Every time Hans Carstensen walks past Memorial Church, he laughs. He is transported back to a “highly unusual Stanford experience” he had during New Student Orientation.

Carstensen today is an active member of the Stanford Alumni Association board of directors and an advisory council member for the Bill Lane Center for the American West. He has had a successful career in finance. But in 1966, he was doing what every new freshman on campus does.

“It was a… beautiful evening,” he recalled. “I was out with a crowd of my roommates. As we wandered around the campus, the girls’ dorms all emptied out and joined us.” 

The group wandered around and watched the band play. Soon, the performance finished and the band left, but Hans found himself in Main Quad with one of his friends: a young lady. They wanted to continue the night.

“We decided that Memorial Church would be a pretty neat place to see when it was all lit up in the evening. So we walked inside, and certainly it is,” he said.

Hans and his friend wandered around inside the church, admiring each mosaic.

“Then we decided we would go up into the balcony, where we could see it closer up on the ceiling,” he said. “When all of a sudden, we heard a door slam, and then another door slammed and a third door slammed.” 

Hans remembered feeling confused.

“We looked at each other,” he said, “and I thought, holy cow, this is getting a little strange. Maybe we better check on this. And she looked at me, and she said, ‘Well, don’t you think this is really romantic?’ And I said, ‘I do. I think it’s very romantic. And then she turned to me and kissed me and I said, ‘I think this is a was really a great idea.’”

Hans and his friend sat together for a little while, kissing a few more times. Finally, he told her, “You know, I think we ought to be worried about this, because we may well be locked in here and have to spend the night.”

Hans and his friend wandered downstairs to check the doors. All the doors in the main level were locked.

“We went into the back of the church, behind the alder area, where the Reverend and his staff do whatever they do, and none of that area was locked,” he recalled “We found one door that was not locked entirely… It was a double door, and one of the doors on the right side moved and the other door didn’t.”

So the two wanderers “jim[mied] the lock that was still holding that door” with a set of car keys, and after some work, the door sprung open. They did not linger at the church.

“We decided we better make our exit and head back to the dorm, which we did … And so that was the end of the discussion,” he said.

But they stayed friends. “We really, both of us had a wonderful time doing this, and remarked to each other later on, probably within the next day or two, when we saw one another at the post office or whatever, we remarked that it was really an extraordinary time and great fun,” he said.

Hans had set the year off on a great rule-breaking note. His fondest memories include bringing kegs of beer down to Stanford stadium at seven in the morning, building bonfires in Lake Lagunita, and holding an automobile race around the lake called Lagunita Seca (a play on Laguna Seca, a famous race at the time). He had so much fun during his fall quarter that when he saw his GPA, he was in for a bit of a surprise. According to Stanford, a 1.2 average was not acceptable, and Hans realized he needed to change his priorities a bit.

In winter, he changed his schedule. Instead of hanging out by the lake, he spent most of his time in UGLI, the Undergraduate Library, and by the end of his freshman year, he was doing well, studying economics and political science. He was enjoying academics on campus. Then, in his sophomore year, he had a “life altering” academic experience.

“I went to the Stanford in Germany campus,” Hans explained. “I did really well academically… I travelled all around Western Europe. It spoiled me rotten.”

He spent “almost every free hour” with his host family and, immersed in the culture, he began to “speak German like a German.”

And then, something terrible happened. On Aug. 20, 1968, Russia invaded then-Czechoslovakia. At the time, Hans, his Stanford classmates, and his German host “siblings” were staying in Prague. That morning his bed and breakfast hosts, he recalled, “grabbed us out of our bed[s]… and threw us in the back of a truck, took us to the train station and sent us out of Czechoslovakia on that train.” They made it safely onto the train, but then the train was stopped.

They “were stopped by the authorities in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia on the way to Vienna, and that’s when they took my two German siblings off,” he said.

That was the last time Hans saw his host siblings. In the years following the incident, he remained in close contact with his host family, trying to get information from the State Department and the CIA on his host siblings’ disappearance.

It was a “sad ending” to the trip, Hans said, but he learned a lot from the experience. He returned to campus right in the middle of the Vietnam War protests.

“It was a pretty rugged transition,” he remembered. “There were tactical squads launching tear gas at protestors.”

The protests didn’t last for his whole time on campus. Eventually, they died down, and the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam. Meanwhile, Hans was rounding out his undergraduate journey with degrees in economics and political science. He didn’t leave Stanford after he graduated.

“I couldn’t leave,” he said.

Instead, he worked for the University for a few years and then got a degree in finance from the business school.

Hans can’t pick out one favorite memory from his time at Stanford. But he remembers that he had “favorite experiences” from his time as a member of the Stanford Flying Club.

Flying “ended up being quite a tool for me,” he said., “Because, for example, when the Rolling Stones came… the traffic on the roads was so bad that I had classmates coming to me and saying, ‘Hey, can you fly us over.'”

He continued: “So I did that.”

Hans advised current students to try things that they were uncomfortable with. “Heck, I’d never been outside the United States when I went to Germany,” he said. “All of those things made me nervous and somewhat uncomfortable because I had no experience with them, but they turned out to, without a doubt, in every instance, be the most rewarding things I did while an undergraduate.

“I’m a big believer that if… everything is really comfortable… go look for something that you’re curious about, but makes you uncomfortable.”