Hindseeing: A Gadfly on the Wall by Alvin G. Edgell Chapter One:  Starting Out            Our big frame house was right on the fault line where older, more substantial homes, and their residents, with their children long gone, gave way across our back alley to newer, but quite modest residences of first generation Croatian immigrants and their numerous young children. The unpaved alley between Splitlog and Orville Aves, between Fifth and Sixth Streets was the precise marker of division in our neighborhood. This was Kansas’s Kansas City.           
           I don’t remember much before the first day of kindergarten, when Mom and I were sent home -- certainly my preference -- because I was not quite old enough; I would not be five before next February.  I suspect that this was a disappointment to Mom since she must have expected me to be off her hands for a few hours a day.
            Mom had a full plate as the housekeeper for our large wooden house at 621 Orville Ave., which, besides our own four rooms, had been divided into seven other two room “furnished light-housekeeping” flats.  Tenants, typically young marrieds, seemed to turn over pretty regularly, requiring frequent follow-up cleaning.  A rotating team of Mormon Missionaries kept one of those flats. There was one shared bathroom on each of the two main floors. Our house was right on the fault line where older more substantial homes and residents with no young children gave way across our back alley to newer, quite modest residences of first generation Croatian immigrants and their numerous young children.
            I started life in l924, but the first larger world ambiance I remember as affecting my life, was the depression years of the l930s. At age 5 or 6 I had my first taste of weltschmerz when a stray kitten I had adopted was found dead in the dusty, junky alley behind our house   I laid it out on top of our large garbage burning drum and weepingly meditated for at least a darkening twilight hour on the vast mystery of injustice in the world.  
            And suddenly in l933 the world of baseball caught my intense interest over the World Series between the then New York Giants and the Washington Senators. Dad was a quite keen follower of sports, especially boxing and baseball.  
            Having started at schooling a half year late, I was eventually skipped upward in the middle of the second and the fifth grades; in the first case, because I was finished work too soon and was disturbing the others. In the fifth grade I totally goofed off and was threatened with demotion back to the fourth.  My father, who until then had been only mildly interested in my intellectual progress, was shocked and became sternly involved.  He hovered over my enforced hours at a mini-blackboard perfecting the multiplication tables. This was encouraged by an implied threat of backside application of surplus hardwood flooring boards, the usual punishment for my frequent and varied transgressions.  He sometimes flogged away till the board 
broke. 
            My Dad was a housepainter and paperhanger -  after  earlier, often referred to, years in tire factory work - but by the early 'thirties' deepening depression there seemed only intermittent public demand for his craft, and so he was sometimes at home during the day.  Before the end of the school year, I was skipped to the sixth grade; getting still smaller compared to my classmates.
            My schoolmates were almost all of second generation Croatian stock, reflecting our neighborhood.  Their parents had, I understood, come over en masse during or after World War I, recruited in their homeland and transported by one or more of the major stockyard and meatpacking operations in the two Kansas Cities.
            The numerous Muvitch kids from across the dirt alley from our grassless back yard were inevitably my most frequent playmates, often in our yard, as well as the alley.  And Ferdinand, a year younger than me, regularly punched or threatened me without my responding except to escape. I wasn't yet a pacifist, just a coward.  Among the few Anglos, mostly older folks, in the borderline neighborhood, the Croatians were looked down upon, and I was given to see them as different and, especially, dirtier.  My mother, herself of Bohemian immigrant descent, seemed especially disappointed that my schoolmates and neighborhood associates weren't nicer.
            I was bullied at Bancroft grade school by Emery Chernovitch who must have seen me as an 'other' kind of kid and easy mark.  He punched me up a couple of times and would regularly go out of his way to bump or taunt me at school play.  If I complained, he was ready with, "Ya wanna fi’d’aboudit?" But in a resolve to end this, one day I responded by wrestling with him and got at least a draw; I let him up each time I had him down.  I think I was entering my Gary Cooper phase. 
            My submission to the younger, and a bit smaller, Ferdinand Muvitch greatly annoyed my father, to whom readiness for, and victory at, direct physical contest was an essential male character (honor?) trait for the Edgell side of the family.  Most of Dad’s stories were about youthful fist fights with rival boys or, later, in single or mass brawls at the Saturday Night dance halls, usually wrecked in the process, in darkest mountaineer West Virginia. 
               The latter usually started over who “carried” whose girl to the dance, or who proposed to leave with her.  I have speculated without any specific evidence that his kin first came to the colonial coast as indentured servants, and, once their contracted term was served out, lit out for the interior Appalachians.  His speech never entirely lost certain hillbilly inflections and colorful locutions:  At meals he would half jokingly say, "Retch me the lip lolly"(translation: Pass the gravy.
            Dad was 38 when I was born and I never knew him with more than a fringe of hair on his bald head. He claimed to have had an all-winning fling at professional boxing.  He never explained why he had quit with such a record.  He didn't seem banged up at all. Occasionally he would try to teach boxing to tough kids like Ferdinand, and even until his late middle-aged years challenged anyone who claimed boxing prowess to a match outdoors or later in our Michigan basement.  He remained fit and quick.  For some years after it was probably no more the case, he would boast to anyone who would listen that " Alvin still can't lick the old man."  Of course I never tried.   Although I became, by about 12 or thirteen, fairly proficient at defensive boxing, I just couldn't bring myself to smash my fist into anyone's face, even with the gloves on.  So contrary to my Dad’s wishes, I steered away from boxing.
            Although I was with my father quite a bit, taken and later helping, on his job sites, I don’t feel that we were very close; as if he saw me as a possession that he came by through accident and found it hard to  talk with.  At some stage before my teen hood, I remember imagining him at his distance as someone of immense unfathomable worth, almost as if were a duty to believe. 
            I came to realize as I grew up that Dad had a very thin skin and took affront at quite ordinary chaffing or perceived insult, with instant rage and reddening of face, ready to fight, and sometimes actually starting one, even into quite advanced age.  . 
            Dad seemed uneasy and awkward in most social situations.  He was most at ease in such venues as the male-scented "pool hall" in uptown Kansas City, where he took me with him from time to time, probably when my mother wanted a breather.  The attraction for me on such occasions was the certainty of a Milky-Way bar.
            With the Mormon missionaries steadily renting one flat in our house, my Dad enjoyed challenging their leaders to "argue Bible."  To my knowledge this was his only intellectual exercise.  His positions were derived from early inculcated white southern Baptism and later Masonry.  His positions and favorite quotes seemed firmly fixed.    I believe the Mormons soon got tired of him, but often couldn't gracefully end the disputations.  Dad had of course some Biblical reference that proved Negroes were inferior since God had (for some good reason) put a "black mark" upon them.  Eventually, I found myself ever more questioning some of his certainties of this sort.  Bible stories and my school readings on American ideals and heroes, and maybe Gary Cooper movies, didn't seem to jibe with many of Dad's views. 
            I don't remember our three-person family going to church in any regular way during my earliest years.  The small, plain Mormon Church was on our block, and with the regular urging of the missionaries in our house-- especially "for the child's sake" -- we began to go there.  I became the most regular attendee of Sunday school, and I was a believer for many years, even though The Mormons damn near drowned me, at age eight, in their full immersion baptism ceremony, to which my parents agreed, again upon the missionaries urging.  The need to be fully dunked was in full accord with my father's firmest beliefs.
            Perhaps my own first intellectual conflict came at a moment I clearly remember.  I was ten and had been told that to doubt the received religion was a sin.   And yet, I think it was in school, perhaps in science class, I understood that doubt and inquiry was the way to knowledge and wisdom.  Wandering home at sundown on a summer day, behind some billboards in a vacant lot, this conundrum took over my mind.  I felt quite torn and leaned against a billboard support for some time unable to resolve it.    I guess that I never did until later in the Army.  
            My mother earnestly wanted to be correct by conventional norms in all of her personal contacts and public outings.  She seemed a true Bohemian: hardworking, neat, orderly, thrifty, striving to better herself and family; always careful to be correct and gentle in her language. She seemed quite concerned about "spoiling" me, a widely presumed danger with an only child.  She didn't openly express much affection, for perhaps this very reason. But she was always very watchful for my safety, well-being and, most of all, health and cleanliness, of course to my annoyance.  An especially galling form of this regularly happened when I went shopping with her. Out there she seemed to often find unacceptable smudges on my face, and would pull out a handkerchief, moisten it with her lips and vigorously rub my distorted, uncooperative face.  When I got hurt, I was blamed for not being careful.
            I was often inclined to test the limits of permissible behavior, which my mother most often had he misfortune of monitoring.  She usually postponed punishment until Dad returned for the hardwood application.  But when she felt the need for instant correction, a wire clothes hanger was her favorite flail, as I typically made a moving target.  When questioned by lady friends about having another child, Mom's stock reply was that she couldn't possibly handle any more than one "handful" like me.  When said in front of others, I felt a certain pride, as if it meant that my self was somehow larger than the ordinary single person.
            I was made to feel, by both parents, as somehow inadequate or disappointing.  An ironic shock came when in my early 20s I heard my mother express some pride to another person about my being a locally recognized baseball player.  It was in my consciousness a totally new experience.  All of my earlier interests in sports had been discouraged by Mom, as if the whole idea was undignified.  Of course sports were OK by Dad, even though he was disappointed that I took little interest in boxing.
            Mom was the oldest of six children, and was the only one yanked from high school to work in the Blahnik family general store, before its later prosperity.  A few years later she was allowed to go, perhaps escape, with a mobile uncle to Denver to take a job there.  That's where she met Dad, who was working in a tire factory, his first trade.
            During my growing years Mom always seemed to be "nervous," on edge, as if things weren't being done right in her immediate environment, while striving to appear calm and proper in any outside contacts.  Somewhat surprising, but very pleasing to me, after Dad died, at 85, she seemed to soon relax and mellow down, focusing on being the  flowers lady and pillar of the United Methodist Church; otherwise content to read and doze in her vibrating lounger and receive occasional visitors.
            Mom and Dad were very different types, and their marriage did not suggest any enduring love.  Mom especially wanted to avoid any ugliness in my presence, but I suspect she was struck a few times.  I certainly saw a few shouting matches where that threat was present.  Mom couldn't help pointing out Dad's 'laid-back' shortcomings, which his mountain pride made unbearable.  I still have a vivid picture of Mom and Dad in an accelerating, shouting quarrel.  Suddenly Dad took a menacing boxer's stance, as if he was about to "haul off and bust" Mom, while she, with only a slight flinch, wailed, "Go ahead and hit a woman, you're such a brave man, and in front of your child!"
            When I was eleven, in l935, our family moved to Menominee, MI.  The depth of the depression had sunk Dad's field of work and other prospects of employment.  I believe we lost the big house to debt.  Mom's father, Grandfather Blahnik, had accumulated a modest estate in Menominee, including several houses of very humble standards and shares in local industries.  He promised Dad would have a job and Mom a house if we decamped to Menominee, in the Upper Peninsula, "the Gateway to Hiawatha land."   

Chapter . . . .:  Settling in Menominee
             There we lived very modestly.  Dad did get a scrape-by wage job at the limping along Rule and Block wood products factory.  So I had plenty of toy blocks and plenty of rulers and paint stirrers around the house.  The house was indeed modest, needing repairs and inviting improvements. 
            Much must have been left unspoken, but Grandfather seemed to expect that Dad would naturally come under his authority as patter families.  With Dad's tetchy free spirit, this regime could not last indefinitely although Mom fitted right in and seemed content to submit.
             For about two years in Menominee it was an unquestioned  rite that every Sunday evening after 'supper’ our three would appear at the grandparents' spacious, comfortable home, along with Mom's slightly younger sister, her husband and their only child, just one year younger than me.  Dad seemed expected to report on the scene at the factory in which Grandpa had an interest.  General town gossip flowed among the adults.  I was usually bored and had little in common with my cousin who was a generally recognized "sissy."
            On one such evening Grandpa rounded on Dad for not fixing a plumbing fault that Dad had come across while doing other repair work in one of the sub-standard Blahnik rental houses.  The regime I have described had been cumulatively galling to Dad for some time, and he blew a gasket.  Words were harsh on both sides, with the women quaking.  This seemed a new experience for Grandpa (a stern authoritarian, even in my eyes) and at peak heat Dad stalked out of the ruling house, never to return.  Mom and I still continued the Sunday evening obeisance, and Mom relayed any info that Dad needed to know -- even if he would be annoyed by it.  Some months later Dad quit the Rule and Block job and relented into "house decorating," which brought in about the same income if not continuous engagement.
            Something of my Blahnik grandparents' world view was revealed when I cut the Blahniks' sizeable summertime lawn, by hand-powered mower.  The first time I reported to Grandfather after the job, he gave me five pennies and quite seriously advised not to spend them all at once.  After the next of what became regular cuttings, when I reported completion, it was Grandma who met me.  She gave me two quarters.  Of course I made sure that it was kindly Grandma I reported to after that.  They were sort of a good-cop-bad-cop combo.
            My first reactions to Menominee were sharply contrasting.   On one of those very first evenings at the Blahnik home, I suddenly started crying (the last time for many years).  When asked why, I could only answer that I missed the roughneck playmates back in Kansas on Orville and Splitlog Avenues.  On the other hand, it was summer and I soon realized that not far from our part of town there was some open country and a river, the Menominee, with a wild island in it and some connecting old train bridges.  All of this seemed to me a Tom Sawyer dreamland, after our closely built-up part of Kansas City, where the unpaved, grungy alleyway was our most common neighborhood playground. 
            By the first autumn in Menominee I had begun playing with a new set of neighborhood mates, but still feeling something of an outsider, merging into agoraphobia, feelings which I easily fell into through much of my life.
            One evening my neighbor kids and I drifted into a street gathering of reputedly tougher types from the next neighborhood. I became the focus of and initiation’ for the newbie.  I was forced to kiss the prick of the crude leader of the pack, while someone else pissed down my back.  There was some other abuse, too, but I somehow went along, feeling, as no doubt intended, greatly disgraced, humiliated and degraded, completely the outsider, hardly welcomed into this new setting
            The first winter in Menominee was bitterly cold , minus 36 degrees for almost a week.  I walked to school, often tagging along with a small pack from our end of town.  But I experienced cold so penetrating that I have ever since strongly preferred summer -- or the tropics; and was little interested in outdoor winter sports. 
            I entered Menominee Junior High School at the 7th grade level, just about the smallest boy in the class (at my tallest I became about 6'3").  This situation persisted all through high school and deeply frustrated my athletic ambitions.  I graduated at a spindly 5'8" weighing 120 pounds.  But I was pretty good with my own age group.  Once when playing basketball with some boys of my own age, all in 9th grade, a supervising coach from a nearby high school observed my relative superiority.  When I told him I was in the 11th grade, he seriously suggested that I drop out of school for two years so that I would then be age and growth matched with varsity players . . . .   Hardly the thing to propose to Mom and Dad.

High-Jinxes
 A personal stunt that had always given me special satisfaction was leaping down school stairs over several steps at a time.  At 15, early in my last year at MHS In the autumn, when I was anticipating the school basketball tryouts, a decision that had to overcome huge self-doubts, I was excited and out did myself on the stairs of the ancient building.   I leaped from the top toward the very bottom.  But I didn’t make it and landed on the edge of he last step and tore my left ankle more severally and painfully than ever before or after in a “sprain.”   Since I had beat the whole class to the stairs, no on seemed to see me, as I hoped, and I could only crawl into a corner and hide my desperate wish not to be seen crying.  After everyone had cleared out at that end of the school day, I tried standing and with great pain slowly limped to my bicycled and headed home.  I can’t remember whom I saw about it, but whoever it was said that I had
a bad sprain and it was bandaged.  I don’t remember any X-ray.  I still tried to go out for basketball, but I could barely put weight on that foot without excruciating pain and couldn’t manage simple basic drills, and so was immediately ’cut.’  .         
          Another one of my efforts, as I now see it, to achieve something unique, a special accomplishment, part of my self-definition,  was my determination  to be the first out of the last class of the day and on my way home before everyone else.  So in Ferdie Davis’s history class I sat as near the door as possible; I laid my plans and felt primed in a starting position to respond instantly at the final bell’s first tinkle.  It rang and I sped the few steps toward the closed door whose handle I would have to instantly open in coordination with my lunging body.  But I did not adjust to an unexpected warping in the wooden flooring just short of the door, and I stumbled into the fragile glass pane in the door’s upper half.  With everyone else in he class close behind me, now stopped and gawking, I felt terribly defeated and embarrassed as I stepped back from the shattered glass.  Davis tried to make a joke out of my urge to flee the class. 
Since the weather was relatively warm I had on only a light shirt, and upon examination, a short cut through it has bloodied my right shoulder.  Davis took me to the teachers’ room, applied iodine and a large band aid and sent me off with a stern message to show the wound to my parents.  For years I reflected on the small scar that resulted, but it seems to have vanished over time.  
             Of course the heartbreak over basketball was crushing at the time.   There was no high school baseball team, perhaps because of the short period of suitable weather.   So there was for me no yearned for high school sports "Letter" which was proudly worn among youths I soon dominated at post-school sports.  Since I was so young upon graduation, next school year I spent part time at Menominee High taking some missed electives.  The coach saw me, now about 6'2", in the hall one day and asked me to come out for basketball - too late!    The ankle pain and awkwardness lasted several months and only slowly returned my ankle to more or less full function.   I did learn to apply a fairly effective basket-weave tape bandage and wore it regularly for several years as I got back into serious sports.  Over the many long years I forgot about it though I actually experienced at least two minor sprains on that ankle in much later years
            [I’ll briefly leap ahead to something quite recent that seems almost certainly related.  While favoring a quite arthritic right ankle, walking slowly through a K-Mart store, my old left ankle suddenly gave me he sharpest sort of stabbing pain.  I slowly hobbled back to my car, but soon realized that I couldn't depress my manual clutch pedal at all without unbearable pain.  I was afraid that I could not continue to drive home.  Somehow I managed and there I called my regular health clinic.  They were closing and I as directed to an emergency facility.  There I was x-rayed and an old bone chip was found.  I was given an ankle brace and a pain pill prescription.  Strangely, in just a few days the ankle pain disappeared and hasn’t returned.  Thanks be to Allah, or whomever!]         
           
A Fish Story 
 One of Dad’s schemes, when I must have been about twelve or thirteen, for the idle winter months was to net the abundant smelt, a small silvery -- and delicious  -- fish out in frozen Green Bay through the ice, before they swarmed up the Menominee River in the thaws of mid- spring.  We would pack them in iced crates and ship to Chicago for a still decent return.  The trick was to be early when the price was good and before it fell drastically when everyone was scooping up the smelt in the river.
             All went well for a time in that first winter trial.  But that last catch of some seven tons was held back because the selling price now had fallen sharply, below shipping costs.  Then, too, our big commercial net, with my Dad relying on the supposed expertise of his local partner, got carried away when the ice melted before we could take it up from of the Bay.   In the end the seven ton of fish was buried in our modest back yard, a spade full for every spaded clod.  The corn we planted there grew to magnificent heights.  But, came the warm months, the persons using the street beside our plot and the neighbors down wind, experienced a mighty assault on their olfactory senses.

A “Sacrament”
            One summer day in Menominee, when I was 14 or 15, my parents said, out of the blue, that I should join the de Molay, a sort of junior Masonry.  (My Dad was a Mason and was proud of that fact.) I passively, but uneasily, agreed.  This membership was presented to me, without detail, as a necessary or valuable event if one were to have an introduction to successful participation in adult life
 On the evening of the initiation ceremonies, I went alone on my bike to the Masonic Hall for some preliminaries.   My parents came later for the main event. There, inside an immense room, I saw adults seated stolidly along the walls.   Several boys from some of the best families in the "twin cities" were in my cohort.  A sort of altar stood isolated in the center of the large room.
                 I remember being very disoriented and frightened and grew more so as the rites proceeded.  It was as if I had found myself amidst primitive pagans who has concealed this their true, atavistic personalities from the outside, quotidian world.  In fact, the people present and the occasion seemed to represent the real, 'deeper' world, the sudden exposure to which had this disturbing and shocking effect on me; a la. “Rosemary’s Baby.”   My parents had given me the impression that this initiation would be a simple event something like going to a mainstream Protestant church service.  Now among my disturbed feelings was a sense of betrayal by my parents, who were offering me up to some occult, primitive world, and by being in league with my tormentors.
     I remember there was some marching around the hall by us boys; and a kissing of a festooned Bible on the alter while we repeated some ritual wording which I remember being about love for one's Mother. And then there was a sort of play put on by some older boys which had to do with one Jacques de Molay being martyred over some deep principle.
                 When these shenanigans were ending, I got the message that some sort of more playful rites conducted by the older boys were still to come.  So I slipped away, nervously, and sped home on my bike, using streets where I felt the initiators would be less likely to pursue me.  Sometime after I got home, panting -- I cannot remember if my parents had come back yet -- the group of the older boys knocked on our door and somehow shamed or intimidated me into accepting their custody as necessary for the initiation  to be complete.  I reluctantly went along, getting blindfolded right off the bat. Then I was stuffed into the back seat of a sedan with other initiates. During the driving about, the older boys kept up a patter over our eventual fate for that night which sounded, and was obviously meant to sound, very ominous.  I struggled to peek out from the eye bandage, but this was being closely monitored and the blindfold was instantly and gruffly
restored to full effectiveness.
                  I remember being very frightened, as perhaps never before in my life, in an entirely non-specific way, during this drive which seemed to go on and on, going nowhere in particular. 
                 Finally, as if getting tired of the game, the tormentors stopped the car and ushered me out.  They warned me not to remove the blindfold until I had counted to 100, out loud -- some punishment being threatened if I didn't comply.  I guess I started the counting, but hearing the car drive off, I yanked off the blindfold.
                 I found myself on a dirt road/track where it ended at the edge of the here quite wide Menominee River.  This was also at the edge of Riverside Cemetery.  I imagine the whole point of the blindfolded drive was to leave me in a scary place from which I would have trouble finding my way home.  But I knew the general area from other summertime wanderings with my neighborhood, not so elite, chums, and I quite easily walked the mile and a half to home.
                 I vowed to myself to never get involved with that sort of occultist ritual organization again.  And my parents didn't push it.
           
A Partner in Deviance
            In the very first year at MHS, I began a friendship with Bob (a.k.a. Groucho or Flato) which grew until we graduated together in l940.  He and I seemed to have common interests not shared by any others. He was awesomely smart and two years older, but unassertive and shyly cautious not to offend anyone,  In spite of that he earned the nicknames of "Groucho," no doubt because of his dry witticisms, and "Flato," I suspect a derivative of Plato.  We sharpened our wits off one another with great delight, but neither seemed to dominate.  There was probably some unacknowledged competition in this, at least on my part. 
            Bob was not very physically prepossessing or athletic although he got into some games, usually at my urging.  I now realize that, being his superior on this one field, I, too much, unwholesomely, enjoyed rubbing it in by indirection. 
            In our last year at MHS, Bob was chosen the "class brain" and I the "class wit."  The last was more because of clownishness, anything for a laugh as one classmate acutely, sarcastically observed; just begging for attention, rather than purveying genuine wit. But I did get inveigled (a Bob word) by one teacher in my first years at MHS into appearing in a few "assembly" plays -- later I managed to avoid such discomfiture.  Groucho, another classmate, Jim, and I did work up a comic skit on one occasion, and it went over big at a school wide ‘gymkhana’ event.   I sometimes helped Bob deliver on his newspaper route, where one day one of a pack of pursuing dogs bit into my bike-peddling leg.  For the months before our skit while we were working on it and for some months after that we formed a friendly threesome.  But overtime Jim faded out while Bob and I stayed very close.  One day in class I had an almost Christ-like event.  In our geometry
class Mr. Taylor was very persnickety and like a Pecksniffian Puritan minister in both looks and manner.  His silent stare of  disapproval after identifying  a misbehavior was rather frightening since it implied imaginable penalties of the sort only the most derelict student would be unmoved by.  On the day of issue, Jim had not brought the required geometry compass.   He had recently had some other reprimanded behavior and felt doomed if he were to be caught so soon in another delinquency.  He asked to borrow my compass, and with a thought on the order of “What would Jesus do?” I nobly passed it to him even though I was not a Taylor favorite and had reason to fear enforced embarrassment or dismissal from the class. because of just such malpractice as forgetting to bring my compass.
            Bob and I saw one another a few times after we returned from the war in l946.  I went to his wedding in Milwaukee while I was at the U. of Chicago, and visited him later when I was in New York and he was at Yale.  There he introduced me to a quite intriguing wench whom I let slip through my fingers after easy physical contact in swim wear at a park with Bob and his new wife.  Helen and I phoned one another and exchanged a few notes suggesting mutual interest over several weeks.  I had already met the “Goddess” (described later) but didn’t know where that would go.  With notice Helen came to visit me in my new digs in Hasting-on-Hudson one weekend day that autumn. For some reason I was uneasy, anxious and I avoided any possibility of intimacy though Helen was quite toothsome and warm in manner. I later regretted that mood since I believe that intimacy was possible and probably would have been welcomed.  Helen kindly helped me do some
shopping and furnishing until late evening.  My coldness must have put her off because that ended any further interest from her, and the Goddess soon absorbed my attention.   Bob and I also lost touch around this time when he got a teaching post at a West Coast University.  There even may have been a sense on both sides that he and I had used up our relationship.  After a few letters, nothing more until a late in life exchange of letters.
            With girls at MHS I was a total loss.  I was somehow afraid of them.  They seemed so much more in control, more mature; not surprising because of our relative ages in my classes; but it operated even with girls of my own age in lower grades.  I never came close to proposing a date, and avoided the Proms, feeling very outside that world.  I couldn’t possibly have danced with a girl.   When playing in a mixed softball game, I didn’t know where I dared to tag one of the girls for an out.  To indicate my callowness, I didn't discover that I could masturbate until I was 16 and out of school.
