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The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project STEVEN WAGENSEIL Interviewed by: Peter Eicher Interview Date: January 15, 2008 Copyright 2018 ADST Q: Let’s start at the beginning. Maybe you can tell me when and where you were born. WAGENSEIL: I was born the first of September, 1947 in Danbury, Connecticut, brought up in Brookfield Center, Connecticut, which is right next door, where I went to elementary school through the seventh grade. My father was a travel agent, owned a travel agency in Danbury. Q: Are you a Connecticut family? WAGENSEIL: Oh, no. My folks had settled there after the Second World War because my dad’s father had a house in Brookfield. My grandfather worked for the New York Telephone company as an engineer. He retired right about the time I was born in Brookfield so my folks bought a house near my dad’s folks. My dad is originally from New York City. My mother was born in Colorado and brought up in Pasadena, California. They met and married during the war. They were both in uniform. Not an old Connecticut family by any stretch of the imagination, although I was brought up with the image of the New England Pilgrims and all of the mythology of Plymouth Rock and all that kind of stuff as part of my heritage. Q: Do you know the history of your family? When they came to the United States? WAGENSEIL: I do, to a certain extent. My grandfather’s grandfather immigrated from southern Germany in 1852. Q: That was the Wagenseils? WAGENSEIL: That was the Wagenseils, yes. His name was Jacob, actually came through Hamilton, Ontario, I believe, and wound up in Port Huron, Michigan where he settled down and raised a family. My great grandfather was the town clerk and then the sheriff. My grandfather was born in Port Huron, went to the University of Michigan and then moved to New York to get a job, met my grandmother and the rest is history. Q: And your mother’s family? 1 WAGENSEIL: My mother was born in Colorado but all of “her people” are from Texas and before that from Arkansas and Tennessee, Virginia and what all. English, Irish immigrants. Q: You say them met during the war. What were they doing during the war? WAGENSEIL: My mother was in the Women’s Army Corps. She was brought up in Pasadena and was recruited by the WACS to be, well, it wasn’t a publicity stunt but it was to help them with support for the soldiers and so to have some public relations effect. She was an attractive young woman and was actually featured on the cover of Life Magazine; actually she and her platoon marching past and she was front and center. I still have a copy of that somewhere. She was working in the WACS and supporting the soldiers. My dad was a military policeman and his unit was transferred out to California at some point and they met out there. Q: He was enlisted or drafted? WAGENSEIL: He was drafted, in 1940. Q: This was the army rather than the marines? WAGENSEIL: The army, yes, indeed. He went to college and dropped out for a variety of reasons a couple of times, I guess and wound up being drafted and was serving his one year of compulsory military service from 1940 to ’41 or ’41 to ’42, I can’t remember. He was on his Christmas leave expecting to be released from service in January when he got word that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and he was stuck for the following four and a half years. He was a military policeman and went ashore Omaha Beach on the third wave of the Normandy Invasion. Q: Did he tell stories about that? WAGENSEIL: He never told a single story. He was very traumatized by the war. He was in the Battle of the Bulge and I never heard him tell any battle stories. It was very traumatic for him. When I was a kid, we were always told if dad is sleeping on the couch, don’t wake him up because he woke up very brusquely. Q: That’s interesting because you hear a lot of people who were in World War II don’t talk about their combat experiences. WAGENSEIL: He never talked about it. He told a couple of stories about when he was supporting the general but nothing about himself. Q: So they got married in California during the war? 2 WAGENSEIL: They got married in California in January of ’44. They were immediately separated. Dad went off to the European Theater as the Normandy Landings were being prepared, and my mom was on tenterhooks until he came back. Actually, he was on board a troop carrier, being shipped from the European Theater to the Pacific Theater when word came that the Japanese had surrendered so the ship turned back. Q: That’s a nice twist. Then came back and they married in California? WAGENSEIL: They were married in California the beginning of ’44, before he went to the European Theater, then he came back, they both demobilized and settled in Connecticut where my dad opened a travel agency. Q: Why a travel agency? WAGENSEIL: Well, he had worked at the New York’s World’s Fair in ’39 and saw how much people were interested in the rest of the world. People, children of immigrants, who had been in the U.S. for a generation or two but were maybe interested in traveling back and so forth. He saw during the war that transport was becoming easier. It was not necessary any longer to take a ship for a week or something to cross the ocean, but that it would be possible, he realized, to fly across the ocean. People are going to want to do that, he thought. Having been in Europe or the Pacific in the service they are going to want to go back. They will want to travel. He said there’s a market there and he got into it. Q: Was it a successful business? WAGENSEIL: Very successful. He built it up into quite a little successful business. He ended up having three separate offices in three towns in western Connecticut. Because of that business and the fact that he was traveling, he took his family with him occasionally traveling. As a kid I remember going not just to Maine and Cape Cod in the summers but also we went to Bermuda on a cruise when I was about three and went down to the Caribbean quite a bit. Every year we’d go down for a couple of weeks in the depths of the winter because my mother from California hated the snow. So as a kid I was virtually at every island in the Caribbean except for Hispaniola. I went to Jamaica; I went to Cuba as a kid. I went to Trinidad and everything between. So I was bitten by the travel bug at an early age. Q: Were you the first child? WAGENSEIL: I was the eldest of two. My brother, Ross is three and a half years younger than me. Q: You grew up living in the same town in Connecticut the whole time? 3 WAGENSEIL: Grew up living in the same New England farmhouse in the same town in Connecticut. As I say, I went through the seventh grade in the local elementary school and then because the town didn’t have adequate upper school, and we’d have to drive to Danbury High School where they were on double sessions because the buildings hadn’t caught up with the population growth, my folks took me out of public school and put me in private school in Danbury, a boarding school and I was there for five years, basically. Q: So you were living in the boarding school. WAGENSEIL: I was a boarding student, yes. Q: Throughout your high school years? WAGENSEIL: It’s a little complicated, but all of my schooling was complicated. I was there eighth, ninth and tenth grades and then during eleventh grade, junior year, I went to school in France for a year. Q: Was that like an AFS program? WAGENSEIL: Well, no. It was independent. My parents were just divorced. My dad remarried with a French woman. The headmaster of my boarding school was going on a sabbatical year. My dad was his travel agent, arranging the trip. He said to the Headmaster, “John, where are you going to put your kids when you are in France?” John said, “Well, I found this nice little school up in the middle of the mountains somewhere, a private school and we’ll put our kids there.” Dad came back out to where I was waiting in the car and said, “Hey, guess where you are going to school next year?” I said, “Where?” He said, “You’re going to France.” I said, “What?” It was that sort of consultative process. Q: Had you been taking French in school? WAGENSEIL: By the time I got to France I’d had two years of high school French. Q: Had you ever been to France? WAGENSEIL: I had never been to France. I had never been to Europe. 4 Q: So you went over with the headmaster and this woman? WAGENSEIL: I went over with my dad on a ship and met up with my new step-mother in Paris, then took a train down to catch up with the headmaster and his family at a two- star restaurant on the road to the school and proceeded to the school and settled in and so forth.