We had a surprise guest that Herb brought in - their dog Tootsie! She was really cute and friendly. She made sure she smelled everyone :-). Also, Malcolm pointed out during the "Fines" session that Herb and Bev listed two different anniversary dates :-) and gave Herb a fine for that!
Bill announced that Stand Down event will be on June 28, 29 and 30 at the same location as past years. He added that May 10th is the clothing drive.
Charlotte mentioned that the Rotarians At Work day will be on Sat Apr 27, 2019 at Solutions For Change and the plan is to make and serve dinner between 4 and 7 pm.
Ken and Paul then announced another Paul Harris Fellow award. This time it was for Sanjiv Prabhakaran for his work with the website blogs and Bocce web site design, development and management.
## "Berlin before, during and after the Wall and the Berlin Crisis 1960-61";
Roger Liles was stationed in Turkey and Germany for 5 years as a USAF Signals Officer and stayed in Europe for 8 years. As a military electronics officer for 40 years, Roger's main function was to translate engineering jargon to understandable English and communicate to the senior officers of the US Government in written and verbal form.
In the 1990s he began taking novel writing classes at UCLA, and writing for pleasure. Now retired, he spends full time writing. He is author of THE BERLIN TUNNEL—A COLD WAR THRILLER, first released in Oct 2018 and became #13 on the Amazon Best Seller List for New Releases in Historical Mystery, Thriller and Suspense Fiction and has sold of 1000 copies.
He mentioned about how Churchill talked about the Iron Curtain. He said that during the Berlin airlift there were 275,000 airlift missions and 2.3 million tons of food delivered between 24jun48 to 12may49.
The Berlin Wall was about 94 miles around Berlin. About 200,000 people per year moved to the west. They had 81 checkpoints built in 1961 to control the flow of people. The wall was closed on August 13, 1961 and within a month the American Checkpoint "Charlie" was built.
There were times when people attending church would cut through barbed wire fence and escape to the West. Checkpoint Charlie became a symbol of the Cold War, representing the separation of East and West. Soviet and American tanks briefly faced each other at the location during the Berlin crisis of 1961. That was almost the start of World War III, but fortunately the Russian tanks did not do anything catastrophic.
The wall remained closed for 28 years and many families were separated for all those years. About 560,000 people escaped during those years. Roger wrote a wonderful book (The Berlin Tunnel) with all these historic details and old pictures. The book's cover was designed by an artist in New Zealand and the tag line "A Cold War Thriller" was suggested to him. He received 4.6 out of 5 stars and the book became #13 on Amazon's Best Seller List. The Berlin Tunnel was a joint spy operation between the CIA & Britain's MI6 called Operation Gold to enter into Russian zone and listen-in on communications. The Allied Museum has a presentation of this Berlin Spy Tunnel.
In the end DMSB Club President Ken Barrett presented the speaker with the Joshua certificate that represents our club DMSB donating school supplies to schools in Malawi in the name of the speaker.
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