By Donald H. Harrison

DEL MAR, Calif.— Although I briefly had met Hilda Pierce before,  I actually had the chance last Saturday night to sit down and talk with her and her husband Herman Slutzky.  I had looked forward to the encounter almost as eagerly as the first time my wife Nancy had met a pen pal  with whom she had been corresponding  since both were pre-teenagers in the Brownies.

Nancy and Gayle Cutler of New Bern, North Carolina,  had corresponded year in and year out through their dating years and Nancy's marriage before finally meeting face-to-face for the first time in 1971 when Nancy and I visited that former colonial capital.  The two pen pals celebrated July 4th together 11 years later when we took our children, Sandi and David, on a cross-country vacation in a motor home and met  the since- married Gayle Midyette,  her husband Don, and daughters Elizabeth and Kathryn.  Last summer, for only the third time, Nancy and Gayle met again, this time here in San Diego County, where they shared the joys of  grandmother-hood. Gayle and Elizabeth brought along grandson Jacob to meet our grandson Shor.  Imagine! Gayle and Nancy  have known each other almost a half century and they'd met only three times!

Nevertheless,  throughout those years, Nancy and Gayle have shared an intimate friendship because in their letters to each other they had told of  their experiences, recounted the news of their  families, and divulged their inner thoughts. There never was any awkwardness when they got together.  In their face-to-face encounters, they simply renewed a long-running conversation.  

The occasion for meeting Hilda and Herman was a delicious "beer-in-chicken" dinner at the home of Rocky Smolin and Marsha Sutton.  Herman is the father of  Marsha, an award-winning journalist who writes for The Voice of San Diego and the Carmel Valley News.  Marsha also used to report for the now defunct  San Diego Jewish Press-Heritage, when I was its editor, and it was through that connection my brief introduction to Hilda had occurred. 

As for "beer-in-chicken," you'll have to ask Rocky about the recipe, but it involves propping a chicken right on a beer can during cooking. Hey, I liked it. 

  Hilda Pierce and husband, Herman Slutzky

Recently Hilda reintroduced herself to me by e-mail.  She  informed me that she was completing her memoirs, and that she would like some technical help from an editor.
 
After we agreed upon a fee, I delved into Hilda's manuscript and knew that working with her would be a most enjoyable experience.  Although she is a painter by profession,  she easily could have pursued a successful literary career. Hilda has the artist's eye for detail and color.  As a reader, you can picture the events in her remarkable life as she narrates them—so visual are some of her descriptions.  

It turned out that you don't have to be pen pals over 50 years to get to know someone through correspondence.  Nor do you have to start as pre-teens as Nancy and Gayle did.  I am 60 and Hilda is in her 80s.  As we went section-by-section together through the story of her life, exchanging emails as this or that question arose, I began to feel that I really knew Hilda—and I liked her immensely. 

Assuming Hilda finds a suitable publisher, I think each person who reads her story will admire her indomitable spirit.  She grew up in a middle class Austrian home and was a teenager at the time of Anschluss. She watched in horror as  Hitler's motorcade came into Vienna, all the while fearing that if the cheering mob recognized that she was a Jew she might not ever get home. 

Maltreated by the Nazis, avoided by her former friends and neighbors, and certain that her family would be better off immigrating, she impulsively ran into the American consulate one rainy day and pleaded for an American visa.  Impossible, there was a quota!  But what was possible was for her to go to England under the auspices of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee.  Hilda  went, and was able through British contacts to obtain  visas for her parents too. Their reunion was short-lived; Hilda soon thereafter traveled through Nazi submarine-infested waters in a convoy across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States. By force of imagination, personality, and good letter writing,  Hilda  had persuaded Americans with her family's name—Harmel—to sponsor her sight unseen, despite the fact they were not relatives.

In her memoirs,  Hilda tells of her life as an immigrant in the United States.  She recaptures the moving scene of  her second reunification with her parents while World War II still was raging.  She helps us comprehend her career as an artist whose works today fills every stateroom and lobby of the Carnival cruise ship Fantasy and the lobbies of the ship's sister Imagination.   She confides the most personal feelings of a woman who was widowed twice, divorced once, and who now lives happily with  Herman, her fourth husband, in semi-retirement in the La Jolla area.  Today a typewriter keyboard feels the creative touch known before by her brushes.

Besides her landscapes and abstract paintings, Hilda also likes to sketch portraits—and she is able to translate this skill into her writing.  One of the first customers for her paintings was Adlai Stevenson, the two-time Democratic nominee for president of the United States and former governor of Illinois. How well she captures the nervousness and anticipation she felt in her home studio as she waited for him to arrive, and the graciousness Stevenson extended to all those who flocked to see him. In the 1960s, Hilda  returned to Austria to attend intensive workshops with the artist Oscar Kokoshka—and I found myself hanging on her descriptions not only of those classes, and Kokoshka's imperial style, but also her feelings about being back in her native country.

Hilda describes her meetings with Ted Arison, the legendary cruise ship figure who built Carnival Cruise into a nautical omnivore that has devoured such other cruise lines as Holland America Line, Princess Cruises, and Cunard Lines, and takes us inside the studio where she subsequently worked at a furious pace to have original art for 1,200 cabins and murals for 16 lobbies completed while Fantasy was still in the yard in Finland.

Wherever she traveled, Hilda blended  the colors of the landscape with the ironies of certain scenes and painted not just what she saw, but what she felt. To an amazing degree, she has been able to repeat this feat in her memoirs. By the time I concluded editing her book, I didn't just feel I knew  Hilda, I felt as if  I also knew the many people who were part of her life, and felt that I had traveled along side on her life's journey.

No wonder when we sat down together on Saturday night, the conversation was so effortless.  I knew then what Nancy and Gayle had discovered in 1971. Friendships grow in the atmosphere of self-revelation.