Odd News Reviews

There continue to be strange things in the news each week, at least strange to me. Some items seem worth discussing further.

Tyler Frost had been suspended from classes and told he will not be allowed to attend graduation ceremonies. Tyler is a 17-year-old who WAS a senior at Heritage Christian School in Findlay, Ohio. The AP article said, "That private school is a strict fundamentalists Baptist institution."

We have read many different reasons for getting tough with graduating seniors over a real or imagined misdeed. Recall one senior class president who was banned from graduation for bringing a striptease lady to demonstrate her talents at a sociology class; however, Tyler's transgression was not that imaginative. He simply took his girlfriend to HER public school's Senior Prom, with the knowledge HIS school forbids dancing, rock music … and hand holding. Maybe they would let him graduate if he told school officials he and his date just watched the actual dancing and he only held her by the wrist and elbow.

Also last week we had two adventuresome young fellows who went #1 in Old Faithful Geyser. There are Park rules against walking off the boardwalks in any of Yellowstone's geyser basins because it is life threatening to break through the mineralized crust. The bad news for these participants in the extreme sport of "geyser potty" was getting fired by the Park Concessionaire. The good news? The action was filmed by an alert photographer, thus becoming an exciting part of the NBC Nightly News. Maybe they'll get in the Guineas Book of World Records. We can only hope this instant international recognition for "going number 1 in a geyser" does not lead to something more challenging.

On a more serious side of the news, at least to me, was a recent report in Time Magazine on prostitution in Germany. The book I'm struggling to finish writing deals with a unique problem in Germany after WW II where so many women survived as widows or potential spinsters after the loss of roughly five million young men in Hitler's wars.

Those women faced more than the loss of males. They also faced several years of poverty and near starvation. Hundreds of thousands did what they had to do to survive, and that often left no option except selling themselves to American G.I.s. Our service men were commanded to not "fraternize," but that puny order was about as effective as shoveling sand against the tide. When "fratting rules' were relaxed, "PUBLIC displays of emotion" were no no's, so they did it in the bombed buildings and the bushes. Five years after the war, the ratio of German females to German males remained two-to-one in the 21- to 35-year age bracket. In spite of this greatly unbalanced population, the once structurally, economically and morally devastated Germany is now a rebuilt modern nation.

The Time Magazine report intrigued me. It said there are currently 400,000 "licensed prostitutes' in Germany. Gist of the story was their business is suffering from the world wide economic downturn. Things have gotten so bad they are having sales, giving punch card freebies to steady customers … same as my carwash. The report did not mention if the girls offered "two for one" sales or a "happy hour," but those could be next.

Know not I how the German ratio of prostitutes compares to the general population in other nations, including the United States, so I have no clue if 400,000 is above or below average for a modern country Germany's size.

There were humorous aspects regarding the fraulein and G.I. relationships shortly after the war, but most were not very funny. Can't help wondering if long-term effects of the Wehrmacht's massive war fatalities has somehow affected the current German social structure. Many things in Germany have changed, but perhaps some haven't … since I was there 60 years ago.

G. George Ostrom is a Kalispell resident and a national-award winning Hungry Horse News columnist.