            A Halloween night escapade that won’t slip memory occurred in my sophomore year.  A gang of about 20 boys of my class set about playing not so innocent tricks, such as pulling off the steps to wooden porches, lifting manhole covers askew, knocking down rickety fences and even some more harmless annoyances.  A police car spotted us and the cops gave chase on foot, down an alley, but they hadn’t a chance.  I was keeping up with the fleeing gang when a clever deviation occurred to me:  I would hide in the dark, narrow space between two barns in the alley route, and let the cops run by. 
            But one of the puffing cops shined his light into my niche.  I was hauled to the station and sternly debriefed as to the members of our gang.  Over awed, I shamefully gave them some names, but, only of the gang members of ’good family’ in town, omitting the guys who seemed familiar to the police or had less social clout.  Next day we got a scolding from the high school principal, and nothing else came of it, but I felt, and still feel shame over that ’squealing.
              Just as Bob and I had interests outside our classmates' world, one of the MHS social studies teachers, Ferdie Davis, seemed unique and out of place in Menominee.  He was from Chicago, and a University of Chicago grad.  He was part of a larger (Jewish) world, and what later would be called  "prematurely anti-fascist."  He made sure that we were aware of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, even if some of us didn't understand his learned asides.  Bob and I loved his classes, and Davis seemed to enjoy putting tricky questions to each of us.  We both got his top grades.  Bob got his all over; over all, mine were more inconsistent.
              Davis must have first put the U of C in my head.  When I left for the army at the beginning of l943, I somewhat foolishly, dramatically -- 'we who are about to die' -- sent him a packet of all of my ill-assorted scribblings on 'life.'
            After high school I had a variety of odd jobs to fill the time until I went to war, at just turned 19.  During the after graduation year of l940-41, while taking an extra class or two, I worked part time in a New Deal project, the National Youth Administration,.  During that winter I was assigned to the out-door city ice-rink, which at times in summer served as the “circus grounds,” now flooded.  So in coldest winter I took my turn with the hose, slowly walking around the rink while administering a fine spray of water onto the frozen surface.  The spray and the leaky hose usually got my heavy mittens and jacket cuff covered with freezing water.  Between outings, we sprayers got spells inside a drafty warming shack, crowding around a make-shift oil drum stove.            
            Next summer with two other Menominee boys, I hitch-hiked to Detroit and got a job in a car upholstery plant.  After several weeks I fell out with my fellow travelers and got lonely, so I took the Greyhound home. 
            After a very brief tour, as inspector-packer, at a local glove factory, another pal, Ralph, and I hitched rides to Chicago to watch a Bears-Packers game, and then decided to stay and get jobs.  Mine was in the mailroom and Ralph's in another department of a large insurance company on racy Rush Street, where we would gawk at the posters at the sub-sidewalk entrances of the unapproachably worldly joints.  We did manage to save up for and occasionally crowd into the more respectable Panther Room of the Hotel Sherman's College Inn on Randolph Street.  We could afford the cover charge and that was all.  They featured big swing bands and that kind of Jazz was our passion, Woody Herman, Stan Kenton, Les Brown.  In those pre-war days the big bands also appeared regularly on stage at the top movie houses; aaaaaaahh: Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Artie Shaw and all that jazz.
            While listening to another football game on a Sunday, December 7, the news of Pearl Harbor blasted through.  Ralph and I began to speculate on being drafted into military service. Friend Ralph got homesick first, but I lasted a few months longer before returning to Menominee.
            While in Chicago, I heard of open tryouts at the Cubs' Wrigley Field and went on the appointed day.   Perhaps overly excited, I didn't get signed up, but the setting was fascinating.  Back home I got jobs as a bricklayer's helper, summer maintenance then chemist's assistant at a beet sugar refinery, and as a helper in the packing and shipping department of an electrical fan and motors factory.  And I played baseball and softball on local teams.
            Ralph, who was older, got drafted a month before me.  Then it was my turn in January l943.  Along with sending my oeuvre to Ferdie Davis, I thought about becoming a conscientious objector.

Chapter . . .:  The Not So Good Soldier   
              Finding a draft notice in my mail near the end of l942, I applied for conscientious objector (CO), non-combat status.  I thought it was a justified war, but I felt unable to kill anyone, both on my understanding of Christian principle and my instinctive squeamishness.  To my surprise and relief, the local draft board, without any hesitation, accepted my petition and classified me as requested.  But, as soon as I got a uniform at Fort Sheridan, outside Chicago, I was sent into infantry training at Camp Roberts, CA. The hastily mobilized WW II Army was notorious for such SNAFU-ed assignments.
            When I complained that I should not be there, a surreal period of several weeks ensued.  Barely literate old army training cadre tried to argue and persuade me against my position.  That was hardly intellectually challenging, but my complaint was not effective.
            One night, very early at Camp Roberts, I experienced my first clear anxiety attack. In the closely packed barracks, I couldn't bear to lie in my cot unable to sleep.  I got up and went to the barracks in-house latrine where I paced for several hours, trying to get some control over my near panic.  The Officer-of-the-Day on his rounds found me there and assumed that I was homesick, which was in fact the farthest thing from my mind.  Somehow I got over that spell.  I even became something of an example of training hardiness, in physical exercise, sports, even crawling under alleged machine gun fire through barbed wire, etc. 
            One small satisfaction came when a camp baseball team was being formed.  I was allowed to try out and surprisingly found myself, by remarkable coincidence, competing with the young man who had been the 1st baseman for the Menominee town team where I had been discouraged from wanting to compete for that position.  At camp, now, I was chosen to play 1st, and he was invited to try another position.  But only a few practices took place before I was transferred.
            Old World War One Enfield rifles were racked near our Camp Roberts barracks entrance.  There were not quite enough weapons for every last trainee in the barracks.  Since everyone else was eager to grab a gun, it was easy for me to hang back and fall out on the parade ground empty handed with out attracting attention, at least at first.  One of the arguments put against my CO’s position was that while I started out on training marches without a rifle, I would come back with two or three draped over my shoulders.  Hence I could not be allergic to weapons of destruction after all.  Of course, this had happened because some of my fellow marchers, new soldiers, were less fit and after a time, when I offered to carry their weapons, they gladly offered them up.
            After some weeks I learned that a dozen other COs, scattered all over the huge camp, were getting their cases acted upon through a Chaplain, and so I joined the effort.  Most of the others were hardly my type, being members of officially recognized ‘objector’ churches: Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists, etc.  After a few more weeks, during which I was assigned to “kitchen police” (KP) duty in the mess hall and kitchen, our group of twelve was sent off to a medical basic training unit at another huge camp outside Abilene, Texas.
            One quondam little episode there, strangely, regularly still turns up in my mind.  On an ordinary evening, while in the Camp Post Exchange a young rather voluptuous girl serving behind the counter whisked her way from one end to the other.  Feeling ‘chancey, I said loudly, “Shake it but don’t break it!”-- a rather hep (hip’s predecessor) phrase of the day.  The girl’s rather bovine face instantly showed a mix of embarrassment and anger.  That somehow got to me.  When that image occurs to me today, I get a powerful wish to have said, ”I’m sorry,” almost as if I could go back and do it.
             After that camp it was off for eight weeks of training in a Surgical Technician course near Fort Bliss outside El Paso.  At first all went well enough since I could play a lot of softball and get recognized as one the best players. On one afternoon we played a team down near the huge airfield.  We faced a remarkable pitcher, a national level competitor with great speed and control, even behind his back.  I got our only hit and that was questionable or “scratch.”  We faced his team again on our home field.  Again I got the only “scratch” hit.  This phenomenon, Wally Luna, later joined my 279th Station Hospital unit in training near Brownwood .  Come autumn, in the Texas Central Region Tournament our 279th won that championship, where Wally pitched four consecutive winning nights, the last a no hitter, and then he went into the hospital and never rejoined our unit.  I got a hit in every game.
            But my last week or two at Surgical Tech. training were miserable for me.  I was assigned to work at a ward in the nearby Beaumont General Hospital. There I found that I experienced unbearable stress and anxiety, even clumsiness, in handling bodies in great distress and pain   Although I made this known, I was told that I had to go through this training until its fixed term was over.  .

Juarez 
 Just across the border is Ciudad Juarez, the preferred attraction for GIs in our training group bent on a cheap, wild “respite” on the eight Saturday nights of passes from our dusty camp above Fort Bliss. 
One man in our 16 soldier barracks rates a remembrance, ‘Big Bill,’ much older and looking even older and well traveled without ever having left Texas.  Bill hit Juarez every Saturday. After one or two of his late returns, reputedly with the aid of the Military Police in cooperation with their counterparts on the Mexican side, profoundly boozed, loud and bent on waking everyone of  us already in our sacks, his subsequent Saturday/Sunday night  arrivals were anticipated for their excitement.  After the first few Saturdays, some mischievous mates played tricks with his simple cot, ‘short-sheeting’ it or fixing his collapsible metal cot so that it would indeed collapse with his weight.  Some of my barracks mates found entertaining his roars, his tipsy struggles to right his cot, and even his efforts to collapse a few other cots.  Since my sack as well down the row from Bill’s he never vented his wrath at my distance although I wasn’t sure of
sanctuary.
              Since my own Saturday nights had been spent on our base or a few times in El Paso just down the hill, some hut mates took an interest in seeing me experience Juarez.  Well, I obliged three or four and we stuck together for the night.  My first novel experience came when the need to piss came upon me.  In at least two bars I was directed to an open-air wall out back designed for that relief. The most memorable event was my pals setting me up to play the drums with a small noisy band, allegedly by paying them a US quarter.     I was as drunk as I would ever get and readily took my seat at the kit.  We played Deep in the Heart of Texas, a top hit of the day.  Built into the chorus at regular intervals was a break for four uniform hands claps.  At each such occasion I attempted a brief drum solo.  All went well for several choruses and the band as ready to stop, but I continued and the band picked back up.  Only when I got tired did we stop. 
I rejoined my friends and we somehow made our way b back to c amp in time to experience Bill’s return of the prodigal.

Chapter . . . .   The 279th Stateside
 I found myself a few weeks later, in mid l943, with the start up stage of the 279th Station Hospital Company at Camp Bowie, Texas.  Except for the officers and non-commissioned officers, we were almost all recent inductees l8 or l9 years old, and were assigned in groups of l6 to very simple hutments in this alkaline scrub country near the town of Brownwood.  We each had a wired-spring cot, arranged head to foot with about two feet between.
            On the first Saturday in Bowie we were to have our company's first general inspection, including sleeping quarters.  That Friday evening our hut's non-resident cadre man, one Corporal Chocol, directed us to prepare the Saturday-morning display: tightly made-up beds with gear arranged on top of the blanket, and all that.
         With my tendency to question and even rebel against authority, I considered some of this stupid, especially since we would be sleeping in our beds before the morning inspection.  Besides we were jam-packed in the small hut, getting in one another's way, and there weren't enough mops for every one to be mopping at once -- or so I reasoned.
         Other huts seemed not to be preparing at the same time as ours.  A few lads were out in the open tossing around a softball, and I joined them.  Two or three times Corporal Chocol or his hut-resident deputy came to tell me to return to the hut and get to work.  I said I would as soon as there was room, and I continued practicing pitching.  Finally, Corporal Chocol "ordered" me inside.   (Chocol strutted about as very “G.I.” and was fussy to the point that he had the creases in his army pants sewn in.)  But I pointedly had a few more casual tosses as he was leaving before complying.  Anyhow, it was getting dark. 
         Shortly after I was inside at work on my layout of gear, Chocol came in with Sergeant Fusco to whom Chocol was almost tearfully describing the extremity of my disobedience of his orders.  Fusco expanded on the horridness of my offense.  I unabashedly replied that this whole episode was stupid and un-American, and that this way of running an army was probably no better than that of the enemy Nazis, Fascists, and Japanese, which I wouldn't mind observing to see if my suspicions were true.  (Ah, the madness of youth)! 
           This seemed to really upset my superiors, who by then felt that this called for serious treatment by their superiors.  I was escorted to the slightly more spacious quarters of the senior Non-Commissioned Officers (Non-Coms) where the Company's First Sergeant arrived some time thereafter.  Sergeant Muratore just seemed puzzled at first, but then asked why I had behaved so "crazy," disobeying orders.  I paraphrased my previous criticism of the U.S. military as I found it, which sent him into paroxysms of Sicilian profanity, and he roughly ordered me to stop tapping my foot to the rhythm of a Glenn Miller tune on the hut's low-volume radio.  
         His puzzlement, now mixed with anger, seemed to have returned with greater force, and Muratore excitedly said that my rebellious behavior required the senior-most attention.  I was taken to the Company office, which had collected the sweaty heat of the July day, and where a few other Non-Coms loafed or drifted in, apparently having heard word of some bizarre uprising.  The Officer of the Day was sent for and soon appeared. 
         Second Lieutenant Reeder was clean-cut, just short of handsome, a recent graduate of a Texas university.  Throughout this meeting he affected a calm, open-minded curiosity about this strange young man who was so loquacious in answering the questions from all sides.  Reeder at times had to hold back the attempts at a grilling style of questioning by Muratore and other Non-Coms.  Muratore repeatedly demanded that I address the Lieutenant as "Sir" although Reeder said that wasn't necessary just now.  I said it impeded my "speeching" -- more madness of youth.
          I was at my most expansive and articulate and must have been enjoying the consternation and puzzlement I produced. This went on for some time.  Reeder's questions had given me the opening to expound on my whole philosophy of life, such as it was.  In the end he said the equivalent of "how interesting!" and asked that this odd fellow be assigned to his platoon when these were being organized. 
         After Lieutenant Reeder left, Muratore and the other Non-Coms were puzzled about what to do with me, since Reeder had left no further instructions.  They certainly felt that I should not be let loose on the 279th world, so they finally decided that I should be put under guard and taken for the night to the guard-house with the off-shift guards who were taking their turns from the Company roster.  As I was getting ready to go to bed, there appeared another sergeant who was known to be a person of great piety.  In the mellowest of cautionary words, he acknowledged my ‘pacifism’ but quoted the Bible on “rendering unto Caesar . . . “ As a believer in Christian ethics, I was briefly impressed.    
         The young guards, about my age, seemed startled to find this new phenomenon, a "prisoner," among them, and one whom they were ordered to hold incommunicado and watch.  Those near my guard-house cot ogled me from theirs, as if afraid to sleep.  I was still enjoying the ridiculous celebrity, and fell asleep before most of them. 
         The next morning I was taken, under guard, to get a fresh dress uniform from my own hut.  Then I was presented to the Company commander, First Lieutenant Thebault, in his office, which was on the other side of the plywood wall next to the area where I had been interrogated the night before.  Who knows what Thebault had been told, but this 30-ish officer came on glowering, with the Manual of Courts Martial strategically placed on his desk for my observation, opened at the section headed "Offenses Punishable by Death."  For the first time I was becoming intimidated -- and maybe I hadn't slept that well.  All I remember about this encounter was its ominous tone, and I was glad this time when it was over. I was returned to my original hut and told that judgment would be rendered soon. 
         A few days later at the first morning formation of the Company, the First Sergeant somewhat dramatically read out an order of "Company Punishment" and reduction from the rank of Private First Class for now Private Edgell for failing to obey orders.  This seemed to be getting strong emphasis as the first punishment for wrong-doing in the new Company, to make a forceful point, to dissuade any other potential miscreants.  Now I was a Company-wide celebrity.  Who knows what the rumors were, but I seemed to become something of an abused brother-man to many.
         My first punishment was to clean the stones from the drill field after its use at the end of that day.  After drilling, all of us were ordered to shovel and rake the stones into small piles all over the big field.  Then the rest were allowed to drift off, since this was the end of the formal duty day.  A truck was brought up and I was directed to shovel the piles up onto its open bed.  A few of the soldiers had lingered behind and began to help me.  When this was observed by a Non-Com, they were ordered off and I was thereafter closely watched to ensure that I worked alone.  But even the truck driver wanted to be pal-y. The work wasn't too onerous since I was in good shape and glad to show it off.  It continued until I was excused when darkness fell.
         The following day at the Company formation after lunch a huge rock was to be seen lying before us on the Company ground.  Sergeant Muratore read out a notice that, as part of my Company punishment, I was to break up this large stone with a sledge hammer and the small pieces were to be placed as bordering for the paths between the hutments.  It seemed expected that this task would fill out the rest of the week of my sentence. 
         But again, I meant to show them, by busting up this monolith as soon as possible.  I now realize that by a certain kind of common reasoning I might have more wisely concluded that I would be better off just dragging out the task for the full term.  But I was young, marching to my own rhythm section.
           I made a game of it, as practice for my baseball swing, and I attacked the monster with fulsome zeal.  I had not asked for gloves and none were offered.  At the end of the first day I had a few blisters.  On the second day, Muratore hauled me before the early Company formation and told me to hold out my hands, presumably as further discouragement to possible transgressors.  Then he, with mock generosity, said that I would be allowed bandages and to wear gloves from now till my week ended.  But I had already demolished almost half of the huge rock, and after the next day it was completely shattered.
          Since the location of the stone made my exertions clearly visible to several passersby during the course of each day, my mythical stature among the rank and file grew.  Many of the company wanted, some furtively, to be friendly.  My fame could only go down from this point as the real me was gradually exposed. 
            On the fourth day of my sentence, I was called out before the Company formation and embraced, almost joyously by Muratore!  Imagine my (and probably the others') surprise!  He then complemented me on how diligently I had worked at my penance, even how proud the Company should be about this example.  His whole performance was way over the top!  I was to be forgiven the balance of my sentence and accepted back into the warm bosom of the Company, and I was urged to apply my rumored softball skills on the Company team being formed.
          After a minimum of thought, it occurred to me that Muratore's superiors had taken in the wide, sympathetic response of the young soldiers to my treatment and enhanced image, and that our leaders now meant to show that they vibrated on the same humane wavelength. 
         Relieved of formal disgrace, I was assigned to work in the Company Supply Unit under Lieutenant Reeder, who showed no particular interest in me in my more hum-drum role for the more than a year that we were still together in the 279th.  But at this job I met another soldier, under Reeder, who became my best friend for the rest of my army days, and for some time thereafter. It was the somewhat older Sam Cherner with whom some further adventures were later shared.
            In full autumn we played in a touch football league.  As the team punter I collected two painful wrists when a burly opposing lineman broke through and hit my extended foot while I was still in the air after actually getting off the punt.  This sent me on a backward semi- cartwheel, trying to break my fall with my hands.  The next day I went on ‘sick call’ over the pain in both wrists.  The immigrant Jewish Dr. Captain who spoke barely understandable English simply had me taped up and sent back to duty in the Supply Room.  The pain for the left wrist got progressively worse when I tried to use it for one week before I again went on ‘sick call.’  This time it was x-rayed.  A few days later I was told that the X-ray was nor clear enough and so it had to be repeated, and this time was found to be broken at the navicular.  This got me a cast and the usual gang’s signatures or obscenities.  It also got me gratefully excused from going on
a chilly field bivouac of a week by the rest of the Company. But, perhaps because of the delay, the wrist was not set right and it has a strange look to this day.  But somehow its frequent pain was never too much for me.   For years I taped it before sports use.
             One of my best friends during these training days was Bob Meyers, a street smart kid from Chicago who also played on the football team.  While the rule of play was “touch,” the line play and blocking was fierce, In one such effort of mine, the blockee laid his knees into my ribs to such effect that t was painful to breath deeply for several days.  Meyers was a lineman and was built like a fireplug.  In late autumn he and I had taken overnight passes and the bus to Dallas.  We just sort of wandered around, went into a few bars and got a little drunk.  But we had made no provision for overnight quarters.  At about midnight this realization struck us with no fall back plan.  Our first improvisation was to get on a streetcar and hopes to ride all night.  But after an hour or two the car went out of service and we were back on the street, now in a residential neighborhood.  Seeing no salvation, we found an empty lot and wrapping ourselves
with newspapers ineffectively against the nighttime chill, we tried to sleep.  But we had awakened some neighborhood dogs and their barking seemed endless.   I remember shivering till dawn when after some wandering we somehow found the bus back to camp, appreciating its security and a Sunday off as never before.  
            I still had the cast on when we boarded the train for the unknown destiny of Camp Miles Standish between Boston and Providence.  It was a slow three day journey.  When I got my turn at the lower bunk in the ancient Pullman, I hardly slept for looking out the window for wonders.  Our smoky train took us through the streets with the fancy iron work of New Orleans and endless miles of featureless swampland after that.  When one opened the car windows, bits of soot from the puffing engine wafted in when the wind was right.  
