International House Berkeley

98 with him because they always tried to pair a foreigner with an American, which was very nice, I think. It worked out quite well. My roommate's name was Andy Yonchick — actually he was of Yugoslavian extraction. I tried to trace him for a long time. He died, I finally found out. Whom did I know? I had Lottie, and relied on her for friendships. Lottie had quite a few American friends and many European ones. The friendships were strengthened by the language tables, which were famous at the time. There were many different languages spoken at these tables, but Lottie studied languages, and she knew seven languages; she majored in Romance languages. The tables were not assigned. There was a permanent French table, and maybe a Spanish table. Lottie had friends from all over the world – I still do. I have friends from Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Denmark, and Sweden. I just got an e-mail from a friend in Sweden with whom I must arrange a visit – Mopsen and Borje Ohlsen. Of course, I knew Bob Brewer and Ingrid Borland, Maideh Mazda, Wendell Lipscomb, Charlie Clapp, and Rafael Rodriguez. I used to love to listen to people like Rafael sing; my voice was so bad, I didn't dare to join in. Through the years, we stayed in touch with quite a few people. Lottie was a great correspondent. And she wrote letters, just simple letters. She kept up. It really was a worldwide correspondence. I capitalized on that, so did my children, when they traveled around the world. Even my Czech friends are from I-House. The father studied here, and now his daughter is a friend of my daughter. I keep in touch with Julia [Fraser], of course. Then there was also Helen Monfries; she was a British girl. We became extremely good friends when we were in I-House. We met when all the foreign students were invited to a famous family for tea. Each one of us had to get up and say something about ourselves. I got up and said that I was from Czechoslovakia, and that I had been in the Air Force, and that I tried to reach my parents in America, and I couldn't because there was no place on the boat, so I got stuck in England. And Helen Monfries got up and said, "What do you mean stuck in England?" Anyway, at that point we became extremely good friends. And of course Peggy Post is also one of my lovely friends. She was at the information desk at I-House. After I-House I started working in 1952, but Lottie was still living at the I-House in 1953 when we got married. We had our wedding on July 1, 1953; we had it in my parent's home in San Francisco. For our honeymoon, we drove in my stick-shift car, which I brought into the marriage, to I-House, and had a party for the young kids at the Home Room. We had only one grownup there — the chairman of the French Department. He had to be invited, but that Home Room was full. My parents were not invited; to their dying day, they didn't know anything about this party. I think my mother would have been offended. But we needed young kids around us, and so from then on we went to I-House quite often. It is, after all, just down the hill. We went to just about every dance, every formal they had. Well, I try to go to just about every function that I know about.

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