Life More Sweet Than Bitter BY PHILA HEIMANN
when I landed in New York and saw the conditions there by the harbor, I said to my husband, "Come on, let's go home." But we went on and lived in Milwaukee for a while, then for six months in Illinois, and after that I wanted to come to Salt Lake. Being from Austria, a beautiful green country, when I walked up Main Street and saw those barren hills I again said, "Let's go home." I know now that it was a blessing that I didn't have the $200 to return home, because the war came and I was very happy to be here. My very first job in Salt Lake City was as a knitting instructor at ZCMI, showing the American ladies how to knit and crochet. T h e n I began my family. During the war I was investigated by the FBI, but I didn't realize it at the time. Dr. McKay had sent two girls, two secretaries at the FBI office, to me; they wanted to learn German but couldn't attend night classes. At the time I had a child about three years old and was expecting my second one. T h e girls came twice a week. One day they said, "One of our agents would like to learn German." I said, "Well that's fine." So he called me on the phone, and I told him all the books he should buy and he bought them. T h e n he came two hours earlier than had been arranged and took his lesson. T h e next time he came an hour later than was arranged; he never came at the time that was arranged. But after three or four weeks he decided that he was not going to learn German anymore, that he was now interested in Japanese. Later on I found out that during the war some German spies living in this country posed as language teachers. So wdien that agent found out that those two girls were learning German from a private teacher he thought, "Aha, here I am going to find a spy." He came at unexpected hours and always found that I was very harmless and that there were a lot of people there. I was not a spy, so then he decided he would learn Japanese. I taught my first class at the University of Utah in 1946. Most of the students were returned GIs, but none of them was as r u d e to me as they were to some others, probably because I was an Austrian — I don't know. Hitler was an Austrian. But anyway, 46 students and for C I O M I N G T O AMERICA, MY FIRST IMPRESSION
Mrs. Heimann is a resident of Salt Lake City.
