CATEGORY: UNIVERSITY YEARS
PHOTO: ENNO POERSCH (A later photo taken from the internet)

Enno Poersch was in the same year as I was in architecture at the University of Oregon.  I went through most of my classes with him.  He was one of the best designers in Design Class and made wonderful, artful presentations.  He was of German extraction.  His father had been in Hitler’s SS during the war. Somehow his parents made their way out of Germany, to the United States, and to Portland, Oregon.

In looks he was the Arian type that Hitler loved: tall, blonde, blue eyed.  In disposition, he was nothing like the German youth of the era in which he was born, or in which his father had been born.  He was kind, cheerful, personable, gentle, without a trace of arrogance–just eager and excited about whatever design projects we were doing.  We became friends.

At the end of winter term in our last year, Enno flunked a course called Structures: structural engineering.  It was a required course.  I was in the design work room when he came to tell me.  He was wearing a nylon jacket, and he kept worrying the lower edge of it between his thumb and forefinger.  He was so nervous that he had actually worn a hole in it.  He was worried about what his father would say.  His father had his heart set on his son being an architect.  Enno said that he didn’t know how to tell him, but that somehow he would have to.  He said that he hadn’t studied enough.  Because he found the course so difficult, he had let it slide and had been taking courses in theater instead.

I reminded him how well he had done in design.  He reminded me that it hadn’t helped his grade point, because design at the University of Oregon, a five hour course, was un-graded.  I said he could take the Structures class again, that I would help him.  I actually said that, even though I was lousy in Structures myself.  But I had studied so hard to get a C that I felt I really could help him.  He thanked me and said no: he had decided to leave and face the music at home.  But he lingered around, standing at my desk as if he had something more to say.  I waited.  I finally asked if there was something else he wanted to tell me.  He hesitated, but then he said no and left.  His face was pale.  He looked sick.  I felt terrible.  That was the last time I saw him.  A year or two later, one of my other class mates told me that Enno was going to Yale, taking set design.

Over thirty five years later, after Don and I moved back to Central Oregon from Port Townsend, and I had learned how to use a computer, I discovered that I could search to find people from my past life.   I thought about Enno and wondered if I could find him in that way.  I typed Enno Poersch into the search window.  His name came up immediately!  There were several listings that had his name in a headline at the top.  One was an obituary!  He was dead!  From it I learned that Enno had been born in 1945, two days after VE day, but it did not say where.  He had graduated from Yale.  He had been a successful set designer in New York City.  With several others he had started an AIDS research group: Gay Men’s Health Crisis.  He had died of AIDS in 1989 at the age of 45.

Enno was gay!  Could that have been what he wanted to tell me?  I am trying, even now, to imagine what I would have said to him at that time if he had told me that he was gay.  I would have been shocked.  I didn’t know anything about gay people then, and I would have had difficulty with such a thing.  He always had girl friends–beautiful girls looking at him adoringly.  Would I have said, “follow your heart”?  I don’t think so.  I would have been speechless.  I would have thought of his father being in the SS.  I would have thought of all the Jews, gypsies and homosexuals put to death during the war.  Maybe my first thought would have been to ask him if his father knew.  Would his father have disowned him?  He had a brother.  Would this have caused a split with his whole family?  If that were the case, I would have taken his hand in mine with tears in my eyes.

I hope Enno will be one of the first people I meet at my Cast Party.  Then I will give him such a big hug!