Introduction
In the summer of 1936 Bill Daniel (on the right, with the glasses), a young medical student, worked his way to Germany on a steamship with his friend Sherman Egan (on the left in the picture above). Bill kept a journal of his experiences on this trip and ten to twenty years later also wrote a summary of his experiences in Germany 1936. That's where it gets interesting. The two documents simply do not agree. They each paint a very different picture of the same trip. Use the links above to explore the differences and about Germany in 1936.
As for how I came to have these documents available to me, Bill Daniel was my grandfather and my grandmother has lent me a transcript of the original journal as
Bill Daniel, at age 22
well as the summary written a number of years later. The transcript of the journal is 62 typed pages, and the summary is 15 typed pages. The summary contains no date as to when it was created, I only know that it is ten to twenty years older because that is what my grandmother has told me (although you can tell by the tone of the writing that it must have been written much later). The only picture I have from this trip is the one above, which is a shame. My grandfather was an avid photographer, and he mentions numerous times the pictures he is taking, but I do not have them. So numerous are my grandfather's photos that it could take a long time to sort through and find them, assuming they are still in existence. If I were nearer I could do the sorting, but my grandmother is in Alabama and I am in Virginia, so there's not much chance of that. So, the pictures here and the picture of my grandmother on the Biography page are originals, but all of the pictures on the Comparison page are merely to help illustrate the story, they were not taken by my grandfather.