Published: Saturday, June 17, 2006
Updated: Saturday, June 17, 2006
OCEAN CITY — Peggy Lloyd knew a historic opportunity when she saw one.
It was 1962, just one year after the Berlin Wall was erected, and the Atlantic City native was chaperoning Miss America Marie Beale Fletcher on a U.S. military tour of Europe.
At Checkpoint Charlie, one of the wall's famous border crossings, she walked past an armed West German soldier and approached the imposing concrete structure.
Her young protege warned her not to go any farther.
“I told her, ‘What are you doing? They're going to shoot you!'” Beale Fletcher recalled.
“I said, ‘Nonsense, I'm smiling,'” Lloyd said.
Lloyd picked at the base of the wall and scavenged two souvenirs, one for each of them.
On Friday, Lloyd brought that shapeless hunk of rock to the Music Pier for an impromptu reunion with her former charge.
Lloyd, 92, chaperoned 12 Miss Americas around the world for the pageant. Now she lives in the Gardens, a north-end neighborhood in Ocean City.
On Friday, she reunited with Beale Fletcher who is in town today to judge tonight's Miss New Jersey Scholarship Pageant. Lloyd brought a scrapbook full of pictures and mementos with her. Lloyd was a teacher who volunteered with the pageant for 10 years before going on the road with the winners.
“She made every place we went to come alive,” Beale Fletcher recalled.
That day in Europe, the two Americans watched distraught West Germans try to make contact with their family members over the border by waving handkerchiefs from rooftops. Many were crying.
Beale Fletcher, too, still has her chunk of the Berlin Wall. She keeps it tucked safely away in a velvet bag like a precious diamond necklace.
“It's an ugly rock. But it reminds me that freedom is never free,” she said.
TKPN
PageantCast Home
Frappr Map
Podcast Pickle Page
Our Feed
One Click Subscribe in Juice
One Click Subscribe in iTunes
No comments:
Post a Comment