            At the end of the train ride there was plenty of snow and it was very cold in the standard double tiered bunks barrack.  We tried to keep the large cast iron coke fed stoves going and tolerated the smoke and particles that floated up.  After carefully protecting my cast for weeks during ablutions. I finally let it soak and tore it off in the shower, even though was supposed to last for another week or two.    Somehow Christmas passed with hardly a notice in those last days before shipping out.  Sam and I did spend a day each in Boston and Providence.  Chapter . . . . . Over There Our troopship the Spartanly refitted peacetime liner, Argentina, entered the Firth of Clyde on the darkest of January nights, gliding slowly past the dark humps of islands and headlands, and near the huge, ghostly shapes of what must have been a large part of the Allied Forces' navies. When we awoke at anchor the next morning, I was surprised to see the mild soft green shores of Greenock, Scotland. Surprised, because we had left snowbound Boston on our troopship some twelve days earlier, as part of what seemed an endless convoy, patrolled by destroyers regularly speeding by, and we seemed to be heading generally north even though zigzagging. Then I recalled my school learning about the warming Gulf Stream. I had been miserably seasick most of the trip. Upon landing, we were herded toward the compartmented railway coaches of Great Britain, snatching unappetizing meat-paste sandwiches and milky-tea from NAAFI girls along the way. Once underway, the train slowed quite frequently and stopped completely near several gloomily lit stations along the route. The whole country seemed blacked-out, a dark, silent land. Finally, in the very early morning hours, our cars arrived at a siding near what I later learned was the village of Govilon on the Welsh borderland. At first there seemed to be only a flickering of numerous flashlights in the otherwise pitch darkness. Once we alighted, my eyes focused on a line of miscellaneous, undersized -- some seemed improvised -- 'pick-up' trucks. Ladies of mixed ages, each wearing a similar sort of uniform cap, were scurrying around, the flashlights in their hands the only illumination. Once formed up, our troops were ordered to nearby 'goods wagons' from which our personal duffel bags and other unit gear were loaded onto the mobilized civilian pickups. Then we were off on British Army trucks to our nearby camp on the compound of the soon to be 279th Station Hospital, and for a few fitful hours of sleep on straw-filled pallets, The next few days were simply for settling in at the camp, in arc-topped Nissen/Quonset huts, which would be our homes for one and a half years. Our mission was to set up, and then operate a US Army hospital in the several large brick, purpose-built buildings in the compound. Once we were settled into the barracks adjoining the simple brick hospital buildings, a few days later, a group of local middle-aged people came to welcome and entertain us. There were singers, a few instrumentalists and a short dramatic turn. They were not very good, and their offerings, light classical warhorses and a drawing room comedy skit, were not in the style that young Americans of the time were accustomed to: slapstick comedy and Andrews Sisters-sorts. While most of the audience was polite, there was some scattered muttering and snickering. But the earnestness of the performers was touching, and I felt some embarrassment for our lads. On our first night free, most of us headed for exploration of nearby towns. My pal Sam and I aimed for Abergavenny, about five miles to the northeast along a two-lane asphalted road, which wound through intermittently hedge rowed countryside. We were riding on our first left side driven double-decker bus. All was almost impenetrable darkness. The town of Abergavenny was not much brighter. The only lights to guide us were the thin scratchings out of "BAR" or PUB" on otherwise blackened door and windows. We explored a few of these establishments, but, not being dedicated drinkers, we didn’t stay very long after assessing the smoky, stuffy, noisy dins, crowded with local civilians, British soldiers and our fellow G.I.s. Sam was from Philadelphia and eight years older, and so seemed to my small-town rawness quite the man of the world. I felt that I could only follow on such rounds, eager to observe and learn. Our Fighting Outfit A sort of internecine violence came over early sleeping arrangements at camp. Our pads were of the austere British Army issue; four roughly hewn posts just in from the corners of two rectangles, upper and lower, of the same material. Across these horizontal frames were laced flat metal straps. These supported ticking filled with straw I had helped collect from Hay-on–Wye. The bunks seemed designed for no one taller than 5’10”. The bottom bunk was 10 o 12 inched off the floor and the top was about 36 inches higher. This made the lower bunk awkward to crawl into and out of, and so the upper was much more desired. After the initial random finding of one owns bunk there came an order to shift bunking in line with organizational assignments. I was one of the first to find my new barracks and threw some of my gear on an upper bunk, then hurried back to whatever duty I had stolen away from. I came back after that task tired and rather cranky. What did I find but a never friendly Pvt. Hoskins lounging on my top bunk and my gear tossed on the bottom? I asked with mild menace that he get off. This got a superior snarl and some vile, dismissive – uh - Army speak. Hoskins’s close buddy, Darby, across the aisle -- both proud, ‘dangerous’ “Rednecks” from eastern Kentucky -- immediately added his own threats to my immediate adversary’s calumnies. With my gorge rising, I demanded more firmly that Hoskins dismount, but only got more of his and Darby’s inventive invective. With that I picked up Hoskins bodily and deposited him across the aisle in the lower empty bed under Darby. Although Hoskins, no heavyweight, had struggled vainly in my carry, he didn’t come completely out of his new bunk, only sitting on its edge. But the unseemliness of his and Darby’s language, mainly hate-drenched dark threats of revenge, was expressed in words that would alarm even a 21st Century “shock jock.” That night I must have lain with my eyes cocked across the aisle until I fell and stayed asleep without mishap. Nothing ever happened to me from that contretemps, and I was soon, again, shifted to another barracks, when I shifted jobs to become a clerk in the hospitals Receiving Office Who’s Who? Once we settled into our long tour in Wales, the camp guards or MPs were formed from permanent volunteers in the Company. Almost all of these were boys from the American South, generally less educated and proud of their Marlboro Man self-images. Both Hoskins and Darby were among them. But also among them was a reddish haired tough Jewish kid from darkest Brooklyn. He won the hearts of his fellow MPs by outdoing them in vulgarity and by adapting some of their vocabulary and style in swagger. I believe he was quite conscious of providing a counter-stereotypical persona. One day when just sitting around in their special MP barracks one of the ’rebels’ as they were widely known, offered a joke with an anti-Jewish implication. Press called him on that. There were about a half dozen Jews in our company. Press insisted on running through each name and asked the now attentive group, “What about Sam Cherner , isn’t he a good guy?” “Yeah, he’s OK” was communicated one way or another and no complaints were raised. And then the rest were serially named by Press, and each was accepted in turn as OK. When he had finished, Press said, “So what‘s the rap against real Jews since you have no complaints against any one you know in the company?” Hoskins spoke up, “Hey, there‘s one nigger-loving-Jew that you didn‘t mention.” Press scratched his head, but feeling he had been exhaustive, asked in puzzlement, “Who’s that?” “That nigger-loving-Jew, Edgell!” Press relayed that one to me with a big laugh. First Crush and Love After eschewing the pub life in early Abergavenny exploration , Sam and I found another doorway with a whisper of light seeping out. In we went to find a NAAFI canteen (wo)manned by chatty lasses of mixed attractiveness. Tea, a parody of coffee, and 'biscuits' and good old meat paste sandwiches were on offer, gratis. A young woman of well above-average height and attractiveness leaned over her counter and in the process of offering her array of edible treats began a larky banter with college-educated Sam, who relished the encounter and responded in kind. Whatever my limited interpolations, they could hardly have been memorable, although I was much taken with this Welsh lass. We weren't free to leave camp for several nights, but when that freedom came, Sam and I headed for the canteen. There was our girl; by now we had got to know her as Mary. There was more challenging banter, at which even I tried my hand. On a third night of freedom in town, we went again into the canteen. This time Mary took a break from her counter duties and joined us at one of the Spartan room's bare tables. After a while she seemed to grow tired of Sam's giving as good as he got in the witty, fencing-like exchanges. Mary seemed to focus more on me as a shy, tongue-tied, hardly dry-behind-the-ears type; more fun for her to jokingly plague. There was certainly, in that wartime, more of a loose style in social relations for the normally reserved British. The young ladies, especially, had been without home lads about since the war got underway in l939. It was now January l944. On the whole that wartime experience showed me a much more open, friendly and matey British face than I found in later, peacetime Britain. Sam and I saw Mary together one or two more times, but I guess Sam saw that I was more stuck on Mary, and he drifted out of the picture. But about here there were a few sleepless nights for me, excruciatingly anxious and unsure over my acute aspirations to "win" Mary. But we soon began seeing one another as often as possible, given the only intermittent freedom of those early days in camp. She was almost six feet tall, with exactly the right weight and its distribution on that frame. That gave me only a 3 or 4 inches over her. Because of her height, she had a habit of bending forward with most people, suggesting a concerned sympathy, listening carefully. But with me she stood proudly upright, almost s if she delighted in that freedom. She wore her straw colored hair pulled back from her face and forehead in a style that did little to enhance her natural good looks. We went to movies -- where everyone rushed out even before the end of the film, so they wouldn't be trapped there while "God Save the King" was being ritually piped in. We took hikes through the lovely woods and across fields where occasional fences provided stiles for crossing. I soon acquired a bike to join Mary's, and that became another mode of rambling. One of our favorite on-foot meanders was through the peaceful, and when more or less dry, water meadows alongside the murmuring River Usk. Not long into our steady pairing, I was invited to the cozy, rather Dickensian, main room of Mary's, and her mother's, home, number 18 Cavendish Street. Mrs. Evans was wonderfully warm, welcoming and, as it emerged, of charmingly liberal worldview. She had been raised a Londoner, and was, according to a proud Mary, one of the first young ladies of her cohort to daringly ride a bicycle in public. Mrs. Evans was now seventyish, and although not invalided, I can't remember seeing her move from the chair that seemed to have grown around her. Mary was her last of six children. Mrs. Evans smilingly sat there, brightly sage-like, making dolls and floral arrangements out of crepe paper and miscellany. These Mary put into a large front window which abutted on the aging sidewalk, to entice a modest trade in her mother's decorative items. During those early, virginally sweet days, Mary would often claim to feel apologetic -- usually with a mock-guilty giggle -- over breaking up my friendship with Sam. I assured her that was not at all he case. Although Sam found his own outlets off the base, we remained close in our daily routines on the small camp at Gilwern. We actually remained the closest of friends throughout our two more years in the overseas army. The simply sweet days didn't last over long. From time to time Mary and I got into a sort of flirtatious play. Sometimes she would challenge me to wrestle from her whatever odd artifact came to hand. This led to inevitable, disturbingly welcome, arousal. Certainly for me it was sensational (in all meanings). This led to more erotic fondling, and we soon became full-blown exploratory lovers. I experienced real transcendence in our abandoned, simultaneous immersion in these ecstatic happenings. As our first coupling was hardly seconds away, Mary, in by-the-way manner, mentioned that her maidenhead had been ‘lost’ during one of her competitive swimming meets. Since I was in high excitement and moving with unpracticed instinct into nature’s prime position, I muttered, and meant it, that I could not care less! Reflection in later life leads me to doubt Mary’s explanation; at 21. With her high sensuality, it wasn’t likely she had waited for me. Just before I entered her, as we ogled one another in “full Monty” for the first time, Mary excitedly said, “Edge, You‘re so long!” At first I stupidly thought that she meant that I was taller than her, and I answered that she was pretty long, too. Only later did I realize what she had focused upon. As our relationship deepened, with its strong element of sexual freedom, Mary expressed ever more fascination with my lingam, as if it had a personality of its own. She asked if she could call it “Billy.” I didn’t object, and after that she always used that name. At times she quite seriously pretended to address Billy directly, almost worshipfully. Without my asking, Mary would quietly, tenderly initiate fellatio, usually in the restorative state after our first climaxes, and it seemed to excite her as much as it did me. As I climaxed again, she would swallow my semen with a beatific smile. Other modes of sex while joyous were not unusually inventive. We didn’t exhaust the Kama Sutra, but we settled on and returned to a modest variety. At times Mary would kneel astride me, with phallus in place, and then twist about in great delight. I enjoyed her pleasure, but this maneuver sometimes tore at my pubic hair, giving me fleeting moments of discomfort, as part of the great game. Once she settled facing forward, my deepest penetration was possible, and Mary beamed as a triumphant queen might as she stretched upright, saying that she felt “filled up” and how marvelous that was.! Mary would sometimes ask if I could feel her “holding Billy.” When I said, “Oh YES!” even when I wasn’t sure of an additional distinct thrill, she seemed to burst with pride. At times she maneuvered so as to invite approaches from the dorsal aspect. Once Billy had been anointed, Mary asked if I would give her counterpart a name, and I suggested “Muffin,” as fitting my sense of her vaginal warmth and soft welcome. She found Muffin quite appropriate. We were of course concerned not to bring a new life into being while enjoying sexual fulfillment. Mary had an understanding of her rhythms of fertility, and I followed her guidance on that. At more risky times I would reluctantly withdraw on the verge of ejaculation. Then she would beg me to spill on her flat belly. On one occasion when I used a condom, it burst and we worried, needlessly as it turned out, about a not so immaculate conception. Mary did say that she would love to have my baby, but that must not happen under the existing circumstances. As our camp became a working hospital and duties more routinized, our restrictions to the camp area gradually loosened until D-Day, in June l944, the invasion of Normandy. But one still needed a signed pass, which limited outings. Like many others with interests afield, I forged a pass of my own, and with the growing laxity of, or friendship with some of the guards at our gate, I managed to see Mary almost every night. I had been fascinated by Mary from the first sighting. Throughout my life tall women have been more immediately attention-getting to me -- perhaps a mother fixation. Mary's challenging, teasing -- but still conventionally ‘proper’ -- manner and easy body movements hooked me with thoughts more romantic than consciously carnal at the start and early days. As I try to reconstruct those feelings, I believe the first stirrings and pain, hardly products of reasoning, arose from yearning for someone, now identified in Mary, to love and value me --a probably general phenomenon -- but that someone had to be of worth, that is someone of such grandeur that her judgment on me was worth having. Sexual appetite, of course, could hardly have been absent, if obscured by the fog of romantic passion. But the song asks: “What Is This Thing Called Love?” It is still hard for me to confidently understand my feelings toward Mary. I think this is always particularly murky when a large element of exciting carnality is involved. Mignon, my first wife, would later write that she had only been in love with my body. In her case that may have also been the overwhelming drive for my own going into marriage with her (body). Was that the case with my unquestioned attraction to Mary? We sustained our wartime closeness for over one year without the slightest hitch in my enchantment with Mary, and only signs of the same joyfulness on her part. But was I -- or Mary -- in love with a whole person, in a way that would be sustained over years together under the much more diverse and changing circumstances of peacetime life? Who knows! Is there such a thing as “hormonal love“? Aside from the marvelous shared sensuality, other common interests gave some dimension to our relationship. Early talks touched on personal history and family data. But these weren't gone into very deeply or persistently. The sparring, teasing sorts of conversation were most common and never disappeared. They held an unexamined, pleasantly exciting challenge for me, however frothy the topics. We talked about the future of our relationship only very much later, when it would become clear that my unit would soon be transferred from Britain. We shared delight in countryside rambles and bike expeditions. Nature charmed us both. Mary seemed a bit too gaga over soppy lyrics of popular songs and romantic poetry. But she only occasionally couldn’t restrain particular enthusiasms, and I saw it as an entirely tolerable foible. My own interest in Jazz wasn't hers, for balance. Mary's wartime job was that of a Lily Tomlin-type of telephone operator at the Abergavenny office of the Royal Engineers. All the telephone operators of that region of small towns got on the line to connect calls, and commonly got into chats with callers. Mary was no exception and it was right handy in a few cases when there had been some ambiguity about our ‘dates.’ She belonged to a badminton club composed of ten or twelve members, most of them her work mates from the Royal Engineers. Mary was by far the best female player and was keenly competitive. When she first brought me there, I was acutely embarrassed over my inevitably failing, flailing efforts to even hit the feathered shuttlecock in its strange flight patterns. My humiliation was heightened by my self-image as a fairly well coordinated athlete, with some homeland triumphs at popular US sports; and display of my prowess was, in my belief, essential to winning fair maiden. Over the many months that we made badminton a rarely missed weekly event, I came to be a fairly good player, eventually even better than Mary -- EUREKA!. . vindication! The sport remained an interest of mine into my 70s, even though my wandering life has permitted only intermittent indulgence. Mary's narrow, shared-walls home, with a small yard space only at the rear, had two upper floors for several bedrooms. It was frequently visited for weeks at a time by two older sisters, usually with their children. So the main parlor, the only room consistently warmed, by fireplace in season, sometimes became crowded. In decent weather Mary and I simply went outside after I observed the expected pleasantries. But in unpleasant weather, Mrs. Evans, accepting Mary and me as 'love-birds,' suggested that we could go to a small unused, and so closed and cold, sitting room on the ground floor, off the long entrance hall. There Mary and I hugely enjoyed one another's company and bodies. We hardly needed the heat from an available gas-fed grill. When the women of the house were discussing re-wallpapering the main parlor's peeling ceiling, I volunteered that I had some relevant expertise since I had been a helper for my father, a practitioner of that craft. My implied offer was hastily accepted, and on the set night, I fool heartedly presumed to lead the renovation effort. Just setting up and moving about the means of reaching the ceiling was challenging in that jumbled room. After many a misstep, with the paste-covered wallpaper, a few times falling over my head, and other contretemps, a reasonable job got accomplished. Given the numerous frustrations, only the larky, chaffing atmosphere, led by Mary, throughout the evening enabled us to reach the end of the task in good spirits. On one night, when I expected to find Mary at home, she was not there when I arrived. It seems that some close friend had urgently, at the last minute, needed a baby sitter some twelve miles up the narrow vale of the stream, Afor Honddu, toward Llanthony Abbey, where Mary had gone by bus. Deeply frustrated in my expectations for that evening, I was able to call her and get directions to her location. She seemed shocked that I seemed determined to reach her, and she tried to discourage me from the effort. I was to wait at no. 18. But I was fixedly driven, and I set off on my bike in a desperate rush. The route, by now under deep darkness, was entirely uphill -- and ordinary bikes in those days were only single-speed! The road was also winding, with the babbling of the unseen Afon Honddu almost constantly in my ear. Lights on bicycles had to be taped over the lens so that only a small slit emitted light, not of any use for the rider's vision, but only so that the cyclist could be seen by others. I arrived at the house in near exhaustion. Mary was surprised to see that I had indeed made the mad trip. She was planning to catch the bus back to Abergavenny at ten o'clock, in just a quarter of an hour. Only a few hugs and kisses were possible before Mary was off on the prompt bus. I continued to act foolishly and from my bike grabbed onto the double-decker’s pole at the rear platform entrance. This led to a mad downhill flight as I clung to the bus till my arm was growing sore, through unseen, unpredictable turns at speed, until about half the way back, when I realized that I was literally risking my life by continuing this madness, and I let go. But I sped on in the darkness to my strength's limits, now downhill. When I showed up gasping at Mary's door, she had already been at home for several minutes. She typically tried to make a joke about my wild excursion, but I suspect she was well pleased with the ardor of my pursuit. That first spring Mary and I were fascinated by a picture and story about The Three Feathers, a genuine Tudor era, half-timbered inn in Ludlow, Shropshire, charmingly off-plumb and hardly sixty miles to the north. We first only dreamed about going there together, and then began cooking up a practical plan. We both could arrange to take up four-day holidays that were due. But Mary felt it was important that her mother give permission. That idea had not occurred to me since Mary seemed such an independent person. She was almost a year older, which gave her fodder, as “the older woman,” for occasional jibes at “Young Edgell.” I was to properly ask her Mum. When I uncertainly did, Mrs. Evans tossed off her permission without hesitation, and seemed to bless the idea. I suspect that Mary had no doubt about this outcome, but there was something in it about propriety. My room at The Three Feathers surprised me a bit with only porcelain pitcher and bowl for washing up; properly period Tudor. There was a common bath for the floor with, to me then, a novel flexible ‘microphone’ shower. During the days we wandered, with a map but hardly a plan, over the delightful hills and the escarpment of Wenlock Edge, celebrated by A Shropshire Lad, and through time-locked Olde Ludlow. After dinners at our hostel or at a nearby cafe, we snuggled and embraced in Mary’s bed against the chilly spring in that sparingly heated inn. Back in Abergavenny, one afternoon in warm summertime, we climbed the Skirrid Fawr, St. Michael's Holy Mountain, and a landmark near Abergavenny, whose cleft at the crest, according to legend, occurred on the night of Christ's birth. It was a beautiful day and place for our picnic, alone up there at the very top, under the favoring sun on the soft green grass. Without restraint for our passion, we spent hours in unhurried lovemaking, in due course flinging our light clothes about as required by our instincts . After climaxes we would lie quietly with our legs intertwined, my hand on her breast and hers around my loins.. The quiet ended when one of us woke the other with sensual caresses and then renewed transcendence. After being so long lost-to-the-world and time, in the early evening we loped downhill in a light-headed state. Hardly halfway I stepped on a stone, twisted my ankle and went down. Even my pain and limp hardly dented an otherwise glorious day, with attentive commiseration from my lover as I hobbled the rest of the way to our bikes. Aside from Love One occasional experience, of a quite different transcendent sort, that also seemed to take me further from the work-a-day world, and, indeed, off the planet for a few moments, happened on an out of the way, rural road near Abergavenny. After my almost nightly bike trips from the 279th Hospital camp at Gilwern to my lady love in town, I came to take this back road; whether or not it was shorter, it was less trafficked, more serene. This stretch later joined the main road that passed above our camp and headed deep into the heart of Wales. My road-less-traveled-by, at one stretch, passed over a meadowland where it was joined by an even more humble byway. There stood, alone, in near total darkness at the time of my late passing, a pub-like building which I never entered. But more often than not when I passed nearby, approaching midnight, a chorus of men's voices would be ringing out from the dark building across the open land in what I took to be old Welsh anthems. I was generally aware of the Welsh love of song, but there, as I biked, especially in good moonlight, an otherworldly feeling possessed me, as if this must be what music in heaven is supposed to be like. Perhaps the mood was enhanced by recent delight in being with my lover. But whatever the confluence of influences, I peddled away, never stopping, in a sublime cloud. It was as if the beautiful sounds arose from no human agency, which I would have discovered, and perhaps been returned to earth by, had I peeked through the doorway. Escaped POWs . That autumn there was a major breakout of German prisoners of war from a POW camp near Cardiff, about 30 miles away. There was some sense that they might be dangerous, and everyone in our area was seriously warned to be on the lookout and, if possible, to help in recapturing them. This got Mary's and my attention, but hardly concentrated it. That evening we cycled away from Abergavenny, via the arched old stone bridge over the River Usk. On the way back, through mellow twilight, we stopped for a cider in the pub at the bridge-foot. British wartime 'double-daylight-saving-time' preserved some light till quite late. Back at 18 Cavendish, we enjoyed one another's warmth for a few more hours before I had to head back to camp. A 'bed-check' was performed almost every night at ONE A.M. to assure our presence in the camp. 