German tanks are indestructible!

[uwe]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/14/volkswagen-van-palisades-fire



My son Leon was/is actually there, he lives in Topanga which is right behind Pacific Palisades. He spent the weekend ad hoc firefighting with some of his friends, putting out smaller fires in the canyon, saving pets left behind (horses among them which they rode out of the canyon), carrying an old lady with walking inability out of a house, hosing water and cutting fire accelerating shrubs. Plus being - by coincidence - interviewed by a German news team reporting about the fires (with his friends jeering "He's our token Kraut!" ). We received quite a few very vivid pictures from him via WhatsApp, let me tell you! 

Topanga seems to be safe now. Where he lives, fires erupted very close (walking distance), but the estate (not his 😀, he's only rented a small pool guest house from his boss - shop and production facilities are in Venice which was not stricken by fires) was miraculously spared. Not everyone in Topanga was that lucky.

[4stringer77]

Congrats on raising an upstanding young man and I'm glad he's okay. I see a red pickup there too. Looks like a Dodge?

[uwe]

Leon has already quipped: "Now where's my Green Card?" 😂

[Ken]

Absolutely fantastic, Uwe.  What a great kid you have.

[uwe]

It's interesting. In Germany, Leon was always more the loner type, the angry contrarian kid, nothing offered in Frankfurt ever really appealed to him. And then against all odds (and via living in Paris), he did make his way to America and in that artists & creative people/alternative lifestyle/neo-hippie bubble/hub that seemingly only exists in California, he finally found and embraced community and a much larger friends & peers group than he ever had at home. He spent Christmas on the Indian reservation-located farm of a friend's parents near Cortez, CO, feeding livestock, riding horses, repairing fences, building a shed, digging ditches, doing cowboy/farmhand stuff, he loved it, even if it meant getting up at 5:00 am.

He was obviously looking for something which he has now - at 30 - found. Topanga is a long ways from Frankfurt, but we're all happy for him. We always knew that he did not have a conventional professional career cut out for him, but that he would end up designing cowboy hats on the West Coast or Lucchese boots in Texas was far from our minds or reasonable expectations. Currently, he's wondering whether a move from California to Texas might not be in order ...

[Son of Dave W]

That's fantastic to read and hear, Uwe.  Sounds like a fine upstanding man/token Kraut   And sounds like he is doing great things in CA.

[uwe]

Thanks, I sometimes rub my eyes at it. He's now part of creating and selling American mythology (he was the artistic and settings/locations advisor for the ad reel below), an America that hardly exists anymore if it ever existed at all, an urban visualization of rural life ...

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[Basvarken]

Good to read he is safe and helping people and animals to get safe.
And nice to read he has found what he was looking for, all the way in Topanga.

[Pilgrim]

It's great to have a kid who finds THAT thing they enjoy and are comfortable with. And a sincere well done and thank you for his actions during the fire. Uwe must be very proud of that young man.

[uwe]

Don't we all want our kids to eventually find something that fulfills them? Leon was determined to do it his way. He never had a plan B either, subscribing to the view that if you have a plan B, then plan A will never come to fruition. I'd be lying if that didn't have me worried sometimes. Talent is one thing (I never doubted that, it was visible from his early childhood on), being discovered or finding your niche quite another. He was still 15 when he left home to move to London with a rock band, asking me the poignant question, "If I don't do this now, when would be the right time, dad?"

What followed was an odyssey London-Berlin-Amsterdam-Paris-LA music/modeling/studying fashion & design/a tailor apprenticeship, but eventually it led to where he is now. When he was a toddler/small child, he had two favorite utensils to which he hung on night and day: one was a rubber-coated hammer, the kind you use for camping, the other one of my wife's make-up brushes. We always joked about to where that might lead ... 😂

[Dave W]

This is great! He was definitely in the right place at the right time.

VW vans, though...as an old friend of mine used to say, if yours broke down on the road, you were scared to leave it b/c they were so unprotected and dangerous in case of a front collision.

[Darrol]

That's awesome that he was able to be so helpful during the fires.

It's been absolutely insane out here. I'm personally closer to the other Eaton fire we had that took out a huge chunk of Altadena/Pasadena and while I don't think I know someone that has been directly impacted, there are a lot of people who know at least one person who lost everything.

[uwe]

VW vans, though...as an old friend of mine used to say, if yours broke down on the road, you were scared to leave it b/c they were so unprotected and dangerous in case of a front collision.

But Dave, trust my son to not content himself with anything as Old World as a 'VW Bus' (the German term for a Volkswagen van)! 🤣 In his never ending quest for assimilation to all things Americana - you have no idea to what lengths my son will go to create an illusion of 'natural' authenticity ... - , he of course drives an original late 70s Ford woody pick up truck with extra-wide tires and aftermarket raised suspension - exactly the kind of car you sensibly need in LA to get from A to B if you're wearing original 50s Levi's and used Vietnam combat boots ... 😂

I have doubts if crash test results would be much better than with a Volkswagen van though. An added benefit is certainly that Leon's car mechanic capabilities have improved in leaps and bounds since he got that (project of a) car! Last it broke down because the fuel tank leaked ... 🙄 This with the kid who as a boy refused to play with toy cars at all preferring Orc armies. 🤗

[ilan]

What a relief!

You missed a point, by the way - the VW bus is the exact blue that Rickenbacker copied for their 70s Azureglo.

[uwe]

Babyblau - hugely popular in Germany in the 60s and early 70s, always a terrible color!