Time to bed this thread down and bring it up to the present.
I was IMU IC through the first year or so of its existence - probably the busiest time I had was Portland when DM decided that I would have to OK all CSWs to leave from the protest.
In october 1985 I was busted and started working in the Div 6 with Deac Finn setting up events, something I hated. I screwed up the set ups for Toronto and got RPFed - and was happy to go. I was twinned with Mike Kehrli, truly one of my greatest friends and by and large we did OK.
I was out of the RPF Christmas 1986 and found myself further out of favor by refusing to reg a Flag public at 2 in the morning on a Thursday. IN January I was told that my wife and I were being sent to the UK to be the UK Tour as our younger son could not come to the Freewinds. We arrived in the UK late January 87.
It was a miserable time, absolutely miserable. By August Nancy and I had decided we had to leave the SO. We went to see the CO CMO there - Karen Mathieson. She talked with Janet Light and they asked if moving back to Scandinavia might be better. So we decided to try that. Things got much better, Se3anwas back at school in Aalborg - and loving it. I was based back at AOSH EU and liking that and we were back in Copenhagen the city that my wife and I love the best in the world.
But there was something rotten in the state of Denmark ( I have always wanted to slip that quote in).
I was amazed to find - as I travelled around the orgs that they were half the size (in most cases) they had been in 1981. Even Stockholm and DKD were puny. The field was apathetic and not functioning. I started doing FSM rallies and workshops to try and get new people coming into the orgs and that was fairly successful but, of course, that was not regging money for the IAS.
Peculiarly Spain also fell under the control of the Scandinavian Tour. We decided to have a huge IAS even down there, Heber would be there, Janet Light and it would be a big deal.
It certainly was - we were sitting down at lunch on the first day when the federales rolled in and all of the foreigners and some of the locals - about 80 of us , ended up in the hoosegow. Heber was the main focus of the attention - and yeah I know he has come in for some shit on here and in other forums but I can tell you that in that jail in Madrid the man was marvellous. He was calm, quiet and steadfast. Sad that his courage was wasted on such a miserable cause.
Deac Finn and I were in one cell, and deac spent most of the time teaching me the Notre Dame fight song and the history of Notre Dame football. he did a great job because I still an Irish Football fan to this day.
At one point Deac and I got a little loud and when the guard told us to quieten down we got a little "defiant" which resulted in both of us being dragged to other cells (none too gently).
We all got questioned by some magistrate - for my questioning there was no translator into english so we had to make do in French.
After two days some of us were transferred to a an extradition center where we waited for two or three days along with a lot of south americans until we were suddenly dumped outside the door of the facility and had to take a taxi to the airport.
Champagne on the plane back..
When we got back to Scandinavia I started getting more info on what had happened to the field there - basically flag regges and fsms had been persuading people to take out huge (and I mean huge) loans for the L's "after all when you get done with the L's you'll have no problem paying off this paltry loan" they cosigned each others loans, lied about their income and so on. By the time we got there the Poniz scheme was collapsing and some of the people involved were losing their jobs and some were facing jail time.
I refused to reg people. I falsified the income stat and just worked on trying to get FSMs to get new people in. Then I wrote it all up to DM and sent it in via telex.
And got declared - again. 11 in the evening Nancy and I were out on the street - again. I had borrowed three hundred swedish kronor from an old friend who happened to be in the Nordland that night so N ancy and I could find a hotel.
2nd time around. Jesus H Christ you would think I would learn. But nooooo.
After a couple of days we had no money, nowhere to stay, no friends no family. Sean was away at school so he was OK, we had left Chris in the SO under the care of some friends. We ended up spending one night in a homeless shelter. It was an awful time.
We got tickets to go up and visit Sean (something parents were entitled to do under the Danish system) and we flew to Aalborg and stayed i a visitors cottage. The school offered to help us out for a couple of weeks and we stayed up there, called my wife's family in the US and borrowed a couple of hundred dollars from her sisters and gradually took out time to relax and to stop worrying.
We went back to Copenhagen, got jobs with SAS at one of the hotels and just started out on trying to get by.
WE eventually decided to go back to the US and we arrived in Denver on October 1st 1990. And now we live out in the country on the eastern plains.
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