'Company punishment' of a week's restriction to camp, or worse, was the reward for an empty "fart-sack." Given my besottedness with Mary, I invariably timed my leaving her on the bike so that at all out speed I reached camp just in time to slide into the sack, sometimes fully clothed, to beat the deadline. On the jaunt that evening with Mary, I was reminded that my bike had lost all the grip in its brake's pads. But it was only a mild inconvenience during our leisurely excursion. On my way back to camp late that night, I had a long downhill where I reached a good speed before mounting the hump of the River Usk bridge. On the crown of the short bridge, I became aware of an indistinct figure in the dark at its far end, about 30 yards away. Almost immediately I heard a hoarse shout of "HALT." "Maybe a German!" was my first thought. This bridge had never been guarded before in my experience. I realized that I could not stop, with my faulty braking, before reaching that voice, so I began banging the bike's front wheel and my boot into the masonry at the bridge side. More "Halts!" came rapidly and were more highly pitched. Finally, I scraped to a stop almost in the face of a small man in an oversized British Home Guard uniform who seemed to be shaking as he braced himself and leveled a Sten gun at me. It occurred to me that my young life had almost come to an untimely end. I showed him my bogus pass, and he nervously let me know that, with darkness, he had been posted there to watch for the Germans. I made the bed-check, but, shaken by the bridge incident, didn’t sleep well in the remaining hours before the routine pre-dawn company formation. Some Introspection As the winter of 1944 was coming, and while our allied troops had pushed the Germans back, our losses were mounting. The word began circulating, more or less officially, that the commanders wanted to pull soldiers that could be spared from rear echelon units such as ours for refilling our forward outfits in the fronts around Luxemburg. One of my tough guy friends who always had felt embarrassed at being in a hospital unit actually volunteered. Although my situation was relatively comfortable and I had a love to add real delights, the new military urgency set me to some rethinking; a Gary Cooper residue may been have at work. I had been initially drafted as a conscientious objector on independent religious grounds which eventually landed me in a medical unit and presumably would keep me from the infantry. But I could no longer claim, on religious grounds, that I should not be asked to kill a fellow human although my ethical objection remained. I thought that if I were now called to join the infantry, how could I honestly claim the statutory exemption on the basis of a belief I had firmly abandoned. Of course I abhorred the idea of going into a fighting unit for every reason! Not the least was the pure physical misery of what such an assignment would entail. I wasn’t sure just how I could properly respond if I were to get the feared order . Thankfully, it never came since none of our unit was to my knowledge dragooned. Oh, Christmas Tree When Christmas neared I heard fatalistic regrets at 18 Cavendish St. that there would again, as in past wartime years, be no chance of a Christmas tree in the house. I wasn’t sure whether this was about conservation, or simply shared wartime austerity, which the British so gamely accepted. That lament set an idea and secret plan into my head. After all, there were plenty of woods thereabouts, and I thought I had spotted some splashes of evergreen foliage on the largely deciduously wooded hillsides. On a day off, I put a hatchet's handle through my belt and inside my trouser leg and biked off to promising vistas. For several hours I searched widely and climbed into wooded patches on Llanwenarth's Breast, across the Usk, where from a distance I thought I spotted patches of greenery. These turned out to be non-Yule bushes or leafy parasitic growths. Near giving up, I saw a dot of green among leafless trees up the side of Skirrid Fach, a delightful hill that Mary and I had often scampered over. I biked over and then climbed up to find a single ten-foot high pine tree. Well, that would be too tall, but what if I hacked just five feet off the top? And so I resolved. It was late afternoon, with the long lingering twilight of that season and latitude just beginning. That hillside was in full view of parts of the town, and since I was all but certain that what I contemplated was illegal, and certainly strongly frowned upon, I must hunker down and wait for darkness. Impatient and feeling ever colder, I tried a chop at the chosen spot on the tree's trunk. But I was alarmed at the unexpectedly sharp sound that seemed to roll out over the fields and houses below me. Once I felt confident that it was dark enough, I cut through as quickly as possible. I had planned my escape route while waiting, and it took me across a sloping field alongside a hedgerow that partially obscured my movement. I emerged near where I had left my bike off a paved road sloping further down into town. With the tree over my shoulder I brazenly cycled toward the town's houses. Occasionally someone passed me going in the opposite direction. According to the friendly custom thereabouts, one always greeted passersby, even in the dark, with a cheery (wartime?)"Hello," and so we did, even as, in each case, the thrill that an apprentice burglar must experience on the 'job' ran through my being. Of course when the door of 18 Cavendish St. opened to my tree and me, I was greeted as the hero I intended to be, with joyous shouts from Mary ringing down the long hall to the parlor. When I described my tree’s original location, I was mock-scolded, as having done my poaching on the lands of Lady Herbert, the local squiress. That thought made for all the more irreverent laughter. A few days later, I was coyly informed by Mary, and it was confirmed by her mother, that the first male who crossed a home's threshold with a lump of coal, after the stroke of midnight on the first of the New Year would have the lifetime love of the nubile maiden within. I immediately determined to perform the ritual, and when I played my part, the traditional effect was properly sworn to. That presentation of coal was one of my easier accomplishments, since our camp had a number of open coal and coke bunkers. I had become familiar with these resources when I had been assigned to bringing order to our camp's coal and coke piles in the course of an earlier tour of after hours Company Punishment. I earned this ‘reward’ by one of my periodic maverick behaviors. Specifically, I had been part of a labor crew laying large, heavy concrete tiles for footpaths around the camp and hospital and I entered into this healthy work with gusto. Because it was tiring work, we were given rotated individual breaks at regular intervals. While I was on one of mine and was throwing pebbles into the River Usk, the camp’s commanding colonel came by. The sergeant in charge of course wanted to make a good show, but I hardly noticed from distance and I nonchalantly continued splashing pebbles. When the colonel had moved on, our sergeant let me have it! That led to my nightly familiarity with the camps bituminous bunkers. during that week of Company Punishment. Bunny’s Bike A figure that was at 18 Cavendish St. throughout these episodes, having an unassertive background-scenery sort of quality, was a British Army sergeant, who was billeted there in a top floor bedroom. This was a common pulling-together arrangement in wartime Britain. I remember him only as Bunny. He must have been in his early 30s, and made himself relatively invisible, at least when I was about. But we were entirely polite to one another in our occasional passings. On one of my visits to Mary, I, most unusually -- for some reason lost to memory -- made the trip on the Abergavenny bus whose in-town terminal was not far from 18 Cavendish. But then in my usual reluctance to part from Mary, without thinking ahead, I stayed until well after the last bus had left that would pass near our camp. Mary suggested that I ask Bunny to borrow his bike, since hers was out of order. I did and he agreed. On the following night's freedom from camp, I rode my bike and pulled Bunny's alongside with my right hand. All this bike riding had given me related skill, and this was no special feat. It was winter and typically dark already. All went well most of the five mile route which I knew so intimately. On a long, gentle down hill stretch I gathered speed while coasting and would have liked to brake a bit. But under the circumstances I couldn’t adjust my tightly fixed grip on the handlebars to operate the braking lever on either bike. At first this gave little problem, but I needed to progressively increase concentration as I gathered speed. I was only a little worried. Although I knew the road down pat, in the darkness I could not see details on its surface. All of a sudden the bike I was pulling hit something and leaped into the air. I was barely able to hang onto it. When it landed the front wheel was askew and I struggled in vain to get it aligned straight forward. As we sped on, Bunny's bike kept swinging wildly from left to right and I fought to keep it off mine for perhaps a further one hundred speeding yards. Of course I could have just let go of Bunny's, but that thought didn't occur to me at the time. Finally, its front wheel ran under mine and we crashed, with me flying over the bikes to land, fortunately, on my back and shoulder. Since it was winter and I was heavily clothed, I wasn't badly injured, and Mary's later ministrations made everything almost worth the bump. Bunny's bike had hit a piece of fire wood that must have fallen onto the road. Bunny's bike was the worse damaged, but I was able to, now more doggedly, pull it along for the rest of the journey. He was a good sport, expressed his sympathy, and said that he would get the repairs made without any trouble. Of course I was both apologetic and grateful. Except for this event, I had had, till then, no substantial contact with Bunny. But later came another, more disturbingly delicate encounter. Friendly ‘Fire’ Another of those rare bus rides to and from Abergavenny had a more violent ending. Near the end of the war in Europe our hospital was full of wounded, many almost restored to full health and near hospital discharge. The last and crowded bus in question returning past our camp held many of these GIs who were strange to me. I was among the last to squeeze off the double-decker. Not far along the road that wound down to our camp, I came across a gaggle around what turned out to be one GI beating another about the head who was half on his back on the road with his head held between the knees of the beater. When this became clear, Gary Cooper-like, I waded through the audience, which seemed to be applauding the brutality, I wrapped my arms around the slugger and hoisted him away from his victim. I had hardly done this when someone from behind grabbed me. I dropped the puncher when I realized that the crowd was on the side was of my embracer. That stretch of the road was nearly horizontal, along the contour of a steep hill. This was bordered by the typical hedgerow on the down hill side. I knew that beyond the hedge, a farmer’s grassy pasture ran for a considerable distance to the bottom. Certain that at least some of the crowd had unfriendly intent toward me, and that I urgently needed to leave that venue, I thrust myself and my strong-armed embracer through the hedgerow line. This resulted in a tumble of some five or six feet down a steep embankment onto the field. That separated our twosome. To my mild surprise my partner turned out to be Okie, so nicknamed from his provenance, a member of our hospital company. Okie and I had had little to do with one another, having stayed at arms length from a probably mutual sense of alien personalities, even though we had both played on the company football team. Once on our feet and facing one another, it was clear that Okie was well drunk. He began cursing me -- “nigger-lover” was included -- with all the venom of an apparently long-stored animosity, and he started making poorly coordinated swings at me. Those were easily avoided, and on one his off-balance swings, I caught the tail of his open army jacket and, with the help of his own momentum, flung his body tumbling far down the incline. By this time some of gang on the road had started to come though our gap in the hedge so I prudently moved briskly to enter the camp gate and safety. The next day, while taking my bike up the hill on the way to Mary’s, I stopped to look at the point where we had broken through the hedgerow. What I saw gave me a shiver! Within a few feet of where we had burst through, and right up against the embankment, was a large piece of rusted farm equipment. The most prominent feature was a closely packed bed of tines sticking upward about one foot and spread over four or five feet in either horizontal direction. Recollecting that shiver now puts me in mind of Kafka’s “The Penal Colony,” where such a rack of long needles was used in punishment. Of course I continued to see Okie from time to time on the compound grounds. I tried to look neutral and he just looked away. We never exchanged a word through the distant end of our service together in the same Army unit. By April 1945, we were regularly awakened at: 5:30 AM daily for the new workday. The regular night duty Sergeant was a recent German immigrant with a heavy residual accent. He would open each hutment door and shout out the breakfast menu. On one day after the noise of opening the door, in his usual voice, he simply said in one sentence: “President Roosevelt died last night and there are powdered eggs for breakfast.” What juxtaposition! Saying Goodbye? Nearer the end of my unit's days in Britain, Mary began to mention that Bunny was showing an interest in her. But he was a married man and this attention made her very uncomfortable. Perhaps her verbally teasing manner had given him some hope. I didn't press for much detail, but I gained the impression that Bunny's interest had grown over some time, during which I had been completely unsuspecting. I had early on felt some generic jealousy from his very proximity to Mary at number 18. However that passed over time with the growing closeness I felt with Mary. As the war on the Continent was ending, both Bunny and I knew we would be leaving the Abergavenny area soon. On one of those days Mary told me that Bunny had proposed marriage to her and promised to divorce his wife if she would have him. She said that this distressed her, because she had felt a comradely fondness for him over his long, quiet dwelling at number 18. But, after all, her "heart belonged" to me. Because Mary felt that Bunny had not given up hope, she pleaded with me to talk with him, man-to-man for the first time, to finally end his ardent aspirations. After the shock to my innocent worldview, it took a good bit of screwing up of my courage to even contemplate and then agree to Mary's plea. Even though neither of us had ever spoken strongly to the other, Bunny's greater age and presumed maturity did leave some awe to be overcome. As I entered his small room at the top of the house, Bunny was packing, and he greeted me in his mild, friendly manner. Nothing was harshness, all gentlemanly. I don't remember exactly what I said, in my hopefully disguised high tension, but I believe the gist was that Mary and I had become strongly attached, and, this being the case, his further pursuit would only disturb her most unpleasantly. And, straining for the avuncular, I suggested that any continuing emotional investment by him would only lead to his pain and frustration. To my great relief, Bunny had no words of rebuttal. Instead, he calmly claimed to philosophically accept the clear reality. In fact, he had already seen the need to give up on Mary and to go back to his wife and children. His packing was for departure on the very next day. He claimed to harbor no ill will toward either Mary or me. We wished one another good luck. Facing Reality With a few brief exceptions, Mary and I had never looked to the future, as if we were in a perpetual lovers' dream. I may be wrong about her thoughts, but then I had no evidence that her cast of mind was different from mine on the matter. But when it became clear that my time in Britain was approaching an end, we suddenly gave it serious discussion. Because of our unit's long tour near Abergavenny, a few of my GI colleagues had married local girls and others were making serious such plans. I asked Mary if she would marry me after the war and come to the USA. I don't think that I was that keen about marriage just then. But I did love Mary and even felt that it was incumbent on me, as a decent bloke, to make the proposal under the circumstances. Mary first responded, almost dreamily, "Wouldn't it be wonderful to be together forever." But she had hardly said this, when a cloud of practical doubt seemed to find her. After taking some time to think, she told me, with a rather pained effort, that she couldn't possibly leave Britain while her dear Mum depended on her so completely. This sounded like a terrible finality! Although the thought occurred to me, it would have been heartless and out of bounds to suggest that her mother might, in the normal course, die soon. Mary may have anticipated the matter since she volunteered that she expected her mother to live quite a while longer, and with that uncertainty it would be unfair to make a promise about leaving her home. I suspect that singular last thought, about leaving her homeland for America, frightened her, also. She asked why I couldn't stay, or come back to Britain, after the war to live, and perhaps go to a British university. She had long understood my aspirations for more education. She tried to sound gay as she proposed this, but there was a wistful quality, and I don't believe she harbored much hope, given all she had heard from me over our times together. I reminded her that I had firmly settled on an American education, since I didn't yet feel adequately rooted in and knowledgeable about my own land of origin. I felt I needed this more secure sense of where I came from before taking on the world, which in some ill-defined way I intended to do. We left matters at that impasse, but agreed, without any satisfaction, that if matters somehow evolved so that one might join the other, we would keep open that possibility. Mary said that whatever happened, she would always be mine. I went no further than to say I loved her, but with some intuition that I couldn't honestly say "always.” Into France and Germany In May 1945, as the European conflict was ending, my unit was shipped to the huge holding concentration of US troops in and around Verdun; the French frontier city so near Germany and so historically war-torn. We had landed at Le Havre in an uneventful parody of D-day, by wading ashore from the landing craft that had ferried us from the cross-channel troopship. After transit Camp Twenty Grand in Normandy, we were crammed into French “40 & 8” boxcars, Verdun bound. There was no planning or organization inside my car, where a pecking order seemed up for grabs from the start, and many were soon in thrall to alcohol from the "Calvados" of dubious quality that had seemed all but given away in unlabeled bottles by presumably admiring French peddlers at the start of our uneven four day and night progress to Verdun. One of our lads when first trying his vintage, spat it out and screamed, “PISS!” And he immediately threw the bottle out the open door of our moving car amidst general laughter and his understandable curses. Other GIs with bottles of similar provenance, still untested -- many had already quaffed heartily without complaint -- quickly checked by inhaling deeply at the opened top of their bottles. No one else uttered similar disappointment. I tried to escape the patches of unsupervised rowdiness by finding a corner of the car. But this was near a hole in its side. With the raw spring weather whistling in, I got thoroughly chilled and wound up with pneumonia in a Verdun US Army hospital. Verdun There was a further miserable interlude after my three weeks flat on my back in the pneumonia ward. The first or second day after I was allowed up and put into the rehabilitation ward coincided with a sports field day for rehab patients. Always used to active sports, now bursting with pent up energy, I entered just about every event including two softball games. Well, the next morning, I could hardly get out of bed for the body pain. For at least a week I was in agony in every muscle and joint. I could not even do the simple rehab exercises, and climbing the four floors of stairs to the rehab ward practically drove me to my knees. Hauling myself up without using my painful arm muscles on the railings seemed impossible. This took two more weeks in light duty rehab before I returned to my Company. The whole summer was passed there in Verdun, pleasantly enough for me after the weeks in the hospital. During our unit's non-operational sojourn of summer there, waiting to join the occupation of Berlin, we had little to do during the day. I seemed to be in a perpetual softball game. About a month after our arrival, the grand surrender ceremonies were being held in Berlin, where the victors took control of government in defeated Germany. With the huge number of troops around Verdun, it was perhaps not totally surprising that another baseball rival of sorts from Menominee came to bat on another team one day. I happened to be pitching, not my specialty. But I struck him out every at bat. It seemed that he was almost hypnotized with surprise upon facing me. We were quartered in a huge compound, “Caserne Maginot,” of several massive four story masonry barracks which probably dated from around World War I. The very large rooms were bare except for our portable cots and nearby dilapidated wooden lockers. To relieve oneself one repaired to the long row of classic outhouses behind the barracks bordering the playing field The natural smells when combined with sanitation chemicals during our warm summer were inescapable, and - uh - how shall I put it? - rather unpleasant! After our Company’s movement to a top floor, a regular informal fixture, but almost as with a duty roster, there sat at one of the large open windows one or another of our lads with a pair of rarely out of use binoculars. Across about 150 open yards, probably once used as a drill field, was another similar barracks. The inhabitants were Army nurses. When something ‘interesting’ was happening in the windows across the yard, our GI “on duty” with the binoculars would alert any others lounging about in our vast room, who would crowd around for their turn with the spyglass, accompanied by appreciative evaluations. I suspect that our big room was not the only one with such a sentinel. I took one peek and decided it wasn’t worth another. Anyhow, I was usually outside playing ball. Of course I continued to think of Mary, who wrote as much in happy memory as over our separation. My own Abergavenny reveries came as I lay on my cot before going to sleep, and then in my dreams. With the final end of the war, when Japan surrendered in August, we were given three days and nights completely free. This coincided with the "liberation" of a champagne warehouse by our unit's wide-ranging provisioning team. As a result every one in the 279th got at least one bottle of the bubbly. Much inebriation followed. Many hardly left their cots, except to answer nature in the outhouse multiplex. One of the unit's characters, Phil, an older, sharp operator, in his cot next to a ground level window managed through wagers and connection with the champagne liberators to accumulate something like 16 bottles of the stuff which he stashed in his nearby locker, packed with melting ice with which he was continually supplied over the window ledge by freed, but controlled for their labor, Polish prisoners of war who worked in the mess hall. Our Phil seemed to be chuckling for the whole three days, as he regularly shot off bottle corks at his targets of choice. Needless to say, spillage, not only his, was abundant. At the end of the three-day holiday, we quite literally mopped the barracks room floor with champagne. Of course while we were idling about Verdun, the great tragedy of peoples being driven from their homes or war locations was taking place, little known to us, all over central and eastern Europe, an estimated 14 million, mostly Germans whose national boundaries were being adjusted westward. Sgt. Chisholm On one occasion during those relatively carefree Verdun days, a veteran sergeant, one Chisholm, of deep southern accent and smallish frame, quiet and hardly noticed most of the time, came into our long barracks room drunk one night, when almost everyone else was tucked into their zipped-up sleeping bags. As he staggered, singing, down the center aisle, he began shaking and trying to flip over random lads in their sleeping bags, from which they couldn't quickly emerge. Of course Chisholm, a sergeant, got groans and complaints as he merrily sang and cursed his way along, but no one did anything. Since I was well down one row, I heard quite a bit of this disruption before he got to me. As I listened my gorge rose, and I decided not to take it. When he started to jostle the end of my sack, I leaped out of bed, picked him up, walked to his cot and dropped him onto it, and without saying a word returned to my own sack. For the next hour or so Sergeant Chisholm lay there, ceaselessly cursing me, most regularly as a "nigger-lover," -- we had once been in a group discussing treatment of "niggers," -- and implying retribution to come. Nothing much came of this, except Chisholm's dirty looks, because in those unstructured circumstances he had no authority over me, or was himself embarrassed over the incident. On to Paris One later French excitement came when Sam and I each got a three day pass, on which we weren’t supposed to go beyond Rheims, some 3O miles short of our goal, Paris. There was plenty of army traffic on the road and we easily thumbed a ride. Once in Paris we knew where to find Charlie Fischer, a former journalist and at one time the 279th’s “Communist” who had been finally transferred to the Army’s Stars ands Stripes newspaper which operated out of the International Herald-Tribune facilities off the Place Etoile at the head of the Champs Elyssee. After getting shown around the papers’ premises, it was late and Charlie took us to the small hotel on the Champs, refitted with Army bunks which were assigned to the Stars and Stripes staff and other enlisted specialists. Charlie assured us that most of those billeted there had found more luxurious accommodations, mostly with girl friends, so we could take our pick of the vacant bunks. The war was over and military discipline was lax. Sam and I wandered around Paris for two days, taking in the sights. But the following day we were due back in Verdun, and we belatedly realized we had little chance to make it by thumb, starting so late at night. We were with Charlie at the newspaper when this hit us. He promptly, with the greatest of cool, said that he would simply take us. The paper had Jeeps assigned to it for journalistic purposes and he would take one. So off the three us went at full speed, with Charlie clearly proud of his ability to be our patron. A special treat along the way was stops at a few villages or towns which were celebrating the anniversary of the liberation of Paris or of their own homes. When we pulled up to watch the dancing at the late night celebrations, we were persuaded to take glasses of wine before proceeding. The whole trip was a mad exciting romp. The only down side was the night cold that got to me near the end, alone in the back of the open Jeep, giving me fears of return to the pneumonia ward, but I did survive intact. By the time we arrived in Verdun it was almost breakfast time, so Charlie joined us there for the repast. Then he promptly, before Sam and I could properly thank him, jumped into the Jeep and took off in a cloud of dust. good old, ever cynical Charlie had come through for us. To Berlin Near the end of summer, my 279th Hospital unit came to know that we were indeed destined for Berlin. On almost the stroke of autumn’s start, we boarded open-bed trailer trucks and headed off. The first day we had pleasant autumn weather and charming countryside for scenery. But the last two days before Berlin were chilly and, worse, rainy. The trucks had no covering. But after we were thoroughly soaked, at one of our stops we were provided with a heavy tarpaulin, which rested upon the heads of the taller guys, hardly a pleasant service to one’s mates. Berlin, by Bike Once in Berlin, the 279th was installed in the partially damaged, first class hospital that had been run by and for the Waffen SS (Schutzstaffel), the elite branch of the Wehrmacht, on Unter den Eichen (oaks). Since I worked the night shift in the Receiving Office, I was excited about the possibility of exploring Berlin during the days. This was long before the Wall, and the boundaries between military occupation zones were only sporadically marked and generally open. I immediately concluded that I needed a bike and contrived to get one. One of my pals was sophisticated about the workings of the thriving black market. After dark he led me to a tree lined street where large numbers of Germans were sitting and standing along sidewalks and under the trees, with an amazing variety of attractive, valuable items for sale. The basic currency was American cigarettes, over the distained “Allied Marks.” We found a 30ish German trying to sell his no doubt treasured bike. I had a carton of cigarettes for ‘currency.’ As a non-smoker I usually didn't take my bi-weekly ration. I had, on principle, held aloof -- till this 'exceptional' time -- from the near universal “economy wrecking” practice of converting fags into readily available, valuable German goods. The man's bike was so valuable to him that one carton was not enough; he wanted two! I remembered that I had appropriated, and sequestered, a half gallon tin of apricot jam (my favorite) when our truck trip to Berlin broke up in general disorder upon arrival. I proposed that sweetener and he tentatively accepted in some puzzlement. I left the cigarettes and some token (forgotten) to make sure I would return to him with the jam, and he let me take the well-maintained bike. Since the 279th hospital gate was closely guarded, partly out of concern for thefts by German employees, after dark on Saturday night, I hid the big tin in bushes alongside a remote side street section of the old iron spiked brick wall that ran all around the vast hospital grounds. Next morning I rode the bike around to the point outside the wall where the jam was hidden. I jumped in and then out with the large tin and was on my way. At the German home, the left cigarettes and now the jam were accepted, after the tin was opened for a confirmative peek and sniff. Husband and wife were delighted; after all, it was food! The home was, like much of Berlin, damaged, and the family, with a few young kids about, seemed of fallen middle class and desperate in circumstances. I couldn't help feel a little guilt and embarrassment, despite my keen awareness of recent German/Nazi brutalities, and without knowledge of this family’s possible participation. At some point in my delight with the bike, the idea emerged that it would be a kindness to return the bike to its old owner upon my departure from Berlin. It was interesting to me that GIs who once complained bitterly about the meager cigarette ration at overseas Post Exchanges, now seemed to smoke hardly at all. Each cigarette was too valuable on the black market where wonderful things could be bought. A first class haircut could be had for one cigarette or even a half of one. Now with the bike, I was able to sail widely over daytime, battered Berlin, taking pictures with a camera I had traded for -- ahem -- cigarettes, with another GI. I had a plan to use a packet of pre-war sepia views of Berlin's great landmarks as guides for "after" shots. Most went well, but similar angles were not always possible since the previous photographer's viewing points were often destroyed or were inaccessible. I intended to return the bike to its previous owner before leaving Berlin, but it was stolen shortly before I shipped out. Anne-Marie Knapstein An older GI friend, a man of the world, soon learned of a remaining or revived, hidden away cabaret scene in Berlin. He took me there into an atmosphere of depression era Speakeasy-like demimonde -- but “classy” -- decadence, found behind a disguising entrance. Currency here was upgraded to candy bars, Spam and other largesse available to GIs from their PXes; cigarettes were for tips. The commodity most on offer seemed to be often lovely women of a fairly wide age range. On my second and last visit to the ‘club,’ my desire to get on with a pliable Maedchen led to an introduction to Anne-Marie, a tall fluffy blonde, probably no older than me, rather vacuously pretty and not visibly unshapely. She passively, with little expression, accepted what I believe she simply expected under the circumstances of the immediate post war, something like indentured ‘sex-for-sustenance’. Late in that barely communicative (my German was high-schooled) night of the club, she invited me to her (parents‘) home at the promptly offered address. In the somewhat forbidding empty darkness and destruction of autumnal Berlin I found the unheated apartment a few streets off once (and future) glamorous Kurfurstendamm. After awkward introductions to the German Gothic parents and a brief effort at limited small talk, it seemed understood that Anna-Marie and I would be all but ushered into another private room on our own. My sexual triumphs with Mary found no trace here. I didn’t know what was proper to expect or do as we sat alone, silently, side by side on a sofa. With no heat, otherwise I would have been sweating, and maybe I was a little. Finally, in an affectedly macho way I easily pulled the almost expressionless girl onto my lap. Perhaps we were both new at this. With no groping and just a little jostling on my knees -- she never moved -- pointless minutes dragged by. On inspiration of a sort, I finally got genuine girlish laughter by singing, with exaggerated accent, what I remembered of the Schnitzelbank Lied (song). This hardly led to intimacy but did lighten the atmosphere quite a bit. Upon request I sang as many verses as I could remember and Anne-Marie almost died laughing. A few minute after I had exhausted my repertoire, with nothing else imminent, I said auf wiedersehen and left, never to pursue Anne-Marie again. She had asked me to bring her some shoes since I had the trip to Britain coming up. Some Berlinschmerz I had been deeply impressed by the great general destruction of Berlin. Especially touching were such sights as very well dressed, dignified, middle aged and older German couples, sitting on stumps or tumbled monuments in the Tiergarten, trying to sell wedding rings, paintings, and other valued personal treasures. Others were digging up roots and chopping at stumps for scarce firewood, with winter coming on. This was simply laid on top of my understanding of just how all this had come about. Generally there were few German people to be seen about in public places and on major thoroughfares of Berlin. The only crowd that I saw was around huge mound of potatoes outside the ruined Anhalt train station, where apparently rations were being issued. Somehow bitter German suffering was not much exposed to G. I.s in Berlin, even one who wandered as widely as me. Night Duty Night duty was not just a sinecure. Fairly regular business with victims of accidents, gun shot wounds, alcohol and “poison” sickness. One night our MPs brought in a burly Soviet soldier. He was uninjured -- only slightly drunk -- but had been found in our Zone sitting on a curb shooting his pistol into the air. He had become hopelessly lost and gun firing (usually in the forest) was the Russian way to get attention and help getting home. Another time a GI was brought in with a serious bullet wound in his head. Although in great pain, he was conscious. His story was that as he and two other GIs were coming out of a US sanctioned club, they were approached by two Russian soldiers who once up close shot all three in the head. The other two died immediately. The story spread rapidly and the Berlin GIs were upset because they were not allowed to carry arms off their bases. They began protesting for that right, but no sale. Some weeks later there was a short front page story in the Army’s Stars and Stripes that said a gang of Germans, who dressed as Soviets had been captured and were presumed guilty of perpetrating this and other disguised crimes in the “West” zones Brief Return to Britain Well after World War II was over on all fronts the Army offered a number of short study courses at European universities. I applied and got accepted for a week long course on the British Press at the University of Leeds. It was a genuine interest of mine; but more, there was also the greater hope that I could see Mary and enjoy her loving presence somewhere along the way. We had written one another regularly, she a bit more often and passionately in the meantime. News of my travel and the thought of our possible reunion got a return letter with “squeals“ of delight. As the time for my trip came close, all I could think of was the pleasure of being with Mary. 
