After finishing up the tournament in Holland, the men and five others rented a Volkswagen van and drove to Berlin, then located deep inside communist East Germany.
Both men remember the deep contrast between the opulence of the west and the extreme poverty of the east as they drove towards the city.
“It was like a time warp,” said Stauffer, a retired Olds resident. “Everything in the east was covered in coal dust and you could just smell the coal burning.”
Once in West Berlin, the men decided to take a bus tour of East Berlin, passing through the famous Checkpoint Charlie.
“That was quite stressful,” said Stauffer. “These guys, these border guards, were armed to the teeth.”
Stauffer remembers the contrast between the busy, clean streets and full shops of West Berlin with East Berlin, which still had many bombed-out buildings and debris-littered roadways.
He also remembers the only items for sale in the shops in East Berlin were handmade knitted baby clothes and tuques.
One of the things Rayton, also an Olds resident, remembers most about his trip to the Berlin Wall area was seeing the markers that had been erected at places where people had been shot trying to cross over to the west.
Although the wall had come down a couple of months earlier, armed border guards were still everywhere in East Berlin, he said.
“The difference between East Berlin and West Berlin was just amazing,” said Rayton. “In the east it was all poverty. It was the 1990s in the west and like 1920, 1930 in the east, with ox carts pulling wagons with wooden wheels down the roads.”
Once back in West Berlin after their bus tour, Stauffer paid a young German boy $5 to chip off a couple of pieces of the Berlin Wall for him as a souvenir.
“You could rent a hammer and chisel or pay the boy to break off a piece for you. I asked him why he wasn’t in school and he said he’d rather be making money.”
The men paid $300 a night for their hotel in Berlin, and that compares to about $60 a night at the Olds Hotel during the same time, says Rayton, who owns the local hotel.
Today, Stauffer still keeps the pieces of the wall as a reminder of his trip during a historic time.
“To actually be there was pretty interesting,” he said. “It was quite a time and the highlight of the trip for me.”
Rayton said, “For me too.”
The Berlin Wall was constructed by the German Democratic Republic of East Germany starting in August 1961. Its fall marked the beginning of the end of the Cold War.
