Page 9 - Winterling's Chasing the Wind
P. 9
CHAPTER 01 - Childhood Days
On September 1, 1931, I was born in Pine Beach, NJ in a house on US 9, the main
highway between New York City and Atlantic City. My earliest thoughts about life
occurred one day when I was less than two years old. As I stood on the lawn looking at
the pine trees, the sky, and the cars passing by, I wondered where I came from. It was
not until I became a young adult that the first piece to the puzzle fell into place.
In 1951, my grandfather, George Winterling, wrote me a detailed letter describing his
life and our family history going back to the middle of the 19th century. The European
family roots are in Ashe, the Czech Republic near the Black Forest.
As a young man, he took a job in nearby Oelsnitz, Germany, where he met and married
Laura Jakel. Together, they had three children; my father, Otto Gustav, a second son,
Beno, and a daughter, Rosa.
Around 1910, the family moved to Belgium, from which he was later transferred to a
German Tapestry company in Toronto, Canada. When his contract expired in 1914,
being aware of the threat of war in Europe, he decided to settle in the United States. The