 When our small group of GIs arrived in England, I learned that my course had been canceled. I was rerouted, with another GI who became my pal of the week, to be guests of the city of Liverpool’s hospitality folks, who scheduled a round of factory and museum tours. When this lackluster week was over, we were left on our own in still dimly lit Liverpool. I had phoned Mary shortly after we arrived in Liverpool and now called again. We had been given three days to report to an Army center in Southampton for ship passage back to France. With a married older sister in London, Mary proposed that we meet there and it was agreed. We talked a lot about the past wonderlands of love around Abergavenny and summoned words to recover our passionate, dreamlike feelings of that time. While we were still passionately warm with one another and intensely concerned and sympathetic about one another’s futures, we understood that the futures would probably not be together. The dreams and innocence were fading. The reunion had many happy moments and snatched ecstasies, but there was the shadowed feeling that we were desperately stealing hardly two days together, and on terra strange to our relationship, in the nooks of her sister’s house. Since Mary and I were now resigned to no early change in our prospects for living together, our pleasures were framed by a cloudy ambiance, and while we shared tender feelings, we also related to one another as somewhat tempered adults, trying to communicate what we meant to each other. In the end I overstayed my paper orders for a day before reporting to Southampton. At the Southampton Army depot, I was somewhat surprised by the chaos, and carelessness about any sense of military order, as if the end of the war had dissolved all that. I was casually directed to a long, disorderly, unsupervised barn-like barrack, half full of GIs idling around their cots. With darkness there was a lot of activity at the far end, hard to discern in the dim distance. But some muffled female giggles and squeals reached me. The G.I. on the cot next to mine leaned over to say that I could get one of the girls to come to my cot. Every evening a whole queue of girls climbed through a back window that seemed open to the public, at least after dark. So fresh from my idyll with Mary, I felt above that sort of thing, and so unhesitatingly demurred. Roistering in the far end of the barracks swelled and subsided in alternation through much of the night. Next day I learned, informally, but credibly, that there would be no troopship leaving for France for about one week. Since no one was checking on our presence, one could just take off on the probability of not being missed. This seemed the game of several barracks mates who had taken off, come back, and taken off again when no shipping was imminent. I desperately called Mary to see if she was still in London, and she was. We agreed to meet again in her sister’s home in south London’s Tooting Common. I had been assured that no troop ship would leave Southampton for a least a week, so we took a westbound train from Paddington Station to Abergavenny. While there, Mary and I sought out Bob, a GI friend of mine who had been discharged earlier while we were in Berlin together, and who had married a Welsh girl. He had written to me from an address in Nanty-Glo in worked-over mine-pit country near Bryn Mawr, some 10 miles west of Abergavenny. Bob was older than most in our unit, well into his 30s. He seemed to have lived a very sophisticated life before the war, much of the time in Hollywood, and was for a time a crooner with a nationally known dance band, Jan Garber's. There was no boasting about him, even a certain shy, lost quality in his wartime surroundings. With my interest in big band jazz, we came to communicate easily with one another, and over time his glittering worldly experience came through. After a bus ride, Mary and I managed to search out Bob's Nanty-Glo address and to descend on him without warning. We found him in the most bizarre circumstances, straight out of underclass Dickens! A squareish dull brick hovel -- no better word -- sat in a sort of blasted, barren landscape enveloped in a smoky fog in the early winter darkness. It seemed to have only one room, but perhaps there was an extension on the side we didn't see. The water supply seemed to come from an outside tap. Inside there seemed no electricity and the illumination came from some flickering lamps. Beside a smoking fireplace huddled a wizened old man, muffling a regular cough. A glum, plump matron was spread over a nearby chair. A plump, pretty young woman sat across the room on a tattered sofa, nursing an infant. Bob almost seemed to cower on a chair in a corner. Maybe it was our discovery of him in this setting that made him seem very uneasy. After Bob's muttered introductions all around, everyone there seemed transfixed by Mary's and my presence. Little was said though Mary tried some jollity and fussing over the baby. It was clear that we made everyone very uncomfortable, so we felt that we should leave fairly soon, On the walk to the bus and the ride to Abergavenny, I couldn't find words to express my amazement, even shock, at finding Bob in such a setting. It didn't come close to the world in which I understood Bob to belong. Mary’s Mum was away visiting one of her other daughter’s family, so making love at no. 18 had nothing covert about it. In those easy ecstasies the uncertainties and everything else vanished for the moment. We took several long walks over our old rural byways in an enfoldment of hardly spoken profound, shared affection overlain by a shroud of regret. We simply hugged and kissed at regular intervals. When it was time for me to return to Southampton, we must have again felt that this would be our very last time together. But we seemed ready for that and no tears were shed, just endless hungry embraces and lingering kisses before goodbyes. While returning to Berlin the idea of returning the ‘purchased’ bike at departure was somehow prominent in my mind even though I still had two or three months more in Germany. As I entered the doorway before the stairs I saw a scene of apparently wanton destruction, the iron railing, to which I had chained and locked the bike had been ripped away. The whim or mood to wreck all things German seemed all too common in the attitude of G.I.s of the time. The bike was nowhere to be found. I was shipped back to the States, via a transit camp near Antwerp, on a “Victory Ship” of the sort turned out in numbers for the war effort - never a luxury liner. I was seasick again. Chapter 2 Back in the U.S. of A. Menominee, Gateway to Hiawatha Land Almost the first thing that I did back in the States was to buy and send Mary, still very much on my mind, a swimsuit, as she had requested. She may have wanted something more functional, as a competitive swimmer, but I sent the scantiest two-piece version I could find; it would be quite conservative by current standards. I asked her to send me her photo in the “bathing costume”. Two soon came, but poor photography only suggested her superbly fit body. We continued to exchange photos for some time, but her occasional bathing costumes were more conservative. After discharge, back in my hometown in April l946, I was generally disoriented, almost as if this once familiar world now wasn’t reliably real, as if it were a time-frozen movie set. Soon I was recruited by the premier local softball team, sponsored by The Sailors Inn; The Freindly (sic) Tavern, whose two story street side wall bore the massive notice: NO JAPS ALLOWED, NOW OR NEVER! It had been there since Pearl Harbor and seemed destined to stay by the will of the proprietor, an aging, punch-drunk former boxer. It was finally painted over at the urging of one of our team players who had served in the Pacific war and found the sign disturbing. I supported him. For a few summer weeks in l946, I worked in the daytime on the Riverside Cemetery grounds crew An Unorthodox Player Late in the softball season, which had been a good one for me, I had badly injured the thumb on my left hand (I’m a righty) and stopped playing. After some of my missed league games, my team was to play the hotshot team from the nearby town of Peshtigo, Wisconsin on their lighted field. Two or three of our players couldn’t make the trip so I would have to play, much as I preferred nursing my hand. I tried in the pre- game warm-up to play first base as if I only had a right hand on which I wore a glove and then threw it off to throw the ball with the same hand. During WWII The St. Louis Browns had a one-armed player, Pete Smith, who managed this trick. Well, that didn't appeal to our coach, so I was shunted to right field, the stronghold ‘traditionally’ least attacked. Soon a fly ball was launched in my direction; it may have been the imperfect light or the strangeness of a glove on my right hand, but, very unsure of my self, I dropped the ball. The same thing happened a few innings later. Near the end of the game, my team tried me in left field. When a fly ball came my way, I gave up on the glove and caught the ball between my elbows and my belly. The enemy protested this unorthodoxy, but it stood as caught in the end. Each of my previous misses were hooted and celebrated by the home crowd. As that last high fly ball came in my direction the crowd jeered no doubt expecting to rejoice at my further fumbling. So much for these defensive shortcomings But at bat I was having quite different luck. My first at-bat I got up in the lefty batters box. I surprise bunted and beat it out to first base. I eventually scored. Next time up I got up as a right-hander, trying to look fierce. But, because of the very painful left hand, I took it off the bat before my lusty swing hit a good pitch on the nose that went all he way to the fence, and I reached 3rd, scoring on the next infield out. Last at-bat, I was walked. In the end we won the game 2-1, so I felt that I had compensated adequately. College Days In the fall of 1946 I entered the College of the University of Chicago (U of C) at age 22, after passing the entry qualification exam proudly proctored at dear old Menominee High by my former quasi-mentor, history teacher Ferdie Davis. It had been six years since I graduated from high school. I feared that I was entering a world of which I was not worthy, and anxiety mounted during that first Quarter at school over possibly failing and being sent home in disgrace. Every one else seemed so much brighter, exuding marvelous self-confidence, and many were much, much younger. This was the high water mark of the Robert Maynard Hutchins era of unorthodox organization and undergraduate curriculum. That inaugurated my total of five years at the U of C, through the Masters level in International Relations, provided by the benefice of the “GI Bill of Rights”. For three years I experienced much lust from a distance but no girl friends, and had one especially depressing, defeated crush. The whole new world of The University of Chicago, with its pressures, new life and new acquaintances had soon overwhelmed or pushed aside my fixation on Mary, only periodically restirred by letters. In a dormitory for the first year, four of us veterans shared a suite, one room with double deck bunks and another as a study. One roommate, Paul, later turned up occasionally during my college years and still later in my life. He was handsome in the Hugh Grant manner, very bright and seemed to have "all the advantages." Some of his bizarre post college adventures will come up later. During the dorm period, we four and many of the returning veteran students affected a very worldly wise, skeptical style, scoffing at many ‘normal’ conventions, especially such sacred cows as mainstream religion. Once the quarter's comprehensive test grades were in, and in mixed surprise and delight I found all "B"s, I felt that I might just hang on all the way. In fact for the two undergrad years I got A in the comprehensive social science courses, and an average somewhat above B. After the A.B. (I never knew what that abbreviation meant) I continued on for three more years in the Masters program of the interdisciplinary Committee on International Relations. Strangely enough, I did less well there; averaging something under a B. I like to think it was because of the willful unorthodoxy of my papers and essay test answers. The Sporting Life In my first quarter at U of C I went out for the soccer team, the only sport offered in that fall season. I had never really played the game before, but I wanted some sporting exercise. I might have made a good goalie, but that wasn't pursued further since my first love was baseball, then basketball. With the second quarter the baseball team began to work out in the magnificent, huge Field House, a leftover from more serious athletic days at U of C. A large pseudo-dirt area, convertible to tennis courts, with high ceiling made many baseball skills testable. From the book of small worlds, I met someone who had tried out, with me, for my same position, first base, at Wrigley Field before the war. The college team starting positions were pretty well locked up by players returning from the previous year, even though the first big wave of returning war veterans included better players. Since it seemed that I was not likely to get in the first traveling game line-up, when my army pal Sam proposed to visit me at the very same time, I chose Sam and stayed in town. That seemed to blot my copybook with baseball coach Kyle Anderson for the rest of my days at U of C, sort of a saga within a saga. When the team came back, I got a tongue lashing from Anderson, and though I kept coming out, I got almost no playing time for the rest of the season, and then not at my infield position, but right field. I grew angrier as the season went on in this fashion. Thinking Anderson's favoritism was obvious to many other underused, skilled players, I wrote a letter harshly critical of the sports coaches in the school paper, to which I had a small number co-sign and others counted anonymously. There was, of course, no formal response. Summer Off That summer I went back to Menominee, helped my aging Dad on some house painting jobs, and played some serious softball with my old team, which did some traveling and hosted top teams from Wisconsin cities. Among my proudest moments was a play against a nationally ranked Milwaukee team, when, from first base, I anticipated and fielded a good bunt in time to fire to second base and make a force-out. I delighted inwardly at the oohs and aahs over that unorthodox play. The Coach and Me The school year after the Menominee summer, I played intra-mural basketball to stay in shape, and in January joined indoor baseball practice. I became a starter in the outfield and went on a spring vacation tour with the team to play colleges in Kentucky and Tennessee. I was one of the better hitters and continued to be in the early regular season. The team now had older GI veterans at several positions and was beating, to their surprise, good teams, such as Notre Dame, Northwestern and Bradley, along with lesser names. But I was unhappy watching others poorly play the position I had, probably foolishly, set my heart on, while I struggled in the outfield. Just then I had to start wearing glasses for mild nearsightedness (too much reading!) and was uncomfortable at long outfield distances. I let the coach know this without any effect. My grades looked like slumping at the same time, about mid-season, and since I wasn't enjoying baseball as I always had, I quit the team. I played sandlot ball in racially turbulent Trumbull Park for the early part of summer and then hitchhiked, with a schoolmate, to Philadelphia to visit Sam for a week. While there I noticed that the Philadelphia Athletics were holding open tryouts in Shibe Park. I went, and some weeks later I was invited to their subsequent spring training. I understood that West Palm Beach was the "A"s spring training site, and, with the aid of maps and brochures, indulged in happy fantasies. But when the second, more specific, letter of invitation came, it was to their lower, minor leagues camp at Portsmouth, Ohio! This disappointed me and lowered my expectations. To sharpen my fitness and enjoy the sport of basketball, I went out for that school team in the new school year. Anderson was the assistant coach here. The same regimen of playing mostly the members of last year’s team seemed to prevail. A good friend, Ivan (to reappear later in my story), and I were on the "B" squad. Ivan may have deserved better, but I had no right to complain, just yet. The two squads regularly played game-like scrimmages. We outplayed the "A" team as often as the alternative. I was a hawkish, intercepting defender and Ivan was a fast-breaking shot-maker. But nothing ruffled the Varsity lineup, which set a national record for consecutive losses. One night our B team was to play a highly regarded team from Chicago YMCAs. Since I had been the regular B Center, I was excited about the game. When the game started, another, more sluggish player started as our Center. I was disappointed, but assumed that I would soon replace him. As play was rolling on, with me getting chilly on the bench, I got to thinking, "What's going on here?" Finally, well into the second half, Anderson said to me, "Go into the area under the stands and loosen up with warm-up exercises so I can put you in.” With this strange, late hope, I did as directed and vigorously did every stretch that I knew while intermittently jogging in place. Minutes went by, a quarter hour went by, and nobody came for me. Finally, in frustration and feeling greatly abused, I sensed that the game must be almost over. I came out to the bench, and politely asked my fate. I was put into the game with less than 2 minutes to play. In a strange, jittery, feeling degraded state of mind, I promptly, almost spastically, fouled a ball-handler, while attempting something that was normally a finely tuned defensive skill of mine Although I am almost the opposite of paranoid-- a trusting soul -- I couldn't help but feel some singular, calculating animosity in Anderson. A few weeks after the start of the new year, the indoor baseball practice began and I joined in. In March I was to be off to the minor league training camp in Portsmouth, on the Ohio River. One of the last days before I left, Coach Anderson took the squad outdoors on a cold damp spring day. While fielding 3rd base during batting practice, a strong-armed outfielder fired a ball at me when I wasn’t looking. It caught me on the fly on the left tibia and the calf muscle. For days stiffness and pain increased and then lingered. In this condition I left for Portsmouth. At training camp I was first assigned to the "A"s Moline (IL) class "C" league team. Well, there I stumbled around as best I could at 1st base, and was limpingly slow in running the bases. Even when I had extra-base hits, I had to stop one base short. I was soon cut and sent away, having received no “pay” except food and housing at a private home where another player and I were quartered. Of course I was terribly thrown down by this. But all I could do was to plead with the unshakable coaches and scouts about my inhibiting injury. Perhaps because of the awkward way I had to run, in training sprints and in practice games, almost as soon as I was back in Chicago, I began to have painful back spasms. Student Health diagnosed it as “University of Chicago Back” and prescribed sitting up straight to study. It later was x-rayed and seen to be a squashed disc near the tail end. Ever since then the level of pain has never completely disappeared, and at times had occasionally been excruciating. But over the years I have come to live with, and adjust to, it to the point where I usually am oblivious to the low level discomfort. Back at school, I had missed the first two weeks of the year's third Quarter. But I soon asked if I could still go out for baseball, since my leg was improving by now. In response I was invited to come to the Sports Office the next day for a talk with Anderson and the head of Athletics at U of C. I was expecting the worst, but was relatively pleasantly questioned and listened to politely, and seemingly re-embraced, as the prodigal son. As we parted, Anderson rather jauntily said that he would be seeing me at practice that afternoon. In the locker room I was issued a uniform, and then happily went out with the earliest practicers. The players were friendly and some eagerly questioned me about my fling at the pros. Some were clearly hopeful for such a chance. After about a half hour of this comradely, improvised practice, Anderson arrived and called the team to sit around him on the ground as he stood. After a brief review of the last game, he said something, but at greater length, like the following: "Edgell, having shown his attitude and hopes about professional baseball, over college, now wants to be welcomed back on the school team. Such a professional attitude is not compatible with the spirit of the U of C. Also, since first coming out for school teams, he has shown a poor attitude regarding respect for the management of the teams and disloyalty toward his teammates. Therefore he will not be rejoining our team." Anderson went on at considerable length along these homiletic lines. When his drift became clear, I was in near shock, caught completely off-balance! But his running on gave me time to recover and consider a response, which I asked time for when he had finished. Somehow I thought and expressed myself reasonably clearly, considering the acutely felt tension. I claimed friendship with the team players to whom I felt completely loyal. I had received no money at training camp, and I believed that some of my fellow scholar-athletes would eagerly grasp at the same opportunity that I had had. There was no response from Anderson who simply stepped aside and let the players improvise practice on their own. I remained among them and got into playing catch with some late arrivals that were quite friendly and even respectful. I was keenly alert to the feelings of those who, probably not knowing what to think, avoided me at first. But more and more came around, and I was batting for a "pepper game" before Anderson called the players to more formal practice. With that I left the field, showered and went off to try to study, with stormy, mixed emotions to try to get under control. In my last years at college, I would come out early to practice with the team before coach Anderson arrived. Meanwhile I was playing weekends in the quite respectable Greater Chicago League with a variety of semi-pro teams. One wore recent hand-me-down Chicago Cubs uniforms. This quite impressed the student athletes I practiced with. One particular memory of my college day’s baseball has, for many subsequent years, thrust itself back to painful, depressing consciousness. It still feels -- less painfully -- like one of my great, disappointing failures. After the evaporation of my prospects with the U of C baseball team, during one summer break from school, I was playing with a sandlot team from South Chicago. I knew that the U of C summer team tried to find other teams to play against during this season. I suggested to our South Chicago team manager, my good friend Bill, that he contact he U of C sports program to arrange a game, and this was scheduled. I was not only a sort of “bad boy in the eyes of Anderson, but also, I believe, to some of the members of his team whose attitudes he had influenced. I of course had a sort of cocky attitude and expected to do well against my tormenter. Gene, his best, very good, left-handed pitcher, who I believe saw me through Anderson’s eyes, would start against us. To my disappointment, only about half of our regular team showed up at U of C’s well-groomed Stagg Field diamond; Bill had somehow scraped up a few strange players of mixed talent. But on with the game. Batting third in the order, I started by hitting a solid single into right center field. Feeling confident about stealing, based on my certain knowledge of the catcher’s weak throwing arm, I didn’t take much of a lead, in part because Gene’s move to first base was as often as not a ’balk’, which no one bothered to call. Almost lackadaisically, I took of with the pitch. The rainbow throw arrived at the same time as did my skidding toe (the belly-flop slide was not yet common). The call was OUT, and wasn’t clearly wrong. Well, that deflated my self-image a bit. Next time up I tried a disguised bunt, but Gene’s awkward throw just nipped me at first. But the real sting that has lasted these many years came in the last inning with me at bat, a runner on second and two outs, with my team trailing 2 to 1. In what approximated to a shoot out at High Noon between Gene and me, the count went to 3 and 2. The base runner would be running with the next pitch. Gene came at me with a low-inside, my best power zone, pitch that broke back to the corner of the plate. I took it and was called out! . . . It was in fact a fine pitch, and I’m not sure that it wasn’t a strike. Although I tried to appear a dignified stoic, it was one of the very greatest, deflating disappointments of my life. Gene and much of the U of C team were demonstrably jubilant. Bill, denounced the umpire, a move I discouraged by observing that the ump must enjoy these U of C paydays and would like to be reinvited. For weeks after that calamitous day, and often later in life, I bitterly reviewed my performance: Why didn’t I get a better jump on the steal of second? Why didn’t I bunt down the third base side rather than first, where a left-hander had a shorter, easier throw? Most of all, why didn’t I swing at that low inside pitch, to my strength, with an easily imagined extra-base blast redeeming the day? Of course, uh, it hardly bothers me these days -- Of course not! Some of the Gang Of my three roommates that first year, Paul is the most memorable because he popped up a few times in later life. But at the time Harold “Heshie” Katz was as close a friend. Heshie had vision problems, and with WWII underway, he had been rejected from the universal draft. This so disappointed him that he spent hundreds of dollars bringing his eyes up to qualifying standards and was indeed later drafted, to his satisfaction. At school he soon found a mate and drifted out of my orbit. After that year in the dorms, with a few irregular school buddies I took evening meals at a literal greasy spoon, the “Home Restaurant” under the elevated tracks on 63rd St. Ralph D. was a member, always immaculate of jacket and tie dress and coiffure. But he seemed commonly out of money and in need of funding for his next meal, which any one of us would gladly supply, and get eventual repayment. Ralph was a favorite of the no nonsense waitress, who, I suspect slipped him a free cup of coffee in hard times. Jim was another, proud of his classical Greek heritage, and not too secretive about his connection with some sort of Freudian analyst. Jim had the mien of a perpetual figure around the campus whether was taking classes or not. We were often together, especially when Jim went out, in a rather lackadaisical way, for the baseball team during indoor springtime training. Jim had a way of making one feel the grownup in the relationship. Often with Jim was a remarkable little girl, Marian. Among us she regularly served as a reality checker. Our fanaticisms and ego inflators had to face Marian’s recalling us to logic and facts. Only rarely was this more than a soft but insistent, “wait a minute,” bracing us to think through our brilliant illuminations. Although she seemed to live a daringly ‘free’ life, in our relations Marian has always seemed to me a Gibraltar of good sense. (We are still in touch over many miles in her small town Maine. I saw her several times after school in Washington, and served as a sort of Best Man in her civil wedding to David, her partner ever since. Other, more irregular co-patrons of the Home Restaurant included Elmer and Dave, the latter usually with his new bride, Mitzie. These two male personalities were as far apart as conceivable. Floppy, androgynous Elmer was ceaselessly shooting off the most outrageous tropes he could devise for shock effect. Dave was the Henry Fonda persona to the life, quietly smiling, speaking softly and not too often. All of these characters took over the ‘spoon’ on the night before I was to depart for the Athletics’ spring train camp in Portsmouth, OH, for a jokey gala, if inexpensive, sendoff. Fully aware that my ‘camp’ was far from the Big Leagues, I was a bit embarrassed by the fulsomeness, however lighthearted, of the celebration. A baseball bat with the autographs of the party was a lasting token. Just for Sport One of my pals at college was Guido, younger and a non veteran. While he was clearly highly intelligent, I can’t remember ever discussing any of the intellectual or academic subjects that were often worked over with other schoolmates. Guido had a sturdy athletic build and had been a standout at football and basketball at his prestigious private high school. Our ostensible relationship focused entirely on physical activities, whatever else lurked underneath. I seemed to be his main companion on the sports front. We must have been in different dorms in my first year at U of C, and we crossed paths casually at pick-up basketball games in the Bartlett gym, where we exchanged intellectual ‘trash talk’ as was common among players. The strangest ‘contest’ came at a intra-mural indoor track and field evening in the gym. Little U of C medals were awarded individual winners. As the evening was coming to an end, none my dorm’s mates had entered the shot-put, so I had a try, with no more experience than having seen the moves of regulars in that event. We were allowed three tries. After my second, I was told that it had beaten all other marks so I stopped. I had already wrenched my shoulder from a bad landing after high-jumping. The organizers told me that they had already given the token medal to this Guido person since they assumed the shot put competition had been closed. I was told that maybe I could get him to give up the medal. That’s how I came to get closer with Guido of whom I was already aware. With smiles on all sides, when I put the shot (He loved puns.) news to him, he claimed that since he, too, had taken only two puts of the shot, I had no better claim than him, and we left it at that. We were soon together on an independent intra mural basketball team. He and I would get into basket shooting contests and standing arm-wrestling. While he was obviously stronger at that, I managed to keep up with him with tricky borderline ‘illegal’ moves. One day when we at this between classes, I was holding on for dear life and somehow got entangled with his flexible wristwatch which came loose and fell into some shrubbery. We never found it. There seemed a keen competitive, but friendly, or at least smiling, tone on various sports fronts, such as punting and kicking extras-points at non game football. Guido’s father was a psychiatrist who had studied under Freud. Guido offhandedly said that he was told that he had been dandled on Freud’s knee as an infant. He was almost certainly cultivated beyond my knowledge, probably because he only wanted recognition as an athlete from me. Late in our college days, I can’t remember the quite casual occasion, big ‘tough’ Guido sat at a piano and played a Chopin waltz beautifully, only a bit to my surprise. While we were more or less standoffs at basketball, baseball had not struck home with Guido. One spring he entered into my baseball tutorial, especially in fielding the ball. Although he tried hard, it was just not his métier, and it was the first time I was to see him ‘mad’ at himself. A year or two after our respective graduations we surprised one another at a busy street crossing in Washington, DC. We were both in a hurry for some reasons and didn’t linger. We promised to get and stay in touch, but nothing came of that. I believe that I was about to move to New York. The Inferno On the second or third summer off from school I looked for work at a laborers’ hangout. I was signed up to work nights in a ‘small factory’ that was a modest streetcar ride on the south side from my near campus room. Duly warned to wear the steel -toe boots and rough clothes, I showed up at a dingy old brick building at the prescribed 9 PM hour – to work till 6AM... With a minimum of instruction, I set to work in a smallish ill-lit dungeon of a room with a four man team of burley Black guys whose “Black English” almost entirely eluded me, but they accommodated me with very Basic English when needed to carry out my duties. Our function was to melt the lead in old car batteries, for what further use I never came to know. This required me to carry two or more batteries at a time in gloved hands, mount a half dozen narrow metal rungs to the top of a huge, flat-topped furnace. It seems hardly necessary to note that the whole room was very hot and on top of the furnace one was nearly singed, especially when it was required to toss the old, sometimes leaky batteries into a large hole near the center of the huge furnace. This action was guided by one of the large men who somehow, hardly believably, stayed on top by rotation and directed me and the two others when to throw in the batteries that we had lugged to the furnace top; sometimes this director had us set them down for him, to dispose of later at finely discerned times. The flames in the furnace were always roaring and sometime were inspired to leap out of the open hole that was the batteries’ destiny. As the new guy, I was apparently not qualified to be in the rotation of the old hands’ on topside and I just lugged the goods up there. We each got a half hour break after every two hours. I was not acclimated to night work and day time sleep, and I seemed always tired. So I would use my breaks to catch catnaps sitting on a pile of batteries. My co-workers treated me with respect if somewhat indifferently. Since I had brought no lunch that first night, I was offered a share of theirs by two of the other guys. Perhaps as a true agnostic, this was meant to be a foretaste of the underworld to which a possible god might later consign me. Well, I lasted a week at that inferno before deciding to seek something less like sinners’ end. This turned out to be at a tire warehouse just under the bridge over the Chicago River on the ‘Million Dollar mile’ of Michigan Avenue, where, in overalls two or three other lad s and I happily competed to see who could roll the most tires simultaneously to the waiting freight cars on