At the Hands of a Stranger by Lee Butcher

Author:Lee Butcher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Publishing Corp.
Published: 2012-08-19T04:00:00+00:00

Bridges read Hilton’s rights to him again and continued the interview.

Bridges: I understand that you met your first wife in the military?

Hilton: Yeah.

Bridges: What was her name?

Hilton: Ursula.

Bridges: And you met her in Germany?

Hilton: Uh-huh.

Bridges: How long were you guys married?

Hilton: Just married in … married in ’68 and divorced in ’71. I’d been going with her since ’65. She was sixteen when I met her.

Bridges: Really?

Hilton: Yeah. Yeah, that was the worst mistake I ever made was running her off.

Bridges: Really?

Hilton: Gorgeous girl. I mean, truly gorgeous. I’m telling you, the best body I’ve ever seen. She had a body so good she’d be at the swimming pool. She’d be going to the ladies’ room, and I—I walked along behind and seen the little boys in a trance walk behind and follow her right into the ladies’ room. I mean, she was stunning. Stunning, and not only that, she was a good German hausfrau. Her father was a police First Sergeant.

Bridges: That’s like a chief, right?

Hilton: He was enlisted, though, not an officer. That would be the highest enlisted rank …. He was a police officer. She had an older sister that had already married a GI, an E-5, so that kind of smoothed the way for me. But, at any rate, she was gorgeous, a fine girl brought up by a police officer, a fine German hausfrau. Kept a spotless house, meals ready, only wanted to do what I wanted to do. And not only that, she had … Her training was as a draftsman. In Germany, they start them at about fifteen into an apprenticeship program where they go to high school half a day and learn a trade, or a vocation the other half. Whether you’re going to be a waitress or whatever you’re going to be. It’s called learner, an apprentice. So her apprenticeship was as a draftsman. It was no computer-assisted drafting back then. None, no CAD.

Howard: Those women hand-drew everything, didn’t they?

Hilton: Everything, hand-lettered everything.

Howard: Even on the symbol.

Hilton: Yeah. It’s what a draftsman was, so it was a high-paying trade, and it was hard to learn, very demanding and difficult. And, of course, right up a German’s alley because it demanded precision.

Howard: I was just thinking that.

Hilton: She came over after I married her. She immediately proceeded to get a job. Leslie Lumber Company. My mother worked there, so that was her in. She got a job working in the Truss Company, drawing trusses. They made trusses to order for buildings, and every one had to be drawn. That kind of thing.

Bridges: So you actually brought her back to—

Hilton: Yeah. I married her after I’d been going with her a couple of years. I married her shortly before I left for the States so that would put her in line for a visa. American visas were hard to get. Now she was my spouse, you know, an advantage. I left, and she stayed briefly with my parents. Rented a guest-house, on a property on the Biscayne River.

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