Dunedin has changed hugely since Dale Timblin last visited the city in 1958, as a visiting United States navy serviceman during ''Operation Deep Freeze''.
''I remember the Octagon was all flowers- I remember that vividly,'' Mr Timblin (79), of San Diego, California, said yesterday.
On his earlier visits, the Octagon's flower beds were a blaze of colour and trolley buses were running in the city.
The trolley buses and those central flower beds have since gone, but this week, during his first visit to Dunedin in 57 years, he noticed the flourishing cafe culture in the central city.
Accompanying him this time are wife Berta and two of their children, Janey Jordan and Cindy McDonald.
Despite the changes, Dunedin still had a special place in his heart, as a friendly, welcoming port city he encountered during his overseas service aboard US navy destroyer-escort Brough.
In some foreign ports during the Cold War there had been an attitude of ''Yanks go home'', but in a much friendlier Dunedin the message was ''Yanks come home with us''.
Many families invited US servicemen home for meals, and several US sailors married women they met in Dunedin.
''I quickly made friends with some of the locals and was welcomed into their homes,'' he said.
Brough was based at Port Chalmers in the spring and summer of 1956-57 and 1957-58.
This picket ship was often stationed well south of Campbell Island, taking supplies to a weather station on the island and providing a radar reference point and rescue support for US aircraft flying to the US base, McMurdo Station, in the Antarctic.
During many weeks of leave in Dunedin he developed several close friendships, including with a Dunedin waterside worker, Harry Moores, who went hunting with him and later visited his US home four times.
Mr Moores, who later shifted to Napier, died about eight years ago.
Mr Timblin was also warmly welcomed by Ivy Wall, who ran a boarding house on a hill north of Stuart St, and he also met her four children, Lorraine, Colleen, Brian and Larry, the latter who was in the New Zealand Air Force.
Mrs Wall later remarried, becoming Mrs Smith, and moved briefly to Bulls, in the North Island, but said she intended moving back to Dunedin.
Mr Timblin has letters from Mrs Smith, but later lost touch.
He is leaving Dunedin today, but is keen to establish contact with any of her surviving children, and to contact any relatives of Mr Moores.