our siding. Army Buddy, Meyer Out of the blue one day, an old Army buddy, Meyer, phoned to ask if I would join him at a wedding reception party for a classmate of his from a community college. It was to be held at a Polish church on the far southeast side of Chicago. He felt uneasy about going alone to strange territory so far from his north side family home. Once on the scene, Meyer knew only the groom to whom he introduced me. Although the event was plenty boisterous and jolly, Meyer and I may have been a bit conspicuous for our unfamiliarity, our hearty eating and his heavy drinking. Well into the rather rowdy evening, one of the groom's brothers asked, in some dudgeon, just who the hell we were and ‘what the fuck we were doing there,’ as if we had crashed the party for the goodies that we so eagerly consumed. The groom laid that to rest after an uneasy moment. As the lively Slavic evening was winding down at about two in the morning, Meyer was getting surly and was reluctant to leave. We were almost the very last to be quite literally pushed out. Out on the sidewalk on that cool, dark summer very early morning, Meyer suddenly became very hostile and aggressive toward me. Then he broke away and began raging through the front and back yards of the working class neighborhood, uttering animal shouts and sounds. I followed him closely to prevent the worst since he seemed to want to kick on house doors and punch windows. I finally got him back on the sidewalk, and I tried to guide him to his car, parked a few hundred yards away. He punched at me with every effort I made to take him, however gently, by the arm, and he wouldn't give me the keys to the prewar car. Finally, during a struggle he dropped the keys and I snatched them up and trotted to the car. I drove up to where he stood muttering and wobbling. Then he wouldn't get into the car except in the driver's seat. It was clear that he was in no condition to drive. After more struggle during which he almost ripped the lapel off my only suit, finally in desperation I let him get into the drivers seat with a plan to push Meyer to the passenger side while getting in right behind him. In those days the front seats was smoothly undivided. It wasn't immediate but the plan eventually worked. While I was driving on the unfamiliar streets, Meyer kept muttering in incomprehensible anger and pushing and pulling at me. When we had to stop and wait for a draw bridge to close for us, he got particularly angry because we couldn't keep going, and he grabbed my still abundant hair with one hand and tried to swing at me. I was tempted to try to clip him in the jaw to knock him out, but in the cramped car I wasn't able to get a safe shot at him. Failure would have almost certainly have led to a wild fight in the car. Meyer was short but squarely built, muscular and tough. We had played on the army unit football team together. Once past the bridge, it was a constant struggle to keep Meyer off me. Finally, as I sensed that I was not far from my little room. I thought about maybe calling the police for help since I was fed up, and anyhow didn't know where incoherent Meyer lived on the North side. But I figured that the police might be a bad idea and get at least Meyer into unwanted trouble. So I simply parked, got out of the car and walked to my digs, at now about 5 in the morning. In my room I dropped into bed and, exhausted and bruised, immediately fell into sleep. When I awoke around noon, I realized I had left Meyer in some danger since I realized that it was all but impossible for him to safely drive from my Southside past midtown to his parents house on the North side. Right away I called his home where his mother answered. At first she said she didn't know if Bob had come home last night. Oh, Oh! But she looked at his bed and he was there. What a relief! Where I had left him was near 63rd St. that ran right across Chicago's Southside to the then all but abandoned Midway Airport. Meyer told me, when later in the day he got on the phone to say that he had picked up a street person who could tell him when there was a stop or street light. Once at the airport he parked and fell asleep till late morning when he woke up and was able to drive home. Meyer later sent me a check for the cost of repairing my suit lapel, and I never heard from him again. Getting Russ Out of Bedlam While at U of C I learned from Mom that a close friend, Russ, from my neighborhood in Menominee, had asked for therapy for the dysfunctional stress he lived with since a WWII experience. The Army sent him to a mental institution at Downey just north of Chicago. I knew he had had problems “adjusting” to civilian life after a fearful episode in the Pacific war. He had been wounded in the knees and then pinned down in “no-man’s land” under constant Japanese fire from mid-day to nightfall. Aside from the wounds, he suffered, the WWII diagnosis of “combat fatigue” had first sent Russ to the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, which he felt had helped him. But back home he still suffered from what I suspect were deep anxiety and depression moods, over which his new, long suffering wife became distraught in her frustrated efforts to help. When I learned about Russ’s situation, I took the North Shore Line to Downey and his institution. He was brought out of a secured area to talk with me in a large mess-hall like room, closely monitored by big uniformed guards. Russ, as I knew him, had always treated everything in the most exaggeratedly light-hearted way, but now he was seriously begging me to help him get out of this place. He had his shoe laces removed, wasn’t allowed to shave with a blade, and in the common bathroom had been suddenly smashed in the face for ‘no reason’ by a big fellow inmate. This seemed to represent the types of Russ’s fellows and the atmosphere at Downey. As I had known Russ after the war, he seemed any thing but deserving of this treatment. He was simply so tormented by war memories, anxiety and depression that he couldn’t function normally at home and in his profession as a bricklayer. I believe that now that the war had been over for a few years, the “nothing is too good for the boys” mood had passed, and a slacker attitude toward veterans had taken over. He had been committed to Downey with the innocent agreement of his wife. Now only she could get him out. But he was not allowed to use the phone. He urged me to call her with a cry for his release. I immediately did this before I left Downey. When I next saw Russ, when I was home on a school break, he seemed to have settled down more like his old self. Some years later when I was home ‘at liberty’ from overseas work, he paid me to help him build two chimneys on Menominee houses. I believe he considered this a kindness since I was ‘out of work.’ Women, Especially Mignon For much too long a time at U of C, my love life was a vacuum, except for lusts aroused at a distance. Women then were a distinct minority on the campus, and all of those of interest seemed beyond me. I did get a crush on a very tall beauty in my third year. But it just led to pain and depression since after one ball game “date” she became completely evasive, curtly dismissive of my high anxiety pursuit. I wandered the streets through a few long nights, on one attracting a paroling Police car's attenuation - just checking. The acute pain erased all my other interests and sent me to the school’s famous Carl R Rogers psychology clinic. When told that my return to function might take a long course of talk therapy, I was stunned and extremely disappointed. I felt, perhaps naively, that I mustn’t be distracted from my study for so long. Somehow this ’recognition’ and with just this telling someone (professional) of my pain, I managed to quickly get back on my academic feet and end that disturbing obsession. An older friend, Al (I was still “Edge”) a pharmacist from 279th Army days hired me for a time on weekends at his drugstore, a short bus or train ride from the campus. He claimed to have attended the U of C in pre-war days. Now he apparently wanted to recapture, as a bachelor, his own youthful days by hanging out with my circle of school friends. This small gang didn’t mind being invited (cost free) on trips, via his new Mercury convertible, to meals, nightclubs, parties and other swinging occasions; and he expected to be invited to our more frugal dos Al sometimes descended on us in our grubbier hangouts. With an offended sniff, he would propose classier venues. -- And who were we . . . . ? One memory I better, reluctantly, let hang out involved Al who invited me to join him at a house of ill-repute, at his expense. While he treated himself to one of the classier (more expensive) Ladies, I was shunted to the $20 section upstairs. A butterball Latina had to remind me that my undressing was in order. The custom of the house was observed, and that was that, anything but a joyous experience; never repeated. Another of Al’s social pursuits was show business folks. Through him I met Mignon (Mig), a well trained musician, music teacher, paid church singer, and a divorcee. At the time of encounter she was most interested in her leadership of a girls quartet, something like the Andrews sisters, then rehearsing for a road show. (Does anyone remember Olson and Johnson’s clownish tours?) Mig was quite interested in our quickly becoming an item. As I look back, she could be said to have swept me off my willing feet. After an intense, merry sort of affair, to the outrage of her divorced, deep South-bred mother, who caught us in a pre-marital bed, we married in the summer of 1949. Mig was on the zaftig side and had marvelous large breasts. She was a great bed partner. We had twin beds but spent a lot of time in just one. Mary and I had corresponded rather frequently till then, when it seemed proper to halt the letters with their sensual tone, more in hers than mine. When I wrote about my marriage and proposed that we end our correspondence, she responded that she, too, had married and now had a new baby boy. Letters stopped. It gradually became clear that Mig’s and my worldviews and prospects in life were upsettingly at odds. To me the emblematic symptom was our complete inability to understand and appreciate one another’s sense of humor. After almost two years, we both recognized our incompatibility and agreed to separate, not many months before I graduated About one month before graduation, as I worked on my thesis on an August night, to my surprise, Mig appeared at my new flat’s door. A little confused, I let her in quite cordially. She had walked a considerable distance. In a mixture of humility and pride she indicated that she wanted to have sex with me one more time before I left Chicago. (Later at divorce time she wrote that she had never loved me, but only my body.) I obliged and the deed was done -- one of the less joyous in that vein in my career. In a mood that suggested nothing more than ceremonial satisfaction, in less than a half-hour Mig left for her walk home. I offered to accompany her there, through not the best of neighborhoods. She coolly declined. Years later it occurred to me that she might have hoped to become pregnant form that visitation. Paul, My handsome dorm roommate, Paul, seemed able to charm just about anyone. This charm, and a strong sense of psychic indestructibility (I can think of no better characterization, as I saw him then) got him into some extraordinary associations and adventures. Once we went our more separate ways after the dorm year together, we were out of touch almost as often as in, for as long as I was in Chicago. And we were to cross paths about five years later in Washington, DC. Early on at school in Chicago Paul began hanging out at a tawdry-glitzy mixed race nightclub on near-campus 63rd St. He sang with the house band once when I was there, which was no more than twice.. There he hooked up with the house dice "26" girl, nothing spectacular, "a cunt on a stick," as he later described her. This shack-job went on for some months while he got a paying job as night clerk in a rapid-room-turnover hotel on 63rd. He seemed to have forgotten about college by this time. One night in a jolly alcoholic fog, Paul and his girl went across to Indiana to get a quickie marriage “solemnized.” Upon waking the next morning, their larky legal entanglement so shocked them that they immediately parted, avowedly forever. After a gap of months, Paul and I reconnected when Paul was 'being kept' by a spooky, Addams Family-style modern dancer, who was also an evangelist for L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics in its then founding stage (ca 1950). To match her persona, she lived in an ominous castle-like gray stone mansion near Lake Michigan in Southside's east 50s, where an ignored, odd but appealing young daughter preferred lurking under a dark staircase. Also in the chatelaine’s keeping at the time was Harvey, a nightclub piano player. Paul and Harvey wrote out, with my kibitzing as a jazz aficionado, a pop ballad, "Easy Come, Easy Go Lover" which was actually recorded by Sarah Vaughan in those days of shellac 78s. No reason the reader would have heard of this non-hit. But I thought it was good. Ralph’s Comeback On one of my very last days in Chicago, I sat at my desk before the large front window facing the street. With my typical lack of concentration on street goings on, my eyes flickered over someone carrying two big suitcases. I did a double take because there was something familiar about this well dressed male form. Just then in apparent exhaustion, he stopped right in front of my window, with his back toward me. He put down the heavy luggage, let his shoulders slump (shades of Death of a Salesman posters) and seemed to be taking his bearings. I thought I recognized another close friend, who had taken a break from U of C. But from the back view I wasn’t absolutely sure. So I ran outside to look at his face, and there was another of our earlier gang, Ralph D. After happy greetings, slaps on the back and that sort of thing, Ralph announced that he was returning to school! But he said that he had to hurry now to be certain of the digs he had arranged for. We would be sure to meet again in my dwindling days in town. Those meetings took place in the spooky chatelaine’s manse where Paul was hanging out. As before, Ralph and Paul appeared to become close again. But that was the last I saw of either since I left Chicago within days. Ivan One day in my 83rd year, as I washed in the shower, a long forgotten image crossed my mind. It was of buddy Ivan propped up on a sick-bed in one of the small dorm style rooms of the University’s International House. That would have been ca. 1950, near the end of my time at U o C. As my refection played out, I was bemused over how differently the meaning of events can be to participants. Recently, as I reflected on life, I realized that I had said and meant some mean things to or of Ivan when in the setting of the Bergendahl music group. So, feeling the urge to ‘come clean,,’ I wrote with a deeply felt apology. He answered surprised, since he hadn’t felt abused, but rather felt a particular gratitude toward me for an event I hardly remembered. Whatever his clinical illness, Ivan had, unknown to me, suffered a great life-shock. He had been advised to drop out of the Medical School, somehow related to his depressing and debilitating heartbreak over a girl. I had simply heard that Ivan was laid up and with no great forethought set out to visit the fallen. Once I was there we engaged in the usual exchange of wildly humorous – to us – tropes. (We once convulsed ourselves by reading to one another lines from a Restoration Comedy.) This led into talk about our common jazz interests. To my surprise, my ailing pal, from somewhere in the bedclothes, pulled out his trumpet and proceeded to illustrate, with mute, a Dizzy Gillespie riff we had been discussing. As that ended he characteristically faked a death throes exhaustion, which may have only exaggerated reality. After more inconsequential patter, I left for other chores without feeling more than the lightness our one on one encounters usually produced. In his reply to my apology, Ivan revealed to me for the first time over the long years since, that my visit in International House had been a great boon to him since his recent emotional traumas had him in a severely depressed state. Others in our group had been as close to Ivan as me, but none had come to his support when he had this great need for ego assurance. Learning of Ivan’s view of my long ago visit sent me on a memory check to try to understand what he must have been going through when I saw only some light camaraderie. Chapter 3 Capital Days Hardly one month after my end of summer 1951 graduation, I left for Washington with John, another close school friend, in his aging car; he would go on to Philadelphia. Neither of us had made much in the way of plans. We were just going to “seek our fortunes.” I did have the promise of a pad in the new house of a former roommate, Ed, whose new wife had not yet joined him; still working on her psychoanalysis in Chicago. My over five years in Washington started out most inauspiciously. I made the rounds of all the likely government agencies with primarily international concerns, applied, had several interviews, took a lie-detector test, (I passed) and waited. I had nibbles from the CIA and a small town North Carolina radio station (as newscaster). But these didn't seem right. At the same and between times, I worked as a sales clerk in a sporting goods store, sorted Xmas mail at the central post office, and then spent seven months as a lowly clerk at the Middle Atlantic Conference, a firm that worked out regional trucking freight rates for the Interstate Commerce Commission. During this latter period I took and passed the State Department's Foreign Service Officer exam. Flo A Washington e episode that still stirs in me a sense of poignancy came rather early in my DC days. A co-worker, Don, at my first marking-time job at the Mid Atlantic Conference, became a good friend and was a fellow jazz lover. He, a DC native, knew the places. One, strangely, was the small Crosstown bar and restaurant in the Mount Pleasant area, which at the time seemed to usually have a country western aura about it. As was my custom, I immediately checked the Jukebox, only to find there the likes of Roy Acuff, Conrad Twitty, Hank Williams, etc., and a mural of a precursor of the Marlboro Man backed the bar. .But on Mondays, the later important Voice of America DJ, Willis Conover, had arranged to bring in about eight of the best local white jazz musicians. This was 1952 and Blacks were in no way seen as customers in this type of otherwise semi-cracker institution. (Don and I had to go to predominantly Black clubs to hear the best.) Sometimes after about midnight on those Mondays, a rather scruffy guy, who claimed to have just finished his daily gig as a taxi-driver, brought in his guitar to play and sing. I knew almost immediately that he was a comer. His voice wasn’t great but he sang the blues quite well and did marvels on the guitar That cat was the still unknown great, Charlie Byrd. But all that is just for the setting of a mini drama. One evening Don and I were sitting at a Crosstown table, and it was a musically moving Charlie Byrd night. The crowd was thin. The joint was small; beside the bar there were about a dozen small tables While we were closely following Charlie, my eyes caught a threesome at a table just beyond one unoccupied. There sat a closely entangled couple and an absolutely beautiful, in the young Peggy Lee manner, girl. Her tablemates ignored her and she seemed very sad, even in pain. I couldn’t help watching her, discreetly, somewhat guiltily (perhaps caused by dysfunctional etiquette). We never made eye contact. That very tableau seemed to have an intriguing quality about it. Her partners’ complete inattention to her seemed almost cruel to me. Every time I glanced at her she seemed ever more sad and uneasy. I easily imagined a maiden in some sort of distress and felt a powerful, I guess romantic, urge to help her. In about ten minutes after my first sighting, she slid out of her seat and walked out the door. I got up and asked her tablemates if they knew that she had left in an obviously disturbed state. They shrugged as if I had improperly interfered and implied I should forget about it. I went back to Don, but before my bottom could hit the seat I was ineluctably driven to leave and overtake the troubled young woman. I didn’t spot her right away and that added a jolt of anxiety about my even heading in the right one of the two directions. But then, taking a chance, I did see her ahead in the sparse light on the sidewalk where a few other late-nighters were abroad, and I soon caught up. But what was I to say? I tried, “Miss, I couldn’t help seeing that you were very troubled, and I wonder if I could help in any way?” Her first reaction was of course dubious, probably frightened, surprise. She, I later learned her name was Flo, naturally wanted to shake me off by hurrying along. I stuck with her, trying not to appear menacing in any way. I asked her where she was heading; she said to her nearby apartment. The neighborhood was not the safest in DC, and I insisted in walking home with her. She claimed not to need the escort, but I walked at what I hoped was an unthreatening distance beside her, but ever so slightly off an exact parallel with her. I desperately wanted her not to fear me, and she didn’t seem so frightened as to scream or try to run away. So much for the good. I don’t think I was very articulate, but I did tell her that it had saddened me to see a lovely woman so troubled as she had appeared. I got the impression that she was new to Washington. and I told her that I, too, was a recent arrival. She was right. Her apartment was hardly more than around the corner from the Crosstown, in an old two story frame house, typical of the old Mount Pleasant neighborhood, Once there she promptly went inside, but I want to remember a laconic “Thanks.” as she went in. Well, I at least knew where she lived. I was careful to get the address. The very next day after work I went there, to find only her apartment mate, apparently not really a friend, but someone Flo had hooked up with for convenience in sharing the rent. The roommate was the lovebird who had been at Flo’s table -- I now knew my fixation’s name from this roomie who claimed to not know much about Flo’s business. Except that Flo had come to Washington, where “secretaries could always find a job,” in order to follow her boyfriend from back home.. The roomie further off-handedly gave me their apartment’s phone number. From here I can‘t clearly remember the sequence. I called for Flo several times and after frosty starts, we began exchanging reasonably civil talk and limited information; of course I was willing to tell all, hoping for reciprocity and a modicum was eventually realized. But any meetings I proposed were rejected, not especially cruelly, even apologetically later on. The first weekend afternoon I called at the apartment of the young women. They were busily doing heavy cleaning. I offered to help. Neither was interested. I think I did help to move something, but that gained no further hospitality, and the implication was that my presence was discomfiting to the girls – and to me. So I said my goodbyes. That was the last time I actually saw Flo. But phone calls became more civil, as noted. Well, the story ends with more of a whimper than a bang. Our phone calls, always my initiative, became platonically friendly. But after several, Flo called me one day to say she was leaving Washington.; her time here had been so very unpleasant. She was going back to Young America, Minnesota where her father was a Lutheran Minister. (It could have been Lake Woebegone.). She gave me her address and we exchanged a number of friendly letters. She soon reported a life-direction decision and was already in training for becoming a psychiatric nurse. I might have had some influence there, since in our talks and letters I was full of what must have been psychobabble. Somehow I recovered from that painful crush, made easier by the ever friendlier phone talks and then letters. These eventually ended when she saw fit not to respond further. But I could take it by then, with fantasies fading. HumRRO Then in the late summer of 1952, a long year after graduating, I was taken on by the Human Relations Research Office (HumRRO) in its Psychological Warfare Research Division (Psywar) at The George Washington University. In the end that was through my connection with Ed, the friend who had provided my first Washington pad. His older brother who was a senior figure at HumRRO interviewed and hired me. I worked at HumRRO for over three years, Until our Psywar Division disbanded. HumRRO had been set up by the US military to do research on training, data collection systems and socio-psychological issues facing the military. The Korean episode described later is an example of the latter. My asexual social life became lively enough with mostly young fellow researchers at HumRRO. Spouses also joined the gang, as it closely became, at picnics, home meals, ice cream parlors, movies, entertainments of all sorts, even a try at proper indoor badminton. There were some genuine wits among these bright people and we had great fun together. I became “Al,” leaving Edge behind, when one of my new associates, having seen my first name, Alvin, on paper, chum-wise addressed me as Al at my first staff meeting. It stuck for others since I didn’t immediately correct him. Then I gave up. After Ed's helpful provision of my first Washington pad, I moved about into six or seven different quarters in the area. Across from one of the earliest was a large high school building, and one evening I saw someone entering with a badminton racquet. I explored and found that a small group played once a week in the gym. I joined in. Soon after, I invited a gang from Psywar for a jolly evening there of learners’ level badminton. But after a time I sought a more challenging level for myself and joined the quite proper club at St. Alban’s School. Badminton remained a major sport interest till well into my 70s, even though my varied international locations often ruled it out. Ft. Bragg A proposal came to Psywar to visit and evaluate the Psychological Warfare battalion at this home of the 82nd Airborne Division near Fayetteville, North Carolina. Herb, a new PhD in psychology and I got the call, and we relished it – or pretended to -- as we speculated on the lively but uncertain possibilities. Our primary contact at the base was a Major Higgins, a redheaded Irish psychologist from academe. He couldn’t have been less well adapted to his sudden military role. He made a point of being as un-GI as possible in his proudly ill-fitting uniform and welcomed his encounter with us as a relief, in discursive chatter, from this uncomfortable venue. This was still the draftee 1950s army, but he did have a few artsy types in his outfit which was a strange fit for this gung-ho Airborne base, a point Higgins made as addendum with almost every comment. One of the training exercises of the camp’s Special Ops troops, we learned, was to randomly try to break into night time quarters of troops and officers at sleep and stealing some item of proof without being detected. Every morning of the week that Herb and I were at the Fort. Higgins had a recital of successes or failures around the base that seemed to be immediately broadcast. I can’t remember Herb or I losing any sleep over these capers. Herb, with a great sense of humor, and I made sort of a lark out of our outsiders’ perspective, nicely billeted in comfortable officers’ quarters and fairly free to roam. Both Psywar and Special Ops were rather new fields for the post-WWII military, facing a world quite different from that great clash of titans where some of America’s best brains had been enlisted in psychological warfare to deceive and penetrate the enemy. Now, more or less in tune with Higgins enigma, the Psywar battalion had a sort of Keystone Kops aura of uncertainty about it. We watched a recording of a skit where European refugees, now in our uniform, with a promise of early citizenship, dramatized the fears and abuse of eastern European ‘common folks’ by the Soviets’ KGB predecessor, to be broadcast over Voice of America. This gave Herb and me a flight of fancy on our last day. We began throwing around lines parodying the VOA broadcast, and developed a parallel script. We asked Higgins if we could record it in his studio. He leaped at the idea and belly-laughed at the prospect. When our ten minutes of vinyl was played back, all three of us fell over laughing at the phony over the top Slavic accents and, we thought, brilliant parody. Somewhere among my accumulatum may be my vinyl McCarthyism Time In the early 1950s Senator Joe McCarthy was a dominant figure for a year or two, arousing feverish media and widespread popular attention by calling out a spiraling network of “communists” left over from the Roosevelt administration into the opening Cold War years. This caught the fierce attention of several of my politically alert fellow researchers at HumRRO. One afternoon during the Congressional hearings on his accusations, I sneaked out the office to slake my curiosity by sampling a meeting of this House of Representatives committee. While I managed to squeeze into the back of the large room, I couldn’t see or hear anything going on since I was behind tiers of TV platforms and the crammed tight ‘audience’ so I didn’t stay long. Around the office, one of our gang, Lou, had become so overwrought over McCarthy’s cloud of fear from communists alleged to be in high places, that he seriously, openly held that the only feasible salvation from this monster would be his assassination, all but shaming one of us into doing the deed. On an evening during the hearings, some of the HumRRO gang was gathered, on the catalysis of colleague Jean Jordan (to later add the married name of Kirkpatrick and fame) to the home of her friend, the conservative ideologue-philosopher, Russell Kirk, in suburban northern Virginia. Our setting provider, Kirk, was still absent attending a drawn out phase of one of the McCarthy hearings. The riveting central memory in all of this came when Kirk returned home later to tell us how absolutely charming, decent, and right he found McCarthy, in contrast with the warped media and popular images. Herman & Vicky Herman, a young sociologist at HumRRO, and his wife Vicky were regulars at our frequent outings, and they were hosts to the gang at least once. They were newly married and childless. Herman was extremely controlled in manner even in his expression of hilarity when that was appropriate. Vicky seemed to be just too tickled to be in such lively company. One Saturday morning I got an urgent call from Herman. He and Vicky had started living apart, which I wasn’t aware of. Now he sounded desperate in urging me to come with my Jeepster to their old apartment where Vicky was in need of urgent attention and quick transport to the hospital. I responded immediately without getting more detail. Vicky had tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills and was comatose! Herman had come to check on her since he had seen that she had been severely traumatized by his initiative to separate. When he got no response from knocking at her door, he entered with his old key and found her unconscious and breathing very shallowly. We bundled her into my Jeepster and sped to the nearby Emergency (sic) Hospital ; Herman had alerted them to our coming. The emergency staff found Vicky full of sleeping pills and treated her accordingly. Herman stayed with her and I soon left. She didn’t come around for several hours. In the aftermath Herman moved back into the apartment with Vicky, and they remained together until I left HumRRO when its Psywar Division was being closed down several months later. A few years after that I leaned from common friends that they had had a final separation not long after the folding of Psywar. A year or two after learning of their separation, I was in Washington for some reason and ran into Vicky by some means forgotten. She seemed delighted. She was now living as a single mother with a small daughter. Even though we had a drink together, at her suggestion, to review some of the happier old times, I never asked or learned about the father of her beloved little child . Vicky clearly signaled that she was available, and even I might be acceptable. Without a sure sense of the appropriate, I tried to act as if I hadn’t read the signals, and we parted, never to meet again and without regret on my part. Jack’s Baby After several days of his undisguised acute anxiety, our HumRRO Psywar colleague, Jack, an anthropologist, had a new baby boy, with the help of his Moroccan, Jewish, Francophile wife Renee. As required by tradition, a bris (ceremonial circumcision) was scheduled on the eighth day of new life, requiring the presence of a minyan (10 Jewish men) with the moyl who performed “the cutting.” HumRRO, with two other divisions, had a sizeable staff of researchers, and as not unusual in such intellectual institutions, a high proportion was of the Jewish heritage. But at the last minute only nine could be found for the imminent event. I was asked, with a mix of jocularity and urgency, to join as an honorary Jew. I accepted and was issued the obligatory yarmulke. Off we went to the home of the parents and assembled in a circle around the originally indifferent babe and the moyl who in preliminaries suggested a Borscht Belt comic. Renee expressed some disgust at this with her body language, and then a subdued agony when the baby screamed over the ‘surgery.’ The bundled, unhappy child was then passed around through the hands of each member of the circled minyan, uncomfortably hurried by some. The comments by our witty bunch on the way back to the office and later were not entirely reverential. Korea for HumRRO One special experience with HumRRO was my time in Korea. This “Project TICK,” named after the quandary our General Mark Clark expressed in his “What makes them tick?” left me very disturbed. When the Korean War ended in 1953 in a mere armistice, the United Nations (US led) Command held large numbers of Chinese and North Korean POWs. Since they had been captured and herded up in massive numbers by MacArthur’s surprise landing behind their lines at Inchon, the camps were merely huge pens surrounded by barbed wire. Inside the camps there was no effective control by the captors. 
