The Playground

For the 875 students of the war-ravaged high school on Hamburg's grey Thedestrasse, the prospect of ever getting a proper place to play seemed just about hopeless. Then, one day in 1950, Teacher Walter Pareik spotted an ad in a local paper: a certain farmer was offering to pay 2.20 Deutsche Marks (52-c-) for no Ibs. of potato peels for hog feed. If one farmer was willing to spend that kind of money, reasoned Teacher Pareik, why not others? Perhaps the Thedestrasse high school should go into business.

Since then, every student at the school has been involved in Aktion Kartoffel-schale (Operation Potato Pee1). Each night they collected peels from their homes and from restaurants; each morning they lugged them to school to be weighed. For every 5.5 Ibs., a student would get one point, and one student earned as many as 250 points in the course of six months. Finally, the students had enough in the kitty (11,000 DM) to make a down payment on a new playground.

But it was the sort of playground that even the most optimistic of them never dreamed of having. Last week Teacher Pareik led his first batch of charges to the rolling countryside outside of town to look the place over. Sure enough, there it was :

a genuine German Schloss, complete with park and pond, now owned by the proud potato-peel tycoons of Thedestrasse.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.