Van Hull was batting clean-up in this story. Phil was from Pontiac Michigan. He and Baldwin had a link from the auto industry. Phil's dad was with Chrysler, who had recently acquired Simca, a French car manufacturer. In Chrysler's vision, the International headquarters of the combined companies was to domicile in Geneva. In 1958, some 500+ Americans descended to Geneva in a similar fashion to the D-Day landing without the landing craft. (Talk about culture shock. Families left their 3-bedroom ranch or cape in the Midwest of the US and found themselves in Geneva, Switzerland. While Geneva, by definition, was a cosmopolitan international city it was also the largest village in the World at the time. The Yanks - and this applies to all of us - had an income base in US dollars, which at the time equaled 4.3 Swiss Francs. Life was much cheaper and the standard of living for many was greatly increased. This was both good and bad.) Phil was also in senior year, and no one knew, or cared, how many baskets he had scored last season for Pontiac High. In fact, most of us thought Pontiac was a car, not an Indian with a town named after him outside of Detroit. (Ultimately, Phil enjoyed his senior year so much, he decided to repeat it, and with my girl-friend nonetheless, but that's another story.)

Phil was large by US standards, and enormous - INTIMIDATING - by European sizes. Phil also had a deep booming voice that by declaring something as "bullshit" served as its own rallying call. Equally impressive however was that Phil almost always had a car. This was a very large deal in a country where driving was not permitted until 18, and most of us were not. Neither was Phil at the time, but since he'd been driving for years in the States, the Van Hulls seemed to neglect the Swiss rules (not a great model for their son). Thus, with a big Chrysler product - part of the perks of the dad's job - we were mobile. (Labovsky was the only legal driver and would periodically obtain his family's "black flame", a small Renault, which could just about hold 2 of us. It frequentlyheld 5.) This gave Phil significant influence on the events of our group - a not necessarily positive from standards that might have been maintained outside our circle.

DeLapp was not at Ecolint. His dad was with the World Council of Churches - The Reverend Mr. DeLapp. Ted was on a sabbatical. He had graduated High School and his younger brother was in our class. It was never clear to me how Ted spent his days when the rest of us were pretending to be in school. In the evenings, primarily Wednesday (we had only a half-day on Thursday), Fridays, and most Saturdays, it was obligatory for the 6-pack (we never referred to ourselves this way) to merge into a coagulative group of fun-loving, out-of-control, red-blooded American boys. Ted was slightly troubled in his post-high-school status and brought a different perspective into our midst. He found humor as well as anger in most situations and usually the laughter would win, but not always... "Destruct" was a rallying cry that Ted coined and I'm, now, ashamed to say that many of us followed with vigor.

I guess I've left myself for last. I, of course was at least an equally influential - possibly more - member of the team. My story was somewhat different and would merit more elaboration than appropriate here. By the time I was in my senior year of High School I had changed schools 12 times, and I had been in Ecolint for two and a half years. I had lived in Switzerland for 5 years. I spoke enough French to insult anyone I came in touch with. I knew the "lay of the land", and most importantly, at the ripe old age of 16, I had my own studio apartment. This again, is a separate topic, which cannot be appropriately addressed briefly, or perhaps ever with any level of rational logic, however it provided location. Thus, not only were we mobile, we had a center of operations. A place to start, end or make an evening. Oh, and did I neglect to mention that in Geneva in 1964 there did not seem to be a minimum drinking age? A half a liter of the local beer cost in the area of 50 US cents. Buying it in bulk - by the keg - it was cheaper than gas for the cars, soft drinks and just about anything else except milk. Its consumption was obligatory, and highly recommended in vast quantities.

In case it hasn't been clear up to this point, we were lost! We were outside of anything familiar! We were insecure! And, the hormones and testosterone (although I don't believe we called it that at the time) were galloping amuck in our bodies. Any environmental securities that might have been able to be developed by 16/17 year-old males had been exploded or evaporated. The environment was foreign. Most of us didn't understand the language, and we sure as hell didn't sympathize with the culture.

We were foreigners in a foreign land. Parental influence, if available, was going through its own crisis. Most were happy to believe that we had found "boys" like ourselves to bond with. Right! We joined like a roving band of thugs to RAISE HELL. Our anger and frustration - and we had at least as much as any other red-blooded American boys displaced and insecure - was venom, to be directed at someone else. And it was! "Here come the Jets like a bat out of Hell. Someone gets in our way, someone don't feel so well." We were however totally fair and impartial. We directed this at random and fully without prejudice.

The Landolt was a cafe-restaurant in Geneva, near the University. It had gained acclaim in the post WW I period when Lenin drank and philosophized there. By 1964, his influence was more story than fact, however, many of the University of Geneva students still went there to drink cannettes of beer. The six of us barely needed any encouragement, but "philosophizing" in the "birth place" of communism was a perfect rationale to consume in excess of 3 liters of beer per person on a given evening.

Of course, the philosophical leanings and more importantly, the academic discipline within our group left something to be desired. Drinking games helped us justify the consumption of two or three additional one-half liter mugs of Biere Cardinale. Drinking songs were de rigure. In our enlightened state, Langston's idiom "mother bear" became The Philosophy. Needless to say, during the subsequent days, upon return to the Quad at Ecolint, there were 5 "Mother Bears" (6 when Ted showed up at near-school hang-outs), who were ready to punctuate all phases and sentences - complete or other wise - with "mother bear" I'm not sure when it happened, but soon we were referred to as the "Mother Bears". We didn't mind. In fact, I believe that we each discovered ways to include the phase into everything we said. "Mother Bear" served as every one of the 8 parts of speech, although in retrospect, I believe its use as the predicate of a sentence was taking more than a little literary license.