My Bicentennial Story For America's 250th

                        Books by Patti Liszkay available on Amazon:   
     "Equal And Opposite Reactions"      http://amzn.to/2xvcgRa
     "Hail Mary"                                           https://www.amzn.com/1684334888
     "Tropical Depression"                        https://www.amzn.com/B0BTPN7NYY​     ​

​My Bicentennial Story For America's 250th

     Today being  a very special birthday for our country, I thought I'd share my 4th of July memory - which happens to be my favorite of all favorite 4th of July memories - of where I spent our nation's last big birthday celebration, the Bicentennial, on July 4, 1976.
       Like millions of Americans, I spent that very special Fourth of July at a family picnic. Our picnic was in a lovely meadow outside a small village in Hungary a few kilometers from the Soviet border. 
         In the spring of 1976 I was working for the U.S. Army as a crafts instructor on a post in Aschaffenburg, Germany, 

...and was engaged to a young  captain named Tom Liszkay.   ​

      By May Tom's tour of duty was up and I'd left my job and we were touring around Europe by Eurailpass for a few months before returning home to the States. 

​       Tom being between a first and second generation American - his mother was a Hungarian immigrant and his father was born in the United States of Hungarian immigrants,

...we decided to include in our travels a trip to Hungary to visit his uncles, aunts, and cousins there.
        Now, in those days Hungary was part of the Soviet Bloc, a Communist state under strict control of the Soviet Union, as Russia was known at that time. The United States and the Soviet Union being Cold War enemies back then, for an American to travel behind the Iron Curtain was a weence daring. And scary. 
       But back in those days Tom and I were young and more than a weence daring. And only a little scared. (Though Tom, with his Hungarian name, was slightly more scared than I was). 
      Before our trip we needed to visit the Hungarian Embassy in Cologne, Germany, to acquire visas to enter Hungary,

...and permits to travel around the country.

     (We were told we would be required to register with the police upon our arrival in each new town. If we did not, we were warned that upon leaving Hungary our travel passes would be checked at the border and if there were not dates stamped on our passes reflecting everywhere we'd been...well, I don't know exactly what would have happened. Of the four families we visited, nobody wanted to take us to the police station and two absolutely refused to. I suppose that with armed soldiers patrolling the streets everywhere we went, people wanted to stay under the radar. We somehow got out without any adverse consequences, though).
             From Cologne we traveled to Berlin, since were in the neighborhood, ​

...and from Berlin on to Vienna.
​        In the last days of June we crossed from Austria into Hungary, where we would crisscross the country visiting Tom's relatives in the towns of:
          Győr,

...a good-sized city where Tom's uncle, aunt and cousin lived in a tiny apartment with a living room, a small kitchen, a bathroom and one bedroom. Tom told me that his uncle had once owned the whole building, but after the Communists appropriated the building and redistributed the apartments his family was allotted this one. Tom's aunt and uncle normally slept in the living room and his teenage cousin had the bedroom, but during our visit we were given the bedroom while the family slept in the living room.

      
     From Győr we traveled to Pusztadobos, ​

     
...then Nyíregyháza,

​...and Salgotarjan,

...where Tom's cousin, a hair dresser, gave me what she called a "beautiful frizura (hairdo)" so I would look good in Budapest, our last stop along the way,

...and which I thought was a more beautiful city than Vienna, in spite of the old bullet and mortar shell wounds in some of the buildings left over from the 1956 Hungarian revolution, when the country tried, but failed, to break free of the Soviet Union.
        And, aside from the armed soldiers patrolling the streets in the cities and one  young, bored functionary in the tiny village police department in Pusztadobos who obviously felt that it was the chance of a lifetime to meet and intimidate two American visitors,  the Hungarians in general were the nicest, most generous, friendliest  folks I've ever met. They didn't speak much English, Tom spoke - and taught  me - only a few words of Hungarian, and yet we all managed to somehow communicate.
         Which brings me to July 4, 1976, the Bicentennial. It so happened that our itinerary  brought us to the village of Pusztadobos, the rural village on the Soviet border from which Tom's mother emigrated, on Saturday, July 3.
           Soon after we arrived Tom's young cousins,

...took us for a walk around the village. It looked like a place out of a storybook. Some of the homes had thatched roofs. There were cherry trees growing along the paths. 
​       At one point the children ran into some of their friends. During the course of their conversation I thought I heard the words "Abbot and Costello" repeated several times. Turned out I did.
         Turned out there was going to be on television that night an old black and white Abbot and Costello movie from the 1950's, but apparently an American movie showing on TV - even an old black and white one - was a national event. Tom's relatives bought a special dessert from the bakery for us all to enjoy while watching Abbot and Costello, which we did.
       The following day was Sunday, July 4. Tom's relatives owned a piece of farmland, and so they ordered a couple of taxis to take us out to the property.  We then walked to a scenic spot for our picnic. 
          It was a lovely 4th of July, a balmy sunny day, us sitting under the trees on a blanket in the grass, eating our sausages and bread and plums, cobbling together conversation from the few words we understood of each other's languages, laughing and laughing. Our hosts seemed unaware that this day was a special one for Americans, and neither Tom nor I had the vocabulary to explain to them about the significance of the July 4th and the Bicentennial.
         And yet it felt kind of wonderful to me, to be there on that 4th of July, making new friends whose language, culture, and life experiences were so different from mine, and realizing that our differences really didn't make any difference.  We could still come together and find plenty of common ground. Somehow it felt so American.
         Happy 250th 4th of July, Everyone. May we all someday have friends the whole world over.