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When Norina and Elizabeth left New York in the late 1940s, someone was needed to host the Monday night Baba group and connect with newcomers. The issue was brought to Baba, and many names were presented to Him, each met with a negative. Finally, someone said, “Fred and Ella Winterfeldt?” “Those are the ones,” Baba gestured.[i]
Fred and Ella were German immigrants to America. They first met when Fred, who managed apartment complexes in New York City, looked out a basement-level window and saw a pair of legs getting out of a taxi. “I recognized those legs,”[ii] he laughed, recollecting that he somehow knew that woman would be his future wife. He managed to start a conversation, and soon they married, without ceremony, beginning a decades-long love affair.
The love affair was not between just them, but the One who loved them both most. They first heard of Meher Baba while Fred was renting an apartment to Murshida Ivy Duce, the head of Sufism Reoriented, in 1948. Her fur coat fell open to reveal a pin with Baba’s face shining out from it. “Who’s that?” Fred asked her.
A few years later, at three in the afternoon on May 10, 1952, in the Lagoon Cabin, Fred and Ella met Baba in person for the first time. Ella saw Him first and fell into His wide outstretched arms “like a tired babe or little bird.”[iii] “It just felt like coming home,”[iv] she said. Fred, who had had some intellectual trouble fully believing that Baba was God, described looking at Baba’s face over Ella’s shoulder in that moment. “I felt a physical impact right here in the middle of my chest. Something physically moved in there; it was not painful or hurtful but joyful. I recognized in this being who embraced Ella, I recognized that He is everything—Everything. And He has been ever since Everything to me since that moment.”[v]
There are a thousand stories to be written about Fredella, as Baba called them, or about Fred and Mush, as Fred affectionately called his beloved wife. For now, I will focus on who they became for Baba’s many lovers, especially the young ones, at Meher Center.
After years of opening their New York apartment to Baba’s family every Monday night (and most days in between), Baba’s wish that Fredella move to Myrtle Beach was fulfilled when Elizabeth Patterson asked them to live and work at the Center as gatekeepers and caretakers. Their presence in Pine Lodge, the Gateway at the time, felt to many like having a favorite aunt and uncle there. Upon arrival, each person would be greeted warmly, and often would be ushered into the back room for a chat—especially if they were going through hard times, which Fred always managed to pick up on, no matter how hard they tried to hide it. Ella would make sure they were well-stocked with apple juice and cookies.
It was around this time that what Fred called the “bushfire” of young people coming to Baba was in full swing. These youth, who he dubbed “Baba’s Hobbits,” flocked to Fred and Ella for their sound advice and experience with Baba. The couple would give them what they were hungry for. “We couldn’t tell them enough,” said Fred, “they wanted to know more about Him and live by His words.” And he went on to say that, through hearing about Baba, “they began a new establishment of their own, self-discipline within themselves. Baba told them the right way to be true to themselves.”[vi]
But it wasn’t only what Fred and Ella said to these young people—it was what they did. One young woman who worked with the couple at Pine Lodge recounts that after her car broke down, Fred and Ella started picking her up at her apartment each morning (sometimes an adventure, as Fred appeared patently unwilling to stop at the stop sign at the end of her street).[vii] A young man tells of the time that he was welcomed to the Center by Fred and Ella on a rainy day, realizing that he hadn’t brought the right gear for the weather. A few hours later he walked into his cabin to find a new raincoat, in his size, lying on the bed.[viii] “They were so generous,” says Jeff Wolverton. “I mean, Baba, He knew who He was picking there, who He was choosing to look after us, to care for us … Baba once said, ‘Everyone is first in importance and no one is second.’ Fred and Ella embodied that saying— each one was their favorite.”
Fred and Ella often showed how much they treasured people by taking them out to dinner—and, famously, never letting them pay. One of these young people was John Welshons, who met Fred when he called to make his first reservation at the Center. Over the years, he would go out to dinner with Fred and Ella at the Reef restaurant; Fred would always try to insist that he order a big steak. They even took John’s dad out to dinner when he came (who finally took Fred up on the steak). “Fred was the first spiritual buddy I ever had, and in many ways the best spiritual buddy I ever had,” says John. “He felt like my brother, my father, my uncle, my best friend.”
Eventually, there came a day when Fred and Ella took John out to what seemed like an ordinary dinner. Fred ordered a bottle of wine, which he never did, proclaiming loudly to Ella in his German accent, “This is a special occasion!” The dinner involved laughter, and tears, a sweet bright moment that still stands out in John’s memory. And it was the last dinner they would ever have together. The next time that John came, Fred was dying of pancreatic cancer. “I’ll never forget the hug we had that last visit, when we both knew he was gonna die,” John recounts. “He put his arms around me and I’ll never forget the feeling of his cheek against mine, and I started to sob, and he said ‘I love you,’ and that was my last moment with Fred.” Whenever Ella asked Fred what she would do without him when he passed, Fred would tell her, "Don’t worry, Mush, Baba and I will come for you.” Eight years later, they did.
Fred and Ella’s Baba family missed their constant, personal love, their humor and good cheer, their apple juice and cookies. But perhaps they kept what was the most beautiful and the most important thing about Fred and Ella: the example of their love for the One who had hand-picked them to play that role. Fred and Ella had a plaque on their wall that they looked at every day: “Don’t lose heart, but keep me in your heart and know I am always with you.” They left that plaque, what Fred called their “staff to lean on,” with the family they left behind—"Baba’s words, Baba’s love and His grace.”
[i] Jeff Wolverton, Personal Communication
[ii] “Fredella: A Bouquet of Memories” by Filis Frederick with Jeff Wolverton, The Awakener Magazine, Vol. 21, No. 2, p. 12
[iii] Lord Meher, Online Edition, by Bhau Kalchuri, p. 3063
[iv] Fred and Ella Winterfeldt, Myrtle Beach, 1971, video by Irwin Luck
[v] Ibid.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] "Remembering Fred and Ella Winterfeldt," video of BabaZoom meeting, Meher Baba Family Worldwide
[viii] “Fred and Ella” by Robert Dreyfuss
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