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William Logan is not currently a member of MENSA, but he has given us permission to post excerpts from his autobiography, "A Lane Less Travelled".
The author understands the terms and conditions.
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"A Lane Less Travelled"
by William C Logan

[after the war, in 1951]

I can recall being in the N.A.F.F.I. canteen and overhearing an amazing conversation between two regular soldiers. I looked at my watch and in sixty seconds counted a certain four-letter word being used seventy five times. It was used as noun, verb, adjective, adverb and preposition. This might not seem so strange now but seemed to me to be exceptional then.

After a very enjoyable two weeks full of new experiences I travelled by train with Alan Piggott to London. We were met by Alan's older brother Spence and treated to lunch in the Russell Hotel. In the evening we went to The Palladium to see a comedian called Red Skelton and next morning we went to Victoria Station and met up with a group of students heading for Germany and led by Ray Davey. We travelled via Dover, Ostende, and Brussels (where W Ramsay had his photograph taken beside the pissing boy) and arrived at Cologne about Mid night. We then moved on to a little town called Leverkussen where we were to stay with families. I stayed with a family called Herdickerhoff which had several children about our age. The father (like most of Leverkussen) worked in the local Bayer factory. He was pleasant enough but serious and formal and shook hands with all the family morning and evening.

The idea of the trip was for us to help to clear some of the rubble still lying in heaps from the bombing, but it was more important as a sort of reconciliation gesture. I think Ray Davey regretted much of the bombing that took place and especially in such places as Dresden. It was amazing to see the Cathedral in Cologne standing almost intact and the whole area round about was a mass of rubble. We did spent quite a bit of time clearing rubble but also had contact with their young people although this was limited by the language barrier.

We had an extensive tour of the Bayer factory which was the main industry in Leverkussen. We also had a visit to Dusseldorf, a tour of the Henkel Champagne factory and a boat trip on the Rhine from Bonn to Koningswinter which was where I spent my 21st birthday. For the second week we stayed in Mainz. Here the people were much poorer and seemed to have lost heart.

I remember being in a small Church in Mainz and there was a War Memorial plaque with a long list of those who had died on the Russian front and most of them were aged sixteen or seventeen.

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