 Most of the several camps for Chinese -- two were on off-shore islands -- had two semi-formal divisions, one, the largest, of “Communists” and the other, defectors (“anti-Communists”). The North Koreans were in separate camps. Most aspects of the Korean War were extremely complex. Many of the Chinese captured by the UN had been members of the old Nationalist Army of Chiang Kai Shek recently defeated and absorbed by Mao’s Communist army.. In the war they were pressed into service as shock troops (“human wave” tactics). Most of this large group that were not killed in fighting readily surrendered and were usually assigned to “anti-Communist” camps. Chinese Communist regulars when captured were of course placed in “Communist” camps. But each group exerted draconian control and punishment over loyalty to their own camp’s dominant group. This seemed both cause and effect of the small but steady trickle of “bug-outs,” prisoners who took desperate chances when on outside duty to change ‘sides,’ usually out of fear hat they were under close surveillance and marked for extreme punishment or execution as disloyal. Actual ideological differences may have been less immediately involved. This fear of one’s camp colleagues was pervasive, where the slightest slip in symbolic loyalty brought down immediate summary punishment. The numerous body parts were clandestinely carted off piecemeal, perhaps stored very briefly under the flooring of the large barracks till safe for removal along with human wastes in the Honey Wagons, the two wheeled ox-drawn carts, intended to provide farm fertilize called “night soil.”. It was said that a “pro-communist” prisoner might say something in his sleep that would sound suspicious enough to produce a “trial” and certain punishment. This could not have helped peaceful, restful sleep for many. This ever present fear of fellow prisoners seemed to be fundamental for much of the puzzling behavior inside the POW camps. The little understood cultures of the enemy fighters and prisoners must also have made them “tick” in these unexpected ways. One device to “keep fighting” by prisoners in at least one of the huge camps was riotous clamor in the middle of the sleeping night, screaming and beating on pots and pans or any other noise-makers. This woke up the UN camp staff and made the guards jittery. The standard response by guards was to spray tear gas through the barbed wire. One morning in a camp for North Koreans on Koje-do, I awoke in the junior officers’ quarters to the whiff of tear-gas. Others were putting on their gas masks and I had one to also put on. We had been warned of this tactic, especially when the wind carried the gas out of the prisoner area toward the guard and administration quarters. One day when a serious camp gate negotiation was in progress, prisoners grabbed the involved American General Dean , dragged him inside and slammed the gate! Only after a further week of bargaining, with avowed concessions to the prisoners, was the General released from inside the camp, no worse for wear. “They don’t act like normal POWs!” “What makes them tick?” These astounded reactions of the UN/US officers in charge of camps resulted in HumRRO’s Psywar Division being asked to carry out Project TICK, A social science study of the POW’s behavior. I was part of a seven man HumRR0 team that visited the camps. We interviewed the prisoners through interpreters and camp personnel directly. All this was intended to lead to analytic observations from our data and to our recommendations. Soon, in the course of my work, I became intensely upset by the close-up images of shocking terror and absence of concern for human life and dignity inside the camps. They seemed to trigger in me an deep anxiety of uncertainty, not so much about my personal safety, but the feeling of a profoundly shaken view of the way the world worked; episodes of anxiety evolved into panics! These were not so overwhelming during the frequent travel and the interviews, but after dark and during sleepless nights, they emerged. These bouts must certainly have affected my effectiveness for the project and how I may have been perceived I was in Korea for about three weeks, and in Japan for one. In Tokyo, outside our modest hotel where transient military related Americans stayed, I was both tickled and feeling a bit puritanical at the sight of hordes of pretty nymphet girls sweetly, almost innocently, but invitingly, doing cute jitterbug steps on the sidewalk around the entrance where the American went in and out. En route back to Washington I jumped off the military plane on a stop in Honolulu to spend a week visiting a college friend Dave and his wife. I was still in a disturbed state in Hawaii. Although I found some release in prolonged staring at the dramatic shorelines, the grand interior vistas and general lushness, I couldn't shake an anxiety that seemed related to nothing in specific, but a general sense of being out of touch with the human world around me. When I tried to use my Government flight orders to get a further flight to Washington, I was censoriously told that I had violated the direct flight orders and would have to wait now for a space-available flight, with uncertain prospects. After about another week, that worked out and it was back to Washington. Vietnam Thoughts After the decisive defeat of the French efforts to recolonize Vietnam occurred at Dienbienphu on the Laos border in l954, an international conference was held in Geneva and Vietnam was divided, North and South, at the 16th parallel Just after that I read a commentary by Joseph Alsop in the Washington Post upon his return from Vietnam where he had traveled deeply into the South’s CaMau District, The article noted that this area had been organized against the South's government by the National Liberation Army, “communist“-led, guerillas, and the French were never able to prevail there. But Alsop's visit suggested to me that at this period the area, probably typical of large parts of the South, might be accessible. In this time of truce, I felt that this would be a rare, perhaps later closed, opportunity to study the nature and appeal of this "communist" grass roots movement, including its organizational tactics. This should have wider value for US response in several parts of the world where such movements largely puzzled us, leading the US to stumble in our responses. Remember, the Cold War was in full chill at this time; that was the raison d’être for Psywar. This led me to outline a proposal for a field study, by non-military researchers in Ca Mau, on how and why the local people could be mobilized against “our side.” . My proposal, as far as I could tell, hardly got noticed, let alone a serious hearing. Psywar's leadership was not very imaginative and tended to wait for cues from the military rather than take any initiative. Looking back from later perspective, it seemed clear that the US's long drawn out debacle, on many levels, in Vietnam was largely because of our profound ignorance and persistently false assumptions about the world view of the majority, as opposed to the Frenchified, Catholic elite, in the South as formed by history, culture and aspirations, more nationalistic than communistic. The Insecurity Officer Late in my HumRRO experience I was made, for three months, the Psywar Division’s Acting Security Officer -- a witty mate once addressed me a the Insecurity Officer -- while the regular Officer was on an overseas assignment. One early morning the overall HumRRO building Security Officer dropped by to quietly say that he had found my office’ s locked files unlocked after I had left the night before. Usually my careful secretary locked them, but I had worked late that night, as I did occasionally, and was the culprit. The building’s top Security Officer was friendly and asked me to remind the next Psywar staff meeting of the need to make sure files were locked every evening. When I, with intended insouciance, so addressed the staff, our startled Division Director asked if there had been a breech. I said, yes. He asked, “Who?!.” I, with reduced insouciance, answered, “the Acing Security Officer.”. The Director only sputtered and frowned, but with extreme prejudice. My pals made the Insecurity Officer title, in still friendly address, more frequent after that. Josie I was having little romantic success with women in general while in Washington. Overtures with three or four of the women at HumRRO came to naught and one depressed me seriously for some days. There, perhaps, was an element of desperation and uncertainty in these vain pursuits which probably sank me. I did have a brief fling with Josie, a sexy girl who worked at the CIA and came to live on my floor of the old apartment building on New Hampshire Avenue near Washington Circle. I knocked on her door and introduced myself and asked if she was ‘married, engaged or otherwise spoken for.’ She asked me in and we laid the ground for what became a sexual relationship. But it was more than that, something of a brother-sister friendship. Josie was quite attractive, with the attention-getting walk of a proud, self-confident young woman. Obviously bright, she had graduated from Wellesley and gone to work with the CIA. She let me know right away that she had pursued every reasonable opportunity for sex, and had had her childbearing capability removed. I soon also learned that she had a real boyfriend who was away for six weeks on his government job, as a geologist, as I remember. Josie was working the late shift at the time of this little tale. It was after midnight when she knocked on my door -- not for the first time -- down the hall from hers. She begged me to come and meet some interesting co-workers at the CIA whom she had invited over after their shift. I reversed my bedtime preparations and reported to her door. She had brought home a 30ish couple. I felt the banter was somewhat competitive on their part, as though a mere Psywar researcher was of a lower order in our related trades. I soon begged off since I needed some sleep for my daytime job. When I next saw Josie, a day or so later, she insisted that she felt guilty and owed me an apology. It seemed to truly burden her. But I could see no reason for apology until she explained. She, a connoisseur, had told me after our first fleshly encounter, with genuine sincerity (trust me), that I was remarkably good in bed. Now, after I left her apartment, her visitors had assessed me as bright enough and somewhat interesting. But they confidently assured Josie that I was no danger to her as a sexual predator or even someone likely to be able to satisfy a woman on that front. She admitted to me that she had felt the need to not challenge her visitors’ assessment. They were good friends also with Josie’s boyfriend, and she felt it prudent not to reveal her discovery of good quality variety in me. Since the feelings between Josie and me were of a kindly fraternal nature, I quite honestly told her it was no big deal and that her conduct seemed justified. A Body on the Sidewalk While I was living in the same building as Josie, well after dark one summer evening I felt the need to take a stroll. From my digs on New Hampshire Ave, I walked up to M Street and tuned that corner. Near the next corner at 20th St. my reverie was jarred aside by the sight of someone lying on the sidewalk. No one else was to be seen. When I looked closely, it was a male African-American (a term not yet in use), barely squirming, and on closest inspection, spilling blood on the concrete. When he saw me stopping, he murmured for help. I squatted to get a good look at him, and asked what had happened. As best I could understand, he had been stabbed, and he was in bad shape, apparently drunk, and could hardly talk. I made out that he had some place to go and he asked me to help him up As I did lift him and almost entirely supported his frail weight, my mind was whirring over just what to do next. He seemed to want to go in a certain direction and I half carried him along. Soon he wanted to stop, as if he stopped thinking of any destination. In the meantime, with still no one in sight and none of the nearby shops open, I had decided to get to the police for help to a hospital. For that the best, least alarming, thing I could think of to do was to go back to where I lived and put him in my Jeepster while I called the police from my apartment. After that I walked back to my car and waited. After some time two white policemen arrived. (This was l953.) Although they took the man away, their less than tender handling of him, even as I urged that he was seriously hurt, gave me immediate doubts about my having done the right thing. These lingered as I washed the blood from my arms, and tried to from my clothes. I never learned what had happened next. Another Body Another time after work while walking up Rhode Island Ave just east of Connecticut Ave., as I passed an older black gentleman, he suddenly collapsed on the sidewalk. I turned to see him lying on his side as he breathed heavily and rolled his eyes. I turned him on his back and put my rolled up jacket under his head, which was lolling. By coincidence, this happened almost exactly in front of one of the fine old residences that now provided professional offices, where I had seen a doctor about my recurring and troubling lower back. A small crowd of passers by gathered. As I tried to comfort the sufferer and to talk to him, I asked one of the gaggle to go in the building, right on the ground floor where I knew Dr. Feffer to practice, and he soon came out. Dr. Feffer asked us a few questions then had two other men to bring the patient inside. Once this was done I saw no other role for myself and headed on to my nearby basement apartment, more that a little shaken by that experience. I would see Dr Feffer yet a third time in a very different setting (Belize). Gael In the year after my Korea sojourn, I had a two-week vacation. On the drive to the family home in Menominee, I stopped in Chicago and met up with some friends who were still at the U of C. One introduced me to an attractive girl, Gael, who lived near the campus. A whirlwind three days followed, of near constant joint activities, including a day of relatively innocent wrestling in the sand dunes and skimpy vegetation of the Dunes State Park across the Indiana border. While in Menominee, I nurtured great expectations over Gael, call it another crush. But on my way back through Chicago, I found Gael a cold stranger, even annoyed by my ardent calls and pursuit. I proceeded on to Washington in new state of defeat. To crown this 'triumph' with Gael, before I reached DC I began to itch miserably. And this turned into a massive attack of poison ivy, which migrated to almost all parts of my body, particularly leprous below my waist. Despite all this, I clung, against all reason, to hopes with Gael.. Several weeks later, I learned from her old roommate that Gael would be returning from a trip to Europe on the Normandy. I had a HumRRO co-worker from Hawaii make a lei for me, and I met the boat in NY. Her former roommate in Chicago was there too. Weirdly, I had hoped that Gael would have reflected on my virtues in the meantime. She was unmoved and barely proper at my lei wreathing welcome. Without her invitation, having long since abandoned all cool, I followed her to the apartment where she would stay. I found her alone, and, in my madness, at the first opportunity grabbed and tried to kiss her, insanely hoping for some sort of reawakened 'surrender.' She resisted violently and we tumbled onto a couch. I quickly released her and got up. I put on my hat and, sobered, with a try at levity said something like, "Well, Gael; you have rather clearly made your point. Good bye and good luck." I promptly hopped in my Jeepster and drove back to Washington. To top this irrational episode, back in Washington, I immediately, totally without lust, sought the solace of Josie, my quondam sex partner down the hall. When I knocked at her door at about midnight, usually no problem, she opened it a crack. Seeing me, she quickly, uneasily whispered, "He's back!" With a wistfully apologetic look, she quickly closed the door. No wins, several losses With the Friends HumRRO's Psywar Division was being disbanded in l955. We didn't come across as the mind-bending ad agency types which seemed to be expected by the military, following Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's vision of Madison Ave-like marketing success. Fortunately, I stepped right into a job as Research Associate with Washington Seminars on International Affairs. This was out of a small office on 16th St , NW. near Scott Circle that The American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) had set up. We organized and hosted meetings, usually around a meal, for invited Washington leaders in all relevant fields, from members of Congress and bureaucrats to businessmen, lawyers, educators, academics and non-governmental organizations. The focus was typically the presentation by a well-known social scientist on his most recent work, ideally before publication. I helped with and attended the meetings, after which I was to write up a summary, a kind of ‘minutes’ which I tried to make interesting. For the AFSC job there was a sort of reverse security clearance, since I had worked so recently on military supported psychological warfare research. That I had been a conscientious objector, in the Army medics, probably saved me. I became a close, for years, friend of a senior co-worker, psychologist Seymour Beardsley. Together we published an annotated bibliography of social and behavioral science publications that dealt with international affairs, a very new field at the time, in 1956. When in Washington later, I always made time for a visit and a tour of the global horizon with Seymour and sometimes stayed at his home when passing through. I also became really good pals with two female staffers. White Emily was a year or two older than me. Black Dolores was a few years younger than me. Both, not unattractive, were probably seducible, but somehow I wasn’t moved that away although we had some rather jolly Platonic flirtations, even dates of sorts. Emily, from Mark Twain’s Hannibal, Missouri, had a sort of keen, almost motherly, identity with black folks, She had graduated from Howard University, and seemed to have some hope for a future with a Trinidadian who was away somewhere. She was a superb executive secretary type on the job, but full of folksy jollity away from it. I usually saw the two of them together, sometimes at the lovely grounds of Dumbarton Oaks. A Face from the Past A rather strange episode occurred at one of the Seminar meetings. An attractive woman, perhaps about ten years older than me, had been a USO worker for staff and patients at the 279th Station Hospital while in Britain. Now she appeared at one of our Seminars. I think her name was Miss Doherty. My boss told me that she had a top job concerned with official and refugee visitors to the US. I recognized her, and reminded her of our past acquaintance. She seemed somewhat disturbed at this, only vaguely acknowledging the fact. This was not one of our typical seminar meetings, held in a comfortable large lounge setting at a grand old Quaker activity building-- not a “meeting house.” -- on R St. NW. At the seminar meeting she did not sit down with the group, but stood leaning beside a recessed large window. When I glanced at her she seemed uneasy, as if reflecting on something. I suspect she stole glances at me. I later speculated that this Miss Doherty was worried that I knew of something less creditable of her at the 279th -- perhaps a liaison with an Officer? Of course, I knew nothing of the sort, having always respected her in her earlier incarnation. Here’s Friend Paul, again During my last year in DC, I met up with Paul again. While reading a Sunday Washington Post, there was his picture in an ad plugging a panel news-talk, local television program of which Paul was the moderator. I tracked him through the station and we reunited in the studio for his next program. At the time I was living in the sizeable modern home of a recently divorced Jim, whom I had met through St Albans badminton. One evening I invited Paul over. Jim was much taken with Paul who seemed to promise a world of opportunity for socially awkward Jim to meet new women. Soon Paul had moved into one of the house's spare rooms. Jim was tickled to have us set up a few parties. Most of the ladies were Paul's fans. Although he was the same charming physical presence, I gradually became aware of a strange change in Paul. From the sophisticated grandchild of the enlightenment I had known at college, he now had become a "born again" Christian. He didn't blast it about, but he kept and lovingly caressed a fine bible, and he reluctantly spoke of a life-changing experience he had had at a retreat in the Great Smokies, near Ashville. One day he showed me a small photograph of a wheat field, divided by a straight line into two equal parts, one standing high and the other severely stunted. With a straight face, Paul said the higher had been prayed over! Another strange story from Paul: Sometime after I had left Chicago and he had gone off to Arizona, he had returned to Chicago. Paul somehow connected again with his old girl friend/wife. In a bar setting with her and friends, Paul told those present that he had hit bottom and decided to kill himself. With that he left the bar. At one of the beaches near the University, as he told it, he walked into Lake Michigan intending not to stop till it was all over. Just as he felt himself succumbing, from out of nowhere his lover/wife appeared, and with her frail frame pulled him to safety. As his and my friend Ralph later told it, his chick simply followed him and persuaded him otherwise while still in the shallow water. In any case, while sharing Jim's house, Paul changed jobs; now a Union organizer, based at the sumptuous DC headquarters of the AFL-CIO on 16th St near K St.. He asked me to join him for lunch a few times at one of the popular mid-day watering holes a few blocks from his office. On two such occasions --I couldn't afford more -- I found him surrounded by an admiring harem of attractive ladies whom he kept in stitches with his flow of tipsily outrageous bon mots. I felt on the margin and out of place in this world where Paul was so at home.
 Suddenly, one day, Paul asked if I would be best man at his wedding! I had no previous knowledge of this liaison, with the late twenties, rather ordinary daughter of a wealthy Italian, with hints of mob connections. The wedding was in the bride’s large family home and relatively modest of scale and ceremony – probably because she had been divorced -- but not in the splendid feed afterward. I played my limited role and ate to excess. Must Have Play While in the Washington area, on summer weekends, I played semi-pro baseball for a team in nearby rural Maryland, and with a team representing a toney restaurant, Bonat’s, on evenings during the week. On the eve of my departure for the Psywar project t in Korea, I came to the ball field on the Ellipse, the large open space south of the White House, to hand in my Bonat’s uniform. When my old team came in for its last bat, we were one run behind and the opposing pitcher had a no-hitter going. With hope dwindling, our coach urged me, having been one of our better hitters, to throw on my uniform and to pinch hit. I took the bait with two out, and with the catcher shaming me for trying to spoil the young pitcher's great achievement, I drove a pitch between and beyond the Left and Center Fielders. There was no fence on that field and the ball could have rolled on to the extent that I might have made a home run out of it. But somehow the ball landed in a strange way and went no further and I had to settle for a double, having slipped a bit, without my spiked shoes, when rounding First. I could have scored if the next batter got a hit. BUT . . . he didn’t, the game ended and my hit was without issue. . Most winters I played in a city-wide basketball league. The Security Net When my one year term with the AFSC was ending, I started moving smoothly into a new job. Then came a snag, the roots of which went back to my Army days. In early 1946, with World War II comfortably over, and just waiting for my turn to go home and get discharged, I found myself an Army Medical Department T/5 in Berlin, a receiving office clerk , working in the 279th Station Hospital. Somehow I learned, perhaps from my politically alert friend, Sam Cherner, of a new, for our war’s cohort, apparently liberal veterans’ organization forming; and that it was holding meetings in Berlin. I went to one or two before I was shipped out, and I was converted to the message of an exciting postwar liberal vision for America. This was the start-up time of the American Veterans Committee. When I entered the University of Chicago in the fall of l946 with a number of other World War II veterans, we discovered a large, lively chapter of the AVC on campus. I paid my $5.00 dues for a year, and I went to two very large meetings. The second one in particular was bizarrely disappointing. It seemed to be a bitter battle for control between 'liberals' and revolutionary radicals ("communists"?). This put me off. So with plenty of school work to keep up, I forgot about the AVC. As already noted, after school, in Washington I called on all the likely government agencies, and had a number of interviews and tests, including a passed "lie detector." And I took the Foreign Service three-day test, which I passed. With HumRRO's Psywar division I got my regular advances in security clearance. I even served as our Division's Security Officer for several months, holding over for a colleague assigned abroad, during which time I was called on by a variety of government investigators -- some hardly distinguishable in manner from Keystone Kops -- asking for information on persons known to me who were applying for government agencies employment. There seemed at the time to be a wide array of non-intercommunicating 'security clearing' agencies. Near the end of l952 I was called in for an interview by a Gregory Peck-like State Department officer, who seemed a decent sort, even empathetic, and I felt good about the interview. A few weeks later I was called by another State Department officer, a Mr. Raymond Levy, who wanted to interview me again. He had taken over my case from Peck, and said that Peck's notes weren't adequate for him, Levy, to proceed. The new interview was altogether different. Levy's style was a clone, or parody, of the then high-riding Sen. Joe McCarthy. The tone was prosecutorial, as if digging for some vague wrong-doing. I felt from the nature of his follow-ups that my responses, often mildly discursive in the interest of being forthcoming and transparent, were distorted in his interpretations and note-taking. After a good bit of this growing sense of being systematically recast as a 'type' that was 'wrong' in some fundamental way, I said that I was worried that I wasn't making myself clear, and asked if he might read back his summaries and notes. At this he threw his forearms over his yellow legal pad, as if to hug it for protection, and answered, outraged: "This is now classified material!" I didn't feel so good after this interview. About six weeks later I received a terse letter from the State Department to the effect that I would not be invited to join the Foreign Service. At HumRRO, my mostly young colleagues and I usually had a nearby lunch together, and on one occasion we were joined by a co-worker's young friend who had been in the Foreign Service for a year or two.. He described the atmosphere that then pervaded the Service. Two fixtures of the McCarthy era, Mr. Roy Cohn and Mr. David Schine were rampaging through overseas diplomatic posts, causing great uneasiness by giving the impression that Messrs. C and S were acting for Sen. McCarthy, critically evaluating officers' performance in the light of McCarthyesque criteria. The young Foreign Service Officer's voice of experience confirmed my reading that the US Foreign Service was probably not the place for me. At the time I had been seeking to find out just why I had been turned down, since I felt that there was something unfair about it. I saw a series of State officers, each one claiming no knowledge of my case, but giving me the names of their superiors whom I promptly visited in their progressively more status-implying offices. Finally, one solemnly advised me that I had better leave off trying to discover my rejection's reason, or I might be much sorrier than I was at the time. So all these factors led me to cease pursuit of this bunch of sour grapes. . . . Remember, I had been cleared for Top Secret at HumRRO! . When the one year of my special AFSC job came to an end (mid l956), I naturally sought new employment. This led me to contact someone whom I had come to know and respect from his participation in our Seminar meetings, a Mr. R., someone near the top of the International Cooperation Agency, AID's predecessor. He was sympathetic and told me to call one Abe Lerner, the Personnel Officer, in two days time. When I did this, Mr. Lerner, was most dismissive, as if I were asking something quite out of the question, and he soon rang off. I called R. about this experience, and he registered some embarrassment over not having remembered to alert Lerner. He now suggested that I call Lerner in three days. When I followed through, the response was astonishing. Lerner treated me like an old friend, just the sort of person ICA was looking for, and do come in as soon as possible. When I did, the matey atmosphere was almost cloying, but more than a little welcome! And of course I wasn't so gauche as to remind him of our first telephonic encounter. The position of a Community Development Officer in Laos -- this is now fall l956 -- seemed about right for me, single bloke that I was, and I was excited about the prospect; processing began., State Department medical exam, official passport issued, and all that. About three weeks later I got another call from Lerner. He said, rather off-handedly, that I could not be hired. He seemed not to want further discussion, and when he answered my question about the reason, he said, again off-handedly: “Oh, the loyalty, security sort of thing,” and he was ready to hang up. But I expressed my surprised disappointment and asked how I could appeal this disturbing decision. He gave me the name of a senior security officer of his agency and I promptly called to make an appointment. Mr. Barber was pleasantly civil, noting that the McCarthy reign of terror now, l956, was blessedly in the past. He had a file in front of him, and he read from or paraphrased it. The file seemed to consist entirely of negative points that sounded exactly as one might have predicted from Levy's report on me, which Barber implied was indeed their source. I can remember three points right off hand: I had belonged to the American Veterans Committee chapter at the U. of Chicago, which had a known Communist leadership; I believed Alger Hiss (a litmus test character, it seemed) was not guilty and had been unfairly treated by the press; and that I considered myself an intellectual non-conformist. The Alger Hiss item was almost exactly contrary to what I had told Levy, namely that I believed Hiss was probably guilty of the literal accusation, that he had lied earlier about typing on his old Woodstock some 'secret' papers, but that the press treatment gave the inaccurate impression that he was being tried for treason. And I believed that Hiss had probably acted idealistically, in his own view at that particular pre-war time. As for the nonconformist label, I don't believe I so described myself, but, rather, that was Levy's own characterization of me. Mr. Barber agreed to read through the 'charges' again so that I could take detailed notes; at no time did he hurry me. That alone was a courtesy, and on the whole he seemed sympathetic. When I asked what I might do next, he said I should write a letter to the head of ICA security rebutting these negative characterizations. I took great pains with my rebuttal, of some 27 pages (attached as an appendix), and showed the result to a well-known liberal lawyer, sure to be sympathetic and perhaps even joining me in outrage. In fact, he treated my matter as if it was just one, rather ordinary, of many such in recent times, as it almost certainly was. His only advice was to add a few then fashionable phrases of loyalty and patriotism at the very end. I sent the letter as Barber had suggested, and in about two weeks I received a terse reply, to the effect that ICA did not itself determine security matters; that was done at the State Department. I learned, separately, that Raymond Levy had become State's chief security officer since we had met some four years earlier. . . . I gave up! The sort of independent, contrarian quality that a McCarthyite did find in my record and thinking would probably have made me a poor, and perhaps temporary, Foreign Service Officer. So I was probably saved from a dismal career turn. In my later overseas tours I met many FSOs and my personality neither matched, nor even approximated, any of them. The “aid” job that I might have had in Laos -- influencing “hearts and minds” -- would have surely have been adventurous, even life-risking. As I later learned, around this time the US began heavily bombing Laos since the Viet Minh had moved in and were routing their war materials to the south through Laos. Of course that was not public knowledge at the time, so how was I to know before getting there. But again, I would likely have come to feel at odds with my superiors’ (trouble with authority figures?) views on purposes and tactics, and so opt, or be thrown, out. But then I might have just made a go of it and become a devil’s advocate within USAID, at least for a time, when in relatively unsupervised circumstances -- but hardly a “good team player” in the usual understanding. In fact, I seem to have instinctively played that ‘independent’ role with most of my employing organizations; which assured my deficiencies, in their eyes, as a team player and lack of appeal