By Elizabeth Cook
ecook@salisburypost.com
This story begins in a German train station on a snowy night in November 1968.
Harry Murphy of Salisbury stood in Stuttgart Main Station at 2:30 in the morning, waiting for his daughter, Jean Yost.
Jean was living in Sindlefingen, a small city near her husband Dennis’ Army base. They had a new son whom Murphy had yet to see ó his first grandchild.
As Murphy stood there, a young station supervisor named Guenter Stuber noticed the well-dressed traveler waiting for the 2:45 train.
“The train arrived and left and no daughter came,” Guenter recalls now.
Guenter made his rounds and returned to the platform at 3:30 a.m. to see that Murphy was still waiting.
Knowing some English, Guenter asked if anything was wrong. After hearing Murphy’s story, he escorted the American to a hotel and helped him find the military police. “They will help you and bring you to your daughter.”
Guenter went home and had no more thoughts about Murphy ó until he returned to work four days later.
The American traveler was at the station waiting to see him, this time accompanied by a young couple with a 2-month-old baby in a basket.
“They wanted to invite me to the dwelling of the young family,” Guenter recalls.
He went, and a lifelong friendship began.
nnn
After Murphy returned to the United States, they began writing back and forth. And after Murphy’s second trip to Germany ó awaiting another grandchild ó Guenter sent photographs he had taken during the visit, carefully arranged in a book titled, “How we became friends!”
The correspondence continued, and after a few years Murphy invited Guenter to the United States.
“I took that letter and I translated to my mom,” Guenter says. ” ‘What shall I do in the States there?’ I asked her. “She said, ‘Hurry up and go. Take the chance to see another country.’ ”
That’s how Guenter’s first visit to the United States came about in 1972. He saw not only Salisbury, but points beyond, including traveling to Texas with Murphy to visit daughter Ann and go to a rodeo.
He returned to Germany with a Southern accent, a cowboy hat, 44 pounds of country-western records and countless photographs. He takes his camera everywhere.
On a return trip in 1974, he brought a photo of a young woman he was seeing, Elisabeth. He picked out a ring for her in Salisbury, and they married in 1977.
A year later, in 1978, Christine Murphy accompanied her husband to Europe ó her only trip. And Guenter surprised them with copies of all the photos he had taken on his trips to the United States. They were pleased. “For them, that’s also memories,” he says.
nnnMemories.
Fast forward to November 2008. Guenter Stuber has arrived in Salisbury for his third visit since that chance meeting in 1968.
“It’s my second home,” he says.
On this visit, though, Guenter visits the Murphys’ graves. Harry died in 1999, and Christine ó “my American mom” ó passed away last year.
He brought a candle from Germany to light for them.
“It was hard for me,” Guenter says. “I was as familiar with them as my own parents.”
When he celebrated his 33rd birthday with the Murphys during his 1974 visit, they addressed his card to “Our Adopted Son,” he says.
The feeling was mutual.
But their relationship didn’t end with the Murphys’ passing. It just spread to the next generation.
And the next.
And the next.
Guenter celebrated his 67th birthday with descendants of the Murphys this go-round, and the 40th anniversary of meeting Harry Murphy.
Murphy’s daughter, Ann Rouzer, held Guenter’s hand as a photographer snapped their photo at Pinocchio’s.
“He told us he’d do it again in 30 more years,” she says. “He’s always so positive.”
Now, even the Murphys’ great-grandchildren ó including the children of Heather Yost Strickland of Salisbury ó have met him.
Heather’s brother, Sean, was the 2-month-old in the basket at the train station. Born later, she was barely a toddler when Guenter visited the Murphys and Yosts in the 1970s and cannot remember meeting him.
But she was among the recipients of his faithful correspondence, and she was glad to meet him this month and put a face to it all.
She even arranged for him to speak to her son’s class about life in Germany.
“He’s kind of like the long-lost uncle.”
Now he’s found.
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Guenter Stuber feels at ease in Salisbury.
He stayed with Ann and Allen Rouzer for three weeks, and is with Jean Murphy Lindsay of Jacksonville, Fla. ó the young mother he met in the train station four decades ago ó for the final part of his visit. (Dennis Yost died years ago, and Jean remarried.)
“I was a little nervous about it,” Ann says of Guenter’s visit. She wondered what to do with a German houseguest.
“But he is so easy to have around, he just goes with the flow,” she says.
Guenter says he came with no set agenda. “We just this time have to sit down and talk together,” he says. “The memories all come up.”
Salisbury has changed a little, he says. “The traffic is more.”
He’s astounded, though, by what has remained the same.
He was an avid square dancer in his youth, and during one visit here, he went to a square dance with Charles and Barbara Doby. So two weeks ago, he ventured to China Grove to see if the Dobys were still around.
Not only did he find the Dobys, but on their wall he found a framed newspaper clipping about himself.
“And I have had no contact with them since 1974,” he says, astonishment still in his voice.
nnnThe depth of Guenter’s affection for the Murphys and the impact he and the family have had on each other is hard to describe.
When he calls them on Skype, an Internet-based service, he goes by “Appaloosa1974” ó because during his 1974 visit, Rick Murphy took him to see an Appaloosa horse.
And he has always called often, even before Skype, when five minutes could cost $40. “It has to be,” he says. “I know my American mom waits for hearing my voice.” Ann says Guenter faithfully remembers them on every holiday and birthday ó every generation.
He was amazed to see a group washing cars in a bank parking lot one day, so Ann had her car washed.
“When the guys finished,” Ann says, “he had them stand together and he took a picture of them.”
He got e-mail addresses so he could send them photos later.
And if they had also shared their birthdays, Ann says, no doubt Guenter would send them birthday messages, too.
He is a kind soul and a keen observer.
nnnAnn likes to walk to the woods behind her house with her morning cup of coffee and “just sit there and be peaceful,” she says. Guenter joined her on several mornings, saying Americans must be crazy to drink coffee in the “forest,” especially in cold weather.
But he enjoyed the peace, too.
And when Ann and daughter Tricia started dancing in the kitchen one day as they listened to a Marvin Gaye song, he shook his head again.
“Elisabeth,” he said of his wife, “will never understand.”
But Elisabeth probably will understand Guenter’s excitement as he retells these stories on his return home. He’s been talking about the Murphy family for a long time. She’s not much of a traveler, Guenter says, but she encouraged him to see the family again.
He bought Levi jeans for himself and son Armin, whom he has been e-mailing reports. Ann says one of the replies from Germany ended with “your jealous son, Armin.”
Midway through his visit, Guenter had 2,800 pictures and a stack of CDs he bought at the Emporium of “musical memories.” Music means as much to him as photographs. He learned that shipping one box home was going to cost $75.
It’s worth the money, he says.
“Well, if you don’t pay it, you don’t get it,” Guenter says. ” … It’s an ó how you say ó an inside treasure, and you cannot pay that for money.”