Mustafa’s, and others.  Frankfurt was a really great city.  There was a lot to do. I enjoyed living there.