I want to thank all of the people who came to Jackie McCandless's Memorial Mass, brought flowers, gave monetary donations, sent emails, brought food to our house and showed empathy and kindness to our family.
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She was my partner for almost forty-two years. We were married in Basel, Switzerland, in the spring of 1969.
I met Jackie quite by accident in Wiesbaden, Germany, in the summer of 1968. After taking a European discharge from the Air Force, I was working as a civilian contractor for a company that repaired pool tables at U.S. military installations in Germany and sold them sporting equipment for their recreation rooms.
The name of the company was ASAP Enterprises, founded by three ex GIs and a retired colonel.
More than one million military personnel and their dependents were in Germany in 1968, and the controversy over the Vietnam War was just beginning to heat up.
The four guys who started the company — forty years later their names escape me — had expanded too quickly. Now they were quarreling with each other over the management of the company. Since they were only communicating through their lawyers, they decided to hire me to run ASAP Enterprises. My first move was to close all but two of the offices, one in Wiesbaden and the other 132 miles away in Bitburg, a frontline NATO base during the Cold War.
My sister Nina, who is three years younger, flew to Ireland on a shoestring and decided to visit me in Germany. She stayed at a small pension where I found her after I had traveled back to Wiesbaden. We hadn't seen each other since I had left the U.S. in November 1964.
I bought steaks and she cooked them. She was out of money and decided to get a temporary job at the PX to earn enough money to visit Spain. We sat and talked until 2in the morning when I left for Bitburg. One of the owners of the company worked for Chrystler Military Sales there and rented a nice house on the outskirts of the city.
The next morning, the owner of the pension informed my sister she had to move because a man had been in her room after midnight.
“But that man was my brother,” my sister tried to explain.
The old hausfrau just glared. “I know that,” she said, “but the neighbors don’t.”
So while I was in Bitburg, 132 miles away my sister was being tossed out of her pension. She went to the PX at the air base to apply for work, and it was there she met Jackie.
Ass a member of the Peace Corps, Jackie had spent two years in Morocco and then toured through Europe. ,
Enterprisingly answering an ad by Max Factor, she was trained as a makeup artist. At this time, she was crisscrossing Germany, going from one military PX to another ,showing U.S. Army and Air Force wives how to apply 57 different products on their faces so they could look beautiful when their husbands came home.
Jackie had an apartment in Wiesbaden. But since she was only home a couple of days a month, she invited Nina to stay with her. When I returned to Wiesbaden, Nina introduced me to the lady who would be my wife for forty-one years.
Going through the trunks and drawers that belonged to my wife has brought back a flood of memories.
Last night, in a desk she had in the living room, I found a little tin cup that had been painted over with flowers. Inscribed on the lid were the words
She
That is of a
Merry heart
Hath a
Continual feast.
That was Jackie McCandless.
