Ray Morgan in Berlin 1962

     In June 1962 Dad left Kansas City for a three-week tour of Western Europe sponsored by the Defense Department. The following is the article he wrote about his visit to Berlin. The Russians had begun building the Berlin wall in August 1961.

     On a bookcase at home, there is a triangular piece of dirty, grey concrete.  It has special significance because it is a piece of the crumbling East Berlin wall which I pulled loose one bright, sunny Sunday afternoon and stuck in my pocket under watchful Communist eyes.     With a group of West Berlin police with carbines slung over their shoulders, I and some other correspondents walked up where the wall was built along the famed Potadammerplatz and peered over the wall from an elevated wooden platform.
      At 100 yards or so away, a group of East Berlin communist troops, with sub machine guns over their shoulders, watched us intently through binoculars.  They walked several yards towards us at one point but we stayed where we were despite the fact the wall is in Soviet zone here.
     I slipped the crumbling piece of mortar between the thin concrete blocks out of the wall and dropped it in my pocket.  We watched a short time later as the communist soldiers moved closer and then we departed in waiting cars.
      Later, about 10:30 that night, John Pinkerman, news editor of the San Diego Union. And I and some others were sitting in the Berlin Hilton.
      Pinkerman, who felt a strange fascination for the wall that grips so many West Berlin visitors, wanted to tour the wall in a taxicab as he had done several nights before that.  He and I went to the brightly lighted entrance to the hotel where shiny motorcars disgorged well-dressed visitors and German cabs were lined up just as in the United States.
      We found an English-speaking driver whom Pinkerman had used on his previous trip and off we went over to Edwardstrasse and down toward the famed Brandenburg gate.  We flashed our official identification and the West Berlin policemen waved us through the barbed wire.
       Along the brightly-lighted stretch of pavement the cab driver wheeled the cab.  He joked about driving through the gate but his laugh was somewhat nervous.  It was an eerie kind of scene in the darkness, an eeriness hard to define.
      On the left, a group of British soldiers stood in front of a barbed wire encircling the brightly-lighted war memorial. Two Soviet soldiers walking along the Soviet memorial plaza stopped and watched the cab moving slowly.
       Atop the Brandenburg gate we could see two East Berlin police in an observation post looking at us with ever-present binoculars.  We got out and chatted with the West Berlin Police a minute or two while they watched.
       We drove back out of the barbed wire area and sped along toward Checkpoint Charley, the barricade where Americans are permitted to enter East Berlin.  The cab had to be parked a half a block away from the Communist border.
       The street was brightly lighted as we walked down the white painted line which marks the division between freedom and totalitarianism.  Helmeted American military police stood talking with the West Berlin police and a burly East Berliner stood almost on the line with his submachine gun
       The cab driver walked along with us until we got a few feet from their line.  He wanted to know when the wall was going to be kicked down.  Pinkerman almost got in a fight when a British girl came up, giggling, with her escort and said the Allies would never defend Berlin.
       I mention these things only because they tend to point up the almost unreal quality in the late evening hours when the floodlights shatter the darkness of this strange world created by a sagging line of concrete blocks topped by barbed wire and broken glass.

Brandenburg Gate Postcard

Potadammerplatz 

     It is a situation Americans find difficult to comprehend.  It is when there is no fighting war is actually in progress between the adversaries and yet two sides, dedicated to two ways of life, stand on either side of a thin line with guns and watch each other.

These are a few of the postcards that he brought home with him and then lastly is a bit of the home movie he took in Berlin.