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Bruno’s

Here in Jefferson a few months ago, a group of high school kids got busted for underage drinking. They had quietly gathered at some secluded spot to toss back a few, when suddenly, cops were everywhere.

Some of the young merry-makers bolted into the woods and escaped, but most stayed to face the music. They were taken to the station and booked, and their parents were summoned to collect them.

Ultimately, the teens went to court, and their names and faces appeared in the local newspaper. They suffered varying degrees of humiliation, but were not severely punished.

As the drama unfolded, the local citizens separated into two camps. One side favored harsh punishment to teach the little villains a lesson. The other side dismissed it as harmless youthful high-jinks — something everyone did in their youth.

I suppose both sides were right. And the story certainly is nothing new. Teenagers have been scheming to obtain alcohol since alcohol was invented.

Which leads me to the prominent role that beer — premium-quality, high-octane German beer — played in my life at that age.

I was raised a Military Brat, the dependent kid of an Air Force officer. Over the years, we followed Dad on assignments around the United States, as well as to Japan, France, and Germany. It was a pretty cool way to grow up.

I attended high school on an U.S. Army base in Stuttgart, Germany. My alma mater, SHS, was a typical American high school, except for the location.

The location factor made for some interesting dynamics. I mean that from the standpoint of American teens living in Germany and having easy access to alcohol.

When I lived in Stuttgart, the situation was this: we kids lived inside a walled compound and were allowed to wander unsupervised around the base. As aspiring adults, we were afforded an appropriate degree of latitude. That also applied when we went off-base.

In our world, “off-base” consisted of three wholly different experiences. One was our various organized trips — group outings to sporting events, the zoo, the museum, the municipal swimming pool. We usually went by bus and were well chaperoned.

The second was family trips, such as vacations and shopping excursions with our parents.

The third was our below-the-radar trips — the quiet, illicit visits we teens made, usually in small groups on a Saturday night, to the local gasthauses and biergartens.

For us, sneaking off to a bar was ridiculously easy.

For one thing, American families lived on half a dozen military installations scattered around Stuttgart. The Army post where I lived, Patch Barracks, was 20 miles from our high school in the Pattonville housing project. Cross-town trips were routine.

For another thing, we were living in a non-English-speaking country where most of the population wanted us gone and avoided us. Had we been back in the U.S., the surrounding community would have been our home town, where people knew us. Frequenting the local bars? Probably not in the cards.

If a legal drinking age existed in Germany in those days, it didn’t seem to apply to us. If we chose the right bars, we and our money were perfectly welcome in the establishment. And we learned quickly how to choose the right bars.

In reality, many of the local gasthauses were off-limits. Some were frequented by locals who hated Americans. Others were operated by locals who hated Americans. Some bars were already taken — the turf of U.S. enlisted men who had no intention of sharing them with bratty American teens.

So, we worked within the system, and we found the watering holes that were appropriate and satisfactory for us.

To be clear, my friends and I carefully avoided trouble, and we did not sneak out constantly to go drinking. An individual kid managed to pull it off, say, once every month or two.

In total, during the three years we lived in Germany, I went bar-hopping about a dozen times. In truth, I never visited the same gasthaus more than a time or two. Frankly, most of the places have faded from memory.

But I still vividly remember one of them. It was called Bruno’s, and we could see it from the windows of our high school.

Bruno’s was located beyond the baseball fields at SHS, on the other side of a hedgerow, past a high fence topped with barbed wire, inside a massive Czechoslovakian refugee camp.

The refugee camp was there because of the Cold War, which burned hot in those days. West Germany had to accommodate a steady influx of people fleeing from behind the Iron Curtain.

Such camps, I later learned, were called DP camps — for “displaced persons.” Most had been built by the Nazis to house Jewish, Polish, and Czech slave laborers. After the war, they were converted to refugee camps.

Naturally, a sizable refugee community required services and amenities. These refugees being from Czechoslovakia — the country where Pilsner was invented and beer is called “liquid bread” — one of those amenities was a proper gasthaus for the refugees.

Bruno’s was that establishment.

My night at Bruno’s happened in the fall, during “Fasching,” the German period of celebration and revelry that precedes Lent.

A few of us were spending the weekend with friends at Pattonville. One of them knew about Bruno’s and had a Czech friend who offered to take us there.

That Saturday night, we went to the main gate of the refugee camp. We were met by a young man in his early 20s who vouched for us to the guards. The gate was opened. We proceeded to Bruno’s, where the residents were observing Fasching with gusto.

Bruno’s was a joyous place. The residents of the camp being Czechs, not Germans, they loved Americans. They loved everybody. They had escaped communism, and the future seemed bright.

The Czechs at Bruno’s were a delight to be around, and they welcomed us enthusiastically. Music played, beer flowed. People danced. The air was thick with laughter and cigarette smoke.

At some point, we were given brightly-colored party hats. Mine was a cardboard fez, metallic silver in color, with a yellow crescent stapled to the front and a dangling yellow tassel. Whether the fez was symbolic of something or merely festive, I neither knew nor cared.

The fez looked like this, only silver and yellow.

After a terrific evening of beer and merriment, we said our farewells and stumbled back to Pattonville. No trouble, no unpleasantness, no complications, no regrets.

When I got home, my parents asked where I got the fez. Mom zinged me by calling it “silly-looking.”

Personally, I thought “garish” or “tacky” would be more accurate. But I told them the literal truth: we went to a party where everyone got a hat.

For years, that fez was one of my most treasured souvenirs. For the rest of our tour in Europe, it sat on the dresser in my bedroom.

When I went away to college, the fez went with me. It was one of the decorations in my dorm room, along with some beer coasters from Stuttgart and my favorite pencil caddy, a souvenir beer stein from the Hofbräuhaus in Munich.

Naturally, after I got married, the fez was relegated to a souvenir box. I didn’t think about it for a long time. Then one day, after we moved to Ft. Lauderdale, I went looking for it. The little thing was gone. Nowhere to be found. I was deeply saddened.

Mind you, I’m not implying in any way whatsoever that my ex-wife was responsible.

The  last time I saw good old SHS was at graduation in June 1960. By the end of the month, we were on our way back to the U.S. and Dad’s new assignment in Atlanta.

By September, I was a freshman at the University of Georgia, living in Athens. For the first time in my 17 years, I was on my own.

More about that in Part 2.