AN INVENTION ANNO 1967 BY
REV. EMIRITUS JENS KOEFOED-JESPERSEN

my father as a young promising student

In 1960 Rev. Jens Koefoed-Jespersen married the nurce Lis-Annette Oldenburg, and they decided to have 12 children. In 1961 Niels was born and named after a kind uncle. Eleven months later I arrived and was named Ruth for "routine". After another 15 months Anna came, but she was called Bebe (abbrevitation of "to pray").

Rev. Koefoed-Jespersen drew portraits of all 12 deciples, as models for what he wanted, and they hung in a row under the ceiling in his office. But deciples are not always as well-behaved as children. Therefore, my father invented the spanking machine for naughty children in 1967. He hung a drawing of the spanking machine in the childrens room, the machine itself was placed in the attic.

In the fall of 1999, more than 30 yeas later, I asked my father, if I could recreate his invention . This request made him proud and delighted, and we decided to cooperate on the reconstruction of the invention. But it turned out, that all the background materials, the drawings as well as the machine, had dissapeared over the years, for example when we had moved from the vicarage. We needed to sift our memories for the details.

During my Christmas visit to Denmark in 2000 I asked the whole family to help by drawing, how they remembered the spanking machine. Every body stood behind the idea and understood the importance of reinventing Rev. Emiritus Jens Koefoed-Jespersen's unforgettable invention.

An amazing event took place in the summer of 2001, when the family gathered. My brother had after months of searching managed to find the original drawing of the spanking machine made by our father. And we all got surprised.