Heidi Webber’s letter to the Sun Journal included this article and photo about the Candy Bomber in Berlin, published decades after the candy runs over Tempelhof Airport. The article recalls the memories of two men, in photo inset, who remember watching for landings there when they were children and who each insist they are the boy pictured facing the camera.
As I read through the paper on Feb. 17, seeing the article “Candy Bomber’ who dropped sweets during Berlin airlift dies at 101,” it brought back memories from my childhood in Berlin, Germany, and stories about the “Candy Bomber” — but we called him “Rosine Bomber,” or “Raisin Bomber.”
I thought people might like to know about it from a real live person, for I lived through the Blockade of Berlin from 1948-49.
At the time, we read in our paper about these candy drops from airplanes, which landed at Tempelhof Airport every three minutes, bringing food and coal into the besieged city.
How often I had hope such a plane would fly over our school and let down little parachutes with some sweets falling down, but the landing was not near where we lived.
I have been living in Maine since 1954, mostly in Wilton, but also out in Industry where I had a small house, for I wanted to sponsor my brother to come. So I did a little farming on one acre of land, and had goats, geese, ducks and chickens.
I did only organic gardening; no poison stuff.
But it did not work out, for they would not let him come to America.
I sold my place in Industry and lived in an apartment in Farmington for three years, and then moved to Wilton.
I first worked at Norwock Shoe in North Jay, then at Farmington Shoe, then at Bass Shoe, first as a stitcher and later in the warehouse.
Now, I am an old woman. I will be 88 years in May, but my faith is still in the Lord.
When I was born in 1934, I weighed three and a half pounds; no one thought I would live more than eight hours. But my mother’s parents kept me; they had to borrow a goat for milk because I could not drink cow’s milk.
I can only say that I am a survivor of World War II, with its bombing and killing, and the time of the Blockade of Berlin, when there was much hunger there. But, now I have my freedom here and all things because of our Heavenly Father.
Too bad that most of the people here have forgotten him.
Heidi Webber, Dryden
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