A reunion down memory lane

A close-knit family, the Helfrichs -- all 31 one of them -- have

always tried to gather for Thanksgiving and other holidays.

But this year, James and Kathryn Helfrich have invited their six

children with spouses and 17 grandchildren on a trip down memory lane.

More than 30 years after the couple packed up the kids and left America

to live in Feldafing, Germany, the family will return to the Bavarian

village this Friday for a weeklong reunion. Two of the couple’s sisters

are also coming along.

“Feldafing was for us a defining experience in a very, very real way,”

said James Helfrich. An engineer, the 69-year-old moved his family to

Germany in 1964 to set up the European branch of a Newport Beach-based

company.

“We made two very important decisions,” said Helfrich, switching from

his native English to German.

Decision No. 1 was to settle in the tiny village, a few miles south of

Starnberg, southern Germany’s somewhat sleepier version of Newport Beach

-- on Lake Starnberg. Here, the family rented a mansion overlooking the

lake that belonged to the Hapsburg family, Austria’s imperial dynasty.

The other decision, Helfrich said, was to sent their kids to German

schools.

“They left school in [America] Friday evening,” he said. “And they

went to German schools Monday morning. They quickly picked up the

language.”

The Helfrichs stuck out a little compared to their neighbors. “No one

else had six children and no one else drove a Volkswagen van,” said

Kathryn, 68, with a laugh.

But their open-door policy, which included offering cookies and

lemonade to village kids and inviting them to play in their 2.5-acre

garden, quickly made them part of Feldafing’s social life.

“Kathryn became the mayor,” James Helfrich said jokingly.

While the children learned German in no time, their parents struggled

somewhat.

Kathryn’s parents immigrated to America from the Netherlands and since

she was already fluent in Dutch, she found it easier to adapt. While he

still speaks flawless German decades after returning to the U.S., James

remembers his first shaky attempts to grasp the language.

Asking a friend for the German word for “residence permit,” the answer

seemed almost impossible to pronounce.

“o7 Aufenthaltsf7 -- what?” he asked the friend in disbelief. But

after chanting o7 Aufenthaltsgenehmigungf7 over and over again, he

managed to obtain the document.

“I think I even sang it to the person at the immigration office,” he

said.

Some of the couple’s children found it more difficult to readjust when

the family returned to America in 1968.

‘o7 ‘Kein Deutsch, kein Deutschf7 -- no German, no German,”

6-year-old Peter would tell his parents as he tried to relearn his native

language and get along with his American classmates.

During a conversation at his parents’ Newport North home Monday,

Peter, now 37, remembered it being a quick transition.

“Apart from playing soccer, I was quickly a pretty normal kid,” he

said.

Peter, who is taking his wife, Linda, and his three children to

Germany, said he was “all piped up” about visiting his early childhood

home.

Like many of his siblings, he’ll use the trip as a launching point to

visit other European countries. The family gathering in Feldafing also

will celebrate the Helfrichs’ 45th wedding anniversary.

Getting ready to head back to work, Peter, who no longer speaks

German, surprised his parents with a familiar phrase.

“o7 Auf Wiedersehenf7 !” he said to them, smiling. “I’m practicing.”