Contact with the Johnsons

Retha asked whether I still have contact with the Johnsons.

Yes, I am very privileged to have had contact with them through these 40 years. My brother visited them the year after I left and he was treated like a king by them. A few years later, my parents visited them - and my mother came home with lovely salad recipes that we still make. Thelwyn took part in karate world championships in the U.S. and she and a friend flew across the U.S. to visit them. They had a great time. Jan visited them a year later - a detour after a business trip in Atlanta.

I had always dreamed of visiting again, but Jan and I only managed to visit them again in 2005. We had a splendid time. Ellen took us to Yellowstone National Park where Anne worked at the time. (She has since retired.) We had also gone there when I in my A.F.S. year. It's an unreal place and not to be missed. When I was in primary school we once watched a movie about Yellowstone and cowboys and afterwards my friends and I played cowboys and dreamed about Yellowstone - Actually being there - of all the wonderful places in the U.S. - was a dream come true!

Reesie organised a reunion in the Conrad mansion and it was a great afternoon with lots of "Do you remember" and "What happened to so and so.." The Conrad mansion was the residence of the founder of Kalispell and built in 1895. It is a beautiful Victorian House and right across the Johnson residence.



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Mother, Anne, Reesie, Dad, Me, Ellen and Jan on the front porch of the Johnson residence - an old brick house with a flatroof - unusual for Montana.

Steve Sutherland who had taught me to snowski in my A.F.S. year took us river rafting in the Glacier National Park and Ellen, Jan and I hiked on Big Mountain - we went up with the ski lift and hiked down. It was early spring and there was still snow on the mountain, but Ellen marched right through it while Jan and I slip slided behind her.... I had forgotten how tricky it is to walk on icy snow. (It had been one of the hardest things for me to learn in my AFS year: how to walk on ice to school and balance a stack of books and files on an open arm. There is something to be said for our school cases!)

Dad died in 2006 and we were so glad that we were able to visit him, before his death. Mother is now 90. We were there for her 86th birthday and that was special for us too.

All the Johnsons have been here on different occassions to visit. Ellen came in 1977. She was single then. Jan and I were married but still childless. We camped in two tiny tents in the Kruger Park and there were lions just outside the 4 foot high Marula camp that night! Anne and Reesie came in 1984 - right in the school holidays. We couldn't get rondawel space in any of the Kruger Park camps, so we bought a caravan.. a tiny little heavy Jurgen "Centurion tank". (Our name for the model.) I don't think they slept too comfortably! (Sorry about that!) Mother and Dad came in 1985 and spoilt us rotten. Ellen and husband Dan and their lovely sons came in 2007. It was soooo good to see them. They are part of the reason why this blog is in English and not in Afrikaans.

All the Johnsons have been so good to us through the years and we can never thank them enough.

Remembering a special day - 40 years ago!

Today I fondly remember this special day - exactly 40 years ago: The day I finally met the Johnsons - the family who volunteered to have an American Field Service exchange student... and then got me!

I landed at Kalispell, Montana at 15:00. I was very excited and nervous. As the plane landed, my Basotho hat rolled down the aisle and when I picked it up, I pricked my finger on the hatpin. So here I got out to meet the family - bleeding finger and all. It was so good to be at the place I had dreamed of so much.

That afternoon I had a tour of the house and saw my pretty room - all done up in white and green - and with its own bathroom! What luxury! I met the dogs, Winnie, the bulldog (named after Winston Churchil) and Clementine.

We went to town to send my parents a cablegram and to buy me a lightblue windbreaker. The people were selling things in the street because it was "Crazy Daze". (I thought it was very strange. In those days we still had not have street vendors in South Africa.)

We also went to Echo lake where we swam and I think we had hot dogs.

Afterwards we went to see the horses. It was about 22:00 and the sun was just setting. I remember Reesie talking to me in the car and all of a sudden she said "Are you sleeping?" "What? No...!" At the tender age of 18, I had never fallen asleep before while someone was talking to me, but in self defence, I had not had a proper nights sleep for days: I only had three hours of sleep the night before we left Pretoria, because saying goodbye and packing things and sewing (yes sewing) up parcels to be sent to the U.S. took much longer than anticipated. Then we had a 24 hour Pan Am charter flight to New York where we landed at 3:00. We got to bed at 5:00 at Hofstra University but we had to get up at 7:00 to meet A.F.S. counselors and attend lectures. My flight to Montana left at 24:00 that same evening! The other students heading West, were going to leave by bus the following day, but my darling new Dad, had arranged that I would fly, because there were strikes going on.

Once at home, I could not get the tap in my bathroom to work, so I went to Reesie and asked her to show me "How to open the tap in the basin." She could not make out what I was talking out, so rather sheepishly I took her to the bathroom where she said "Oh the faucet in the zink!"

Anyway I slept until 12:00 the next day. I have never slept "in" that long ever before (or since). I went to the kitchen and Mother asked whether I would like lunch and by way of suggestion said that Ellen had had a peanut-butter jelly sandwich. (What? In those days I had never thought of jam as jelly. Jelly was jello too me....)

There were many, many highlights that year, but here are a few that I can remember without getting out my scrapbook or slides. (What a pity I took slides and not photos, but thank you Mother for taking photos! I still cherish them, as you can see.)

• Horse riding - lots of it. I remember the cowboy horsetrail in the rain with all of us wearing ponchos and seeing a real old log cabin.
• Glacier National Park
• Learning to water ski. It took me forever, but once I mastered it - WOW!
• Going to Calgary and Banff in Canada. (The hotel, the breakfast, the scenery, the wool and carvings we bought, the dresses we had had made...)
• School: Most significant subject: Problems of American Democracy.
  
• Extracurricular activities like "Up with People" (How did we land there?)
• The Presbyterian church and attending mass in the Catholic Church for the first time.
• Listening to the Johnsons singing. (Oh Danny boy...)
  
• Snow, and more snow.
• Crayfish at the Hacienda
  
• Being a homecoming candidate - I wore Anne's velvet dress and felt so grand. They were just very kind in nominating me.
• Learning to ski.
• Christmas and talking to my family on the phone. (In those days you had to book a phone call and I suppose it was frightfully expensive!)
• Shoeshoeing the day after Christmas
• The horse show in Missouri
• A train trip with Ellen
• Pep club
• Letters from home - an aerogram took 10 days to get there. How lucky exchange students are today with internet!
  
• Giving 60 odd talks and slideshows. (How gracious everyone was.)
  
• Graduation and all the gifts - I still have the ceramic bowl Fern had made me, but the lid broke a few years ago.)
• Strawberry Shortcake (one week towards the end, I had supper with various different families and every night we had strawberry shortcake - not that I complained, I loved it.)
• The trip to Yellow Stone

I remember lots more, but it would take up the whole day to list them all. Suffice to say, that year changed my life forever: it opened up my horisons and for the first time, I learned not to take everything at face value. I became deeply concerned about the problems of South Africa - in fact had sleepless nights after reading in the U.S. things about us, that I had never known. I learned a lot about myself. And of course I learned a lot about America. What a year it was: man on the moon, Nixon, Watergate, Vietnam, demonstrations, Martin Luther King, Alabama, Berkeley, Edward Kennedy and Chapaquidic??, L.S.D and Where have all the flowers gone.

Thank you God for giving me that special year and thank you Johnsons for having me!! Imagine, taking on an extra teenager... a hungry one... for a whole year....