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By Dale Heberlig, Sentinel Reporter

Last updated: Wednesday, March 19, 2008 2:44 PM EDT

Talking with Robert and Eleanor Ferguson is like thumbing through a travelogue of recent history.

During his 83 years, Robert Ferguson watched the Berlin Wall spring up in 1961, peered through binoculars across the 38th parallel into North Korea a decade later, saw his picture appear in newspapers over the words “El Gringo” during the nationalization of the Panama Canal in the late 1970s and saw first-hand the destruction of Kuwait by Iraqi soldiers as they fled before the Desert Storm advance of the United States military in 1991.

Educator

Ferguson’s wife of 63 years -- Eleanor -- was at his side or nearby in the background for much of this.

An educator for his entire adult life -- except for three years as a Marine in the World War 2 Pacific theater -- Ferguson spent much of his professional life overseas as an administrator of the Department of Defense Dependent Schools for children of U.S. military stationed abroad or for State Department assisted schools.

Bob Ferguson has stops in 85 countries worldwide. Eleanor Ferguson, 82, lists 61 countries in her travel itinerary.

Link to Shippensburg

With early roots in western Pennsylvania and ties to central Pennsylvania, the Fergusons chose Shippensburg for their retirement.

The octogenarians took the time for a trip down memory lane recently.

“It’s the first time we’ve really thought about these things in a long time,” Bob Ferguson said.

Bob graduated in 1950 from what is now Indiana University of Pennsylvania. While there he met Ralph Heiges, who later became president at Shippensburg State College.

While working as a high school guidance counselor in western Pennsylvania, Ferguson visited Heiges in Shippensburg and made an offhand comment that he’d stay in “this beautiful valley” if he had a job.

It wasn’t long before he was employed in the Big Spring school district from 1956 to 1959.

During this time, Eleanor earned a degree at Shippensburg State, graduating in 1958.

Went to Germany

By 1959, the couple was in Germany, where they spent eight years educating children of active-duty U.S. military personnel.

Bob Ferguson was a guidance counselor, then educational specialist and, finally, assistant superintendent of 13 schools throughout Bavaria.

Eleanor still finds use for a vintage ski coat purchased 46 years ago in the Alps. The red jacket shielded her at least once this winter while she cleared the sidewalk of snow.

While Bob’s job was a full-time executive post, Eleanor worked as a teacher when she could. Unable to take a permanent position since it would have been a conflict to be hired by her husband, she taught on a substitute basis whenever possible.

Not all the Fergusons’ memories are as tense as the Panama Canal, Berlin Wall or Kuwaiti war variety.

Eleanor has fond memories of driving snowy mountainous roads of Germany in a Volkswagen Beetle en route to ski slopes.

“Munich was close to military recreation areas where you could ski or boat, and we went often,” Eleanor recalls. “We found many mysterious things in the small towns.”

Among the sights they witnessed was a passion play in the Bavarian village of Oberammergau where townfolk have acted out the life and death of Christ since the 1600s, when the town pledged to perform the play every 10 years if God spared them from a wave of bubonic plague. The play now entertains up to 500,000 people when it’s performed every decade.

While assigned to Germany, Bob supervised a school in Dachau -- the site of the infamous Nazi concentration camp -- visited Nuremberg and “stood where Hitler stood” to deliver speeches. He also viewed the Warsaw ghetto.

A memento of their German experience occupies prime space on crowded shelves in the Fergusons’ dining room. The brass coffee service -- tooled by a Bavarian metalsmith -- is made of brass casings of spent artillery shells fired during World War II.

Berlin Wall

Bob and Eleanor have poignant memories of the birth of the Berlin Wall that separated the German capital and split families for 28 years.

“We were home stateside during the summer when they started building the wall,” Bob recounts, “and, we were anxious to get back to see what was going on.”

Returning before the wall was completed, Bob says it was a very sad sight.

“We watched people wave back and forth across the wall,” he says. “People from the west would gather at the wall and people from the east would go up on balconies and rooftops to wave to family members. Those on the east were not allowed to approach the wall to talk to their relatives.”

He says stairs and platforms were erected in the west to enable people to see over the wall, “but they were tightly controlled because you can get yourself in trouble up there.”

To the Pacific

When Bob left Germany in 1967, he moved on to Hawaii where he administered defense dependent schools in Korea, Japan, Okinawa, Taiwan and the Philippines from 1967 to 1973.

Although the nearest dependent school was in Midway 1,300 miles away, he says he thinks the commanding general wanted him in Hawaii for specific reason.

Air Force Gen. Lucius D. Clay Jr. was dictatorial and vocal, Bob says.

“I think I was headquartered in Hawaii so the general could chew me out when he heard anything about the schools he didn’t like,” Bob says. I’d stand in front of him and get chewed out and then be on a plane somewhere to attend to a problem he identified.”

On one of these trips, Ferguson had the dubious pleasure of touring a forward observation post along the demilitarized zone that still separates North and South Korea along the 38th parallel.

“I looked through binoculars into North Korea, and there were the North Koreans looking right back through their binoculars,” he says.

Eleanor was not along on that foray.

“I was nervous when he told me about it,” she says.

Not quite retired

Ready to retire and look after his ailing parents in 1973, Bob was convinced, instead, to accept a posting in Washington, D.C., as chairman of the curriculum division, where he was asked to consolidate the curricula of defense schools for dependents around the globe.

He was in Panama in that capacity during the nationalization of the canal. His mission was to merge the canal zone schools with the defense schools when the canal zone was dissolved by the Panama Canal Treaty.

Bob was unpopular with canal zone teachers, because their fringe benefits were far better than those offered by their new employers -- the defense department.

He was taken aback to see his likeness on Spanish-language newspapers with the words “El Gringo Ferguson” beneath his photo.

He ascended to the deputy director post and did a hitch as acting director of 180,000 defense schools worldwide and the 14,000 teachers who taught there, leaving that slot in 1983.

More federal schools

Still only 58, Bob succumbed to the recruitment efforts of the Department of State.

“They said, we know you, we want you, when can you start?”

He spent the next 10 years overseeing state department-assisted schools, flying twice yearly to locations in the Mediterranean and Middle East.

Bob actually did retire in 1990, but was persuaded to stay on as a consultant because of his familiarity with the sheiks and ruling families in the region.

He winces at the memory of zoo animals in Kuwait slaughtered by Iraqi soldiers, and the looting of items that were boxed and sent to Baghdad.

Bob says 108 computers purchased by the state department for Kuwaiti schools were wantonly destroyed by Iraqi officers.

“They destroyed the new stuff, and kept the big, outdated computers and sent them back to Iraq,” he says. “They thought bigger was better.”

Life in Shippensburg

Ironically, the Fergusons live in a home next to the house where their old friend Ralph Heiges retired to when he stepped down as president of Shippensburg State College in 1969.

Once quite active in the Shippensburg Historical Society and as members of the choir at Second Presbyterian Church in Carlisle, the Fergusons are dialing it back a bit.

Genealogy occupies a lot of Bob’s time, along with photography and surfing the Web.

Eleanor says photographs taken over eight decades tend to make the two of them the family historians.

“We get a lot of requests from family members, especially their grandchildren, who are curious about the family and want old photos,” she says. “We try to respond to everyone.”

Eleanor says maintaining contact with old friends nurtured during overseas assignments is also important.

“When you spend so much time out of the country without family, your friends become your family, and it’s important to stay in touch with them.”