to superior management, whatever their rhetorical admiration of “innovative thinking.” After the IDS job (coming up) I went to work with CARE in Turkey where I served for over four years. After my first year and a half in Trabzon on the eastern Black Sea, CARE was given a contract to manage a new Peace Corps Rural Community Development Project (PC /CARE), and I moved to Ankara, CARE's and PC's headquarters, to work as a second for a new PC/CARE Project Director. There had been a brief hiccup in Turkey over me at the start of the Peace Corps/ CARE Program when a security question was raised. With a sense of urgency, since the prospective Volunteers were already in States-side training, I was on a whirlwind tour, with a Turkish colleague, over much of western Turkey to assess and get local agreement on the villages to which they would be assigned. When I returned to Ankara, the overall Peace Corps-Turkey Director was absent in Washington, and his second had a cable from PC Washington to the effect that some security problem had arisen, and I was to be put on hold while it was sorted out. This message was relayed back to the PC Turkey Director then in Washington. In implied disgust, he cabled 'not to worry'; he would straighten it out. He did and I got back to official work. I never heard from the PC Director just what had been the security problem and how he resolved it. He dismissed such questions with a shrug and a no-content answer. Subsequently I worked for CARE and other agencies that were carrying out US AID projects in Belize, Nigeria, Bangladesh, and Somalia; and I joined the Peace Corps staff in Afghanistan some seven years after the Turkey tour. I was not aware of any further security problems. Last Summer in Washington Back in 1956, after my one year job with the AFSC, my main activity for several weeks was around my pursuit of the government overseas aid job in Laos and the eventuating “security problem.” But it was summer and the livin’ was easy, at least for the period when I was expecting the job in Laos. I was still living in Jim Edwards’s house, where Paul also had a room. But during the day I had the place to myself. This modern house was just west of the DC border off MacArthur Blvd. Behind the house was a wooded bluff that descended to the old Potomac Canal. Directly below our house were an old lock and an abandoned lock house. The lock was easy to climb over to the far side where the tow path was manageably trodden. After sleep till mid-mornings and a rest after an auto-breakfast, I would clamber over the lock to the tow path and walk, jog and sprint as the spirit moved me in what seemed a pleasant summery world all my own . After about an hour of this solipsistic setting, with a good sweat, I would have had enough and go back to the house and to reading about Southeast Asia, notably Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American,” just out. There were only very rare passersby on the towpath. One I remember was Justice William O. Douglas who nodded as he walked by with his hands clasped behind his back. Chapter 4 Off to New York While wrestling with the security issue, I sought work elsewhere. After my inquiry, a Vice President of International Development Services (IDS) of New York, while in DC on business, interviewed me and I was hired. . When I brought up the security taint, he dismissed any concern, saying that it didn't matter, as if every decent person was likely to have faced the same, given the atmosphere of the McCarthyism time. That got me to NY for six years. My new boss, Robert ("Pete") Hudgens, the charismatic founder of IDS, had held important New Deal positions and had more recently been managing Nelson Rockefeller's rural development schemes in South America. Pete had now split off to set up his own IDS, with Rockefeller's blessing and start-up help through an overseas aid managing contract. I started to write to Mary again shortly after I reached New York. I told her of my divorce and of my fond memories of our loving past. She replied that she too had just become “free”, without explanation, and was delighted that we were back in touch; and she warmly described some of our memories of intimacy that she treasured The comfortable IDS office, high above the Radio City Music Hall in Rockefeller Center had a laid back, almost family-like atmosphere. Pete Hudgens had come from a gracious South Carolina background, old family, the Citadel, WW I cavalry officer, with still troublesome wounds. His persona, at once strong yet mellow and grandfatherly, pervaded. Our whole office never held more than seven working persons. We did however plan and manage a small number of contracted overseas projects at any one time, recruiting, employing, and supporting up to 40 coordinators and technicians in countries of the Third World. Our major client was the US foreign aid agency which the Kennedy administration renamed the Agency for International Development (AID). As Assistant to the Vice President (which really meant three people, Hudgens and the two Vice Presidents), I was the primary recruit-searcher-screener and reports writer, and utility fielder. Along the way I became a member and officer of the just then founding NY chapter of the Society for International Development (SID). Pete, along with a few UN officials, was the primary founder and was SID’s first President. SID is now a well established international organization headquartered in Rome. The Goddess of Love In fall of l957. I had been divorced for some four years and had been without a substantial relationship with a mateable woman all the while. I now lived on the Yonkers-Bronxville borderline, commuting to New York City from the Fleetwood station of the New York Central. Taking the evening train home, I sometimes boarded after all the comfortable seats seemed taken, and, rather than search, I chose to stand in the vestibule off the coach's entrance. On the evening to be described, as the train moved off, I found myself with one other vestibule passenger. It was the Goddess of Love, a good six feet tall in her heels, almost as tall as me. Her striking appearance and her aura were certain to attract more than usual attention of even New Yorkers. She wore a large, flat hat of the sort I associated with British royalty at Epsom Downs. I had no good opening lines and was always awkward, even evasive, in the presence of attractive women whom I yearned to approach. But in what seemed an unusually favorable, compelling situation, I tried an opener. I can't remember the words, and I'm sure that they were far from memorable. But she replied sympathetically and clearly invited further conversation. I was soon surprisingly at ease. From a few initial banalities, we graduated to rather kittenish exchanges on life in New York, and discovered that we both would detrain at the Fleetwood station, near which we both lived. Shortly before we reached Fleetwood, she asked if I would like to see her again. Trying to stay calm, I said, "Very much," with thumping inner delight! We agreed to meet at an entrance of Bloomingdale's the very next night. We both arrived about the same time at Bloomies -- well, maybe I was just a bit earlier. Where should we go from there? I had given this a bit of last bed-time thought and, now, sensing her willingness, suggested my office a few blocks away. With lascivious visions of immediate intimacy, I opened the office door to find (UGH!) two cleaning ladies at work in the small suite!. I could think of nothing better than to pretend to bustle around the office files, having seated the Goddess at my desk. It seemed to me that the cleaning ladies purposely, endlessly delayed their final departure. Once they had left and I had made sure the door was locked, I raced back to where the Goddess was swiveling about playfully in my chair, and I planted a ravenous kiss on her receptive, delicious mouth. After an appropriate time she gently broke off and asked if there wasn't some place more comfortable in the office. I promptly conducted her to the leather couch in the reception area. The Goddess sat down at once and I followed in seamless proximity, laying on a very deep kiss. I was sunk in this outlet for passion when I felt her hand adroitly unzipping my fly. She immediately grasped my swollen penis which she tugged free and caressed, saying with what I still want to believe was real surprise and excitement: "Wow! You must be from Texas!" Reflection on this pleaser, however, convinces that this could have hardly been the first time these gratifying words fell from her lips in similar circumstances. After some more of this fondling, the Goddess of Love asked: "Would you like me to kiss him?" I was going through the roof and answered –what else? -- OH, YES! She went at it with apparently practiced skill while, from the positions we were in, I could do little but paw her still clothed bottom. She had let me know that she was too "gussied up" for me to do much else under the circumstances. She brought me to a marvelous climax as she herself seemed to mount in excitement and remained bonded until I was well drained. Then she gently gestured that she wanted to spit out my semen, so I led her to the wash basin in our nearby cloak room. (Mary my only other fellatio partner had smilingly swallowed.) Riding home on the train we made jolly with sensual chat and exchanged a few superficial bits of personal information. Without hesitation, she stated that she was the same age as me. She claimed to like my "crinkly eyes," and I affirmed that she was the most exciting woman I had ever met and that she was totally lovely. She said that she was married, but that it didn't matter, and that she would never make any demands of attachment to me. She gave me her office phone number, with future encounters in view. Strange to me now, but not at the time, we never probed into one another's private lives or background, as if in unspoken agreement. We sat together on the city-bound train next morning, and in the course of our suggestive banter, I learned that her husband would probably be on the road for a few days. Thinking fast, I remembered that my landlord family had told me that they would be away that evening. I was renting a top floor flat in the home of a couple with a young son and a usually absent college-age daughter. Though I had a semi-private rear entrance, to reach my digs I had to pass through part of the house where I occasionally ran into family members. With these thoughts in mind, I wondered if I should invite the Goddess over, but before I could make the offer, she asked if she could visit me, since her husband would probably be away. What would any normal male say to that? That evening the Goddess appeared at the front door, all fluffy pink and radiant of face. Once in my rooms, she flung off her coat and proudly displayed a brilliant, shape-revealing new dress she said that she was wearing just for the occasion. I duly admired it. Then she asked if I would like to see what she wore underneath. What could I say!? The skimpy under garments revealed, even more convincingly, a heavenly body. After a few standing embraces and caresses, we headed for the bedroom, both shedding clothes, her now with less, along the way. Before hopping into bed, to get the lighting just right, I thoughtlessly hung her dress directly on a lit, unshaded light bulb. Then I followed her into bed. What came next was only the most natural, according to my limited experience -- and as good as the best. But I had never before had a love partner shoot her legs up so vertically. After an affectionate rest, we went into my sitting room, where the Goddess stretched out on the sofa and I sat down on the edge. With her makeup all but worn away, I remarked on her resemblance to a fresh-faced Ingrid Bergman as she lay there in a sort of dreamy-eyed reverie. Not long after, as we sat side by side, I caressed her with gentle passion.. Suddenly she knelt in front of me and asked if she could "kiss him." Again, what could I say?! And it was another supreme transport. In getting dressed we discovered that the bare light bulb had burned a hole in her beautiful dress. I was mortified and endlessly apologetic, offering to pay for a new one. The Goddess seemed hardly concerned. She said it really didn't matter much and was inconsequential compared to the joys of the evening. Since it was near midnight, I offered to walk her home. But she said that we mustn't be seen together by any of her neighbors, let alone her husband. So I walked just part way with her, with many tender, hugging good nights. Next morning as I showered I noticed that my back had a pattern of scratches that had to have come from the Goddess’s fingernails, which I took as evidence that the Goddess had had at least one moment of highest excitement. Because of the Goddess's married state, she was not always free. But her husband was a truck driver, and was sometimes away for days, so that would facilitate our intimacies. We managed those about every two or three weeks. Much more often we rode the train together, often smiling meaningfully and caressing one another's legs, but saying little, for as long as I stayed in the Fleetwood area. The nature of my residence would make it hard for me to have her there. So I decided to get more private digs, and in less than a month had relocated in Hastings-on-Hudson's more homey suburbia. I had my part of a house, with an entirely private aspect. This did take me away from the Fleetwood commuter line. But on one of those last shared in-bound rides, we arrived late and had to share one of the wicker three seaters with a party already sitting near the window. The Goddess sat in the middle. As happened with unsurprising frequency in the approach tunnel to Grand Central, all lights went out for a few minutes at a time, and we sat in pitch darkness. After a few seconds, I felt the Goddess's hand take a gentle grip on my trousered penis, already semi-turgid from her warming proximity, and it immediately achieved full stretch. She held on, with remarkable timing, till just before we were re-illuminated, after which she gave me a knowing, affectionate glance. Steam should have been coming out of my nose and ears! Although now missing the train rides, I was able to comfortably have her to my place when she was free to come. We talked regularly on the phone, anticipating the next meeting for love. When the coast was clear and dates made, I would usually pick her up at some appointed place, not too close to her apartment, which was in a large complex. Once or twice she rode back with me on my commuter (Hudson) line, and after an evening of the most fulfilling, abandoned love-making imaginable, I would drive her to near her home, always before midnight. Before we would hit the sack, the Goddess would usually undress to nudity before me, and at least once I gulped that her stance suggested a perfect artist's model. She replied that she had done that -- hardly surprising. Her womanly proportions were perfection. Because of her Junoesque stature, she was a generous armful. But inspired by the mighty Aphrodite power in her Goddess nudity, I at times would pick her up and carry her to the bed. Often after supreme climaxes -- none were less -- and a brief rest, she would enthuse, and me too, about the heavenly pleasure just experienced. Once, at such a moment, she said, "Wow, You could make a million dollars with that!" - as she nodded in a certain direction. How's that for a male ego booster?! But sometimes after a single love episode, when we sat talking, she would drift into a slightly distant sadness. I would caress her and ask what was troubling. She would say something like, "Oh, it's nothing" and promptly try to smile it away, usually succeeding. We still seemed agreed not to explore or volunteer much that was personal. She liked me calling her the Goddess of Love. When she sent me a card it was signed "G. of L." And I liked that because it turned my mind to once and future thrills. Once when I had returned her to near home, she led us to a park bench and we sat down. She looked increasingly uneasy and finally said that she felt that she might be falling in love with me although she was trying not to -- and must not! I wanted nothing more than to comfort her. But she said I must not hug her in this open place. Gradually she returned to her sexy, girlish manner, as if just tossing off any seriousness. On another evening, after I had moved to Hastings, we rode back together on her commuter line, but we got off a long stop before Fleetwood and slowly walked about two miles through suburban neighborhoods to near her apartment. For some time she said little, but regularly smiled at me and welcomed an occasional across the back hug. As we walked her mood became increasingly preoccupied. Eventually she began talking about her husband, for the first and only time. She seemed to speak very reluctantly and with patches of silent inward staring: She was not happy in her marriage -- this was communicated almost apologetically. . . . . They did almost nothing together. . . . . He was rough and arbitrary in taking his sexual pleasure. . . . . . He had no concern for her sexual pleasure. . . . . I am unable to recapture the long, measured, somewhat indirect, certainly not vehement, but rather mournful, phrases in which she managed to communicate this disappointment. I felt terribly uneasy and inadequate as this unhappiness slowly unfolded, with little detail. Part of me fleetingly entertained the romantic role of "taking her away from all of this." But that mood soon passed since I couldn't imagine a satisfactory whole life with the Goddess; our relationship had been so focused on the single dimension of sexual transcendence. But she appeared to cheer up, with me trying to help, before the walk ended, and I left her with a warm, meant to be restorative embrace. Our marvelous affair lasted about six months, from fall into spring. Although uncomplicatedly direct in her interest in sex, when she was with me I saw a sweet, gentle girlishness, combined with genuine exuberance. There was nothing crude or slatternly about the Goddess's behavior. It was more as if she simply had transcended the guilt and fear regarding partnered sex that was then so widespread in our society. For my part, I cannot recall ever wanting more from our relationship than the satisfaction of giving her excitement as she gave me mine, and whatever her, perhaps, deeper feelings, the Goddess never asked for more. After one otherwise great night of excitement at my home, in cold, snowy weather I took her right into her building and near to her door. There, for once I felt uneasy with the Goddess, about how to `say' good-bye. What a place to risk being discovered! Why was I stupid enough to be there? The image of a wrathful husband, or observation by nosey neighbors, raced through my mind! So I only gave the Goddess a quick peck and headed out of the building, feeling uneasy until I was well quit of he premises. It was a strange new feeling, perhaps an awakening to the violation of social norms I had been enjoying, but still without guilt. On a warming night in mid spring the Goddess suggested that I meet her at a greater distance from her neighborhood. This may have made our meeting more romantically special. She would take the train to the Tuckahoe station and I would collect her there. With the usual anticipatory excitement, I took the top down on my Jeepster and sailed off. There she was, all aglow and alone on the station platform. In a giddy cloud we drove to my pad. Once home, nothing delayed our getting into bed. After some giggly cuddling, I initiated the traditional ‘beast with two backs.’ Next she mounted me for a ride ending in a vaulting gallop. Then she offered to ‘kiss him’; eagerly accepted. While on a rest my phone rang. I answered and heard the voice of a good HumRRO friend, now teaching at Fordham U. who was at one of the New York airports and suggested that I come to see him while he had a long delay there. Normally I would have taken him up, but now I stammered that I was seriously engaged and would pass. He seemed to guess my reason for regrets, and I hurried back to the reason. As I fell back onto the bed, the Goddess turned to place her rear aspect toward me, and she squirmed up tight against me. The new possibility re-aroused me instantly. And this was not sodomy! When I came out of that following fallow-rest, the Goddess was fondling my prime mover to full extension. Then she lay back and invitingly welcomed a reprise of the orthodox mode of lovemaking. Although I initially felt a bit tired from love's labors by this time, inviting expressions by the Goddess recharged me. As I neared ejaculation the electric current in my body surged rapidly. Suddenly the Goddess’s body sprang to defiant life, asserting her own urgent thrusts. Or a fleeting moment I was surprised by the suddenness. Then both of us writhed together in the following rapture. It may have been the best ever for the Goddess and me. With all that ecstasy memorably achieved, the Goddess, after about fifteen entwined minutes, said that she should be getting home soon. Our lollygagging trailed off as we rose and dressed. In delicious satiety, I drove her to near her home, and we separated in a common dreamy state. I never saw her again! The next day my penis was somewhat sore, but I figured that it was only from the recent overwork. But this turned into a bad rash which lasted for over three weeks. A doctor assured me that such intense use with concordant female secretions could be the cause. During t this down time I didn't call the Goddess. When I did finally feel recovered and called her work number, I was told, for the first time, that she couldn't answer the phone. But she never called back. Despite my weeks of persistent calls, we never even spoke again. For months, troubled imaginings were all I had for explanations; questions now still unanswered, because of the way my exciting encounter with the Goddess came to an abrupt end. King Making Because Pete was the President of SID for its first two years, he permitted and encouraged me, as a lesser IDS officer, to give that organization a fair amount of time in organizing monthly meetings and writing detailed reports of their proceedings. The core membership at that time consisted of senior bureaucrats and others from the UN. I now reflect with some shame that when I presided over a meeting to elect chapter officers, I clumsily overrode all democratic discussion of candidates in order to put in place the officers that a "king-making" committee, including me, wanted. I had once seen someone carry off this sort of thing charmingly, but that wasn't me, feeling, and no doubt appearing, uneasy doing something so out of character. The man we put in place turned out to be an uncommitted disappointment. This ,too, made me feel a guilty failure, since I had argued strongly among the kingmakers to "objectively" head off, Ben. Ben was actually a good friend of mine, who, I then felt, was too zealously overcommitted to an agenda that I now recognize was probably sound, even farsighted. Ben wanted SID to sponsor setting up a data base on international development on the just emerging computer phenomenon (ca l961). Ben was elected chapter president next year, with my help, but by then he had lost his steam. A Kindness Acts of kindness can take an infinity of forms. One of my favorites occurred one summer weekend in New York when I was feeling a streak of anxiety. Typically, I took to the open road with the modestly distant goal of visiting my friendly badminton doubles partner, Henry, and his family in rural New Jersey, where I had been offered an open invitation. Not long after I arrived it was time for lunch, and I sat down with the family including Henry’s wife and three children. The table was handsomely spread, and I, in my anxious state, served myself and began to eat and Henry did as well. After several minutes of what I failed too notice what must have been strained silence. Henry’s wife gave Henry a stern look and firmly said, “Henry, how could you have started eating without saying Grace?” He answered, “Well, I had seen Al already start to eat and I didn’t want him to be embarrassed.” Perhaps he had noticed my uneasy state. With that I apologized and Grace was duly said. A Deviant Perspective One fairly common event for me would be attendance at various meetings conferences, etc., of the sizable community of aid and development organizations’ workers clustered in the neighborhood of the UN. One still remembered had a moment at least absurd, but in a way both funny and sad. The occasion was a launch of a major new book on African geography. The author described his work to a good sized audience and the questions were all congratulatory softballs. That is, until a plump man of no other particular physical distinction rose and after identifying himself as a former manager on a Firestone rubber works in Liberia, had this to say, as remembered, in the most calmly instructive way imaginable. ‘You New Yorkers don’t understand that these blackies are like children and the only way you can get them to work is with the lash of whip.’ These words hung in the air of the large room where the audience of usually loquacious, certified champions of the less developed peoples seemed paralytically stunned to silence except for some stirring of butts on seats.. It seemed some time before the spell was broken by a peace restorer who rose to ask the author a question completely unrelated to what had been beyond inflammatory from the man of Liberian experience. Even after this meeting in talking with present friends, no one to my knowledge spoke of the bizarre interpolation, as if it never happened. In current jargon, it didn’t compute. Field Job, Aborted In one of my early years with Hudgens’s, IDS I was asked to take a position as administrator for our thirteen man IDS technical team in Guatemala. In an ironic twist, I had been yearning for such an overseas posting. But just at that same time IDS was negotiating with the US foreign aid agency (not yet USAID) to mount two projects in Africa, Ghana (but then still the Gold Coast) and Nigeria, and I much preferred being posted to one of those. But for that I would have to wait for negotiations to be completed. Hudgens told me that if I’d rather not go to go to Guatemala ASAP, I would have to find an acceptable substitute. At liberty at the time was my competent pal Ralph D. I recommended him, he was hired and he did an excellent job. My African dreams were dashed when the final contracts for the African projects did not include a slot for me. That extended my stay in New York, left to read and recombine Ralph’s well written reports from Guatemala, with others for our sponsor. Encounter with a Cop An experience tangentially related to IDS was an early warning to me about being careful in dealing with the Police. I had told some co-workers that I intended to drive my Jeepster to Washington at the end of the last day of work before a Thanksgiving long holiday. An older woman in the office asked me if she could come along on the drive since she also had a number of friends in DC.. In late afternoon, while crawling south in the bumper to bumper traffic near 42nd street, heading for one of the tunnels into New Jersey, we were pinned in the middle of the intersection with a crossing street. No surprisingly, the cop directing our stream came over and gestured for me to turn right onto crossing street as if I were to continue on there. His gestures and shout indicated backing up before turning, presumably to clear the car in front off us. But with my sharp turning radius I felt, correctly, that I didn't need to back up first. So I simply made the turn. While I was well into the turn, the cop’s body, and only observed oral, language suggested outrage, and he flagged me down and ordered me to enter the cross street and stop. I did and it was several minutes before he came over and asked why I disobeyed his order. I answered that I understood his wish to clear he intersection and that I could quickly do it without taking the time to back up first. All he could say was that the point was that I had disobeyed his order. Then he silently began slowly circling the car as if making an extremely close inspection of its every aspect. Prior to this he had ordered us out and we simply stood on the chilly sidewalk for almost a half-hour as the cop circumnavigated my Jeepster, regularly stopping to peer closely at something apparently interesting. Finally, he silently stopped and set about writing a ticket for obstructing traffic. Only then did he speak a few words about paying a fine or going to court. Perhaps he had been hoping all this time that I would somehow offer to pay him well for letting us go. In so far as this occurred to me at the time that was out of the question as a matter of principle, or even a sort of counter attack. My gorge was rising all the while over what I considered an abuse of power on some ego need of the cop, but neither I nor my passenger said a word to him although I like to imagine that I shouted as we drove off something like, “I’ll see you in court!” Whatever the forgotten mechanics, I did give proper notice that I would seek justice in the court. I asked the kindly Hudgens if I could take my willing passenger with me as a possible witness on the appointed day. He was approving and sympathetic. In court when I took the stand, I described things as above and added that I considered the cop’s behavior as arbitrarily punitive and that he even abandoned his critical post directing the heavy holiday traffic just to cause us embarrassment and delay . All this was said with all the injured innocence that I could muster. I even added that I thought the cop should face some sanction for his misbehavior. Then to my astonishment, the magistrate pleaded with me to have some sympathy for the cop and to let matters drop. After all it was almost Xmas and the young man had a family living in modest circumstances. I can‘t remember all of the judge‘s plea on behalf of the cop, but it was as if I now had the upper decision-making hand. I answered, well, that‘s OK to end the matter, and that I had insisted on coming to court in order to make authorities aware that such things do happen. I must also have been concerned about paying a fine, but I believe that was secondary in my then Quixotic mode. Twice later in life I had unfair treatment by arbitrary American policemen, but I still expect that there are good men among them. . A Boy of Summer & Early Autumn In that first summer in NY, I sought a baseball team to play with and found one in Armonk. The star and captain of the team was the first baseman -- my usual spot -- so I wound up playing several other positions. Also on the team was a very quiet black player, John Gomes, a pitcher. As a new member, I was rather quiet myself. John's quiet manner made him interesting to me. Very gradually we got to know one another somewhat. He was very bright, but liked to communicate in riddles that left one a little unsure of just what he had in mind, and so that one felt a little uneasy, perhaps being tested. During one of our 'chats' near the end of the summer season, having learned that we were both bachelors, John invited me for a beer at his pad in Nyack, where he worked with disturbed youths. He was a trained social worker. I followed his well-worn Chevy in my yellow Jeepster. At his home, John wasn't much more effusive, but he did make known that he played clarinet and liked jazz. Since I was already playing with Earl and Ivan, I invited John to come and see if he would like to join us. He did, and he did. He had a nice tone on his axe, but when improvising his jazz choruses, he often could be heard to sound like the way-out ("free") Ornette Coleman, if the listener were generous. Frankly, I think John usually lost his way and just splattered all over his stick. SANE In what must have been my second or third autumn in New York, I became aware of a new group being formed, the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy, using SANE as its label. I went to an organizing meeting, led by a representative of the American Friends Service Committee. In a requested round of self-introductions, I identified my interest as being in a sane foreign policy, which would embrace the nuclear policy. Then I became a regular in the Westchester County unit. At the regular meetings, typically of a dozen or more, I felt a need at times to lean against some of the more excited zealotry, but still seemed to be among friends. At length a decision was made to hold a major conference, in nearby Purchase, NY, in conjunction with some of SANE’s big people from New York City. I was interested and took a major role, gladly conceded, in aspects of the conference’s organization. I had a hand in designing the overall format and sequence, and particularly in getting what would now be called Focus – or break-out - Groups in the scheme; and in getting the main speaker, then a top official of the Rockefeller Foundation, who had been a teaching assistant under Hans Morgenthau when I was at The University of Chicago. His talk, I found out later, turned out to be a bit too sane for a few present. Norman Cousins, just as the day long meeting was closing, sailed in through a rear entr0ance as a deus ex machina, announcing, as he charged down an aisle, that he had just arrived from Washington, to deliver a rip-roaring message of inspiration over his conversion of certain celebrities to unilateral nuclear disarmament. His excitement seemed to be contagious and the whole event ended on that high point. While I thought this climax was a bit over the top, I felt the overall conference had been a great success, with about one hundred people from far and wide attending. At the next regular local meeting at the home of our chairman, the gentlest, most harmony-loving of Christians, an immigrant Austrian, discussion of the conference started quite unexceptionally. After a few voices of self-congratulation over the conference’s apparent success, another member asked for the floor, and launched into an extended, measured, obviously prepared, condemnation of my influence on the conference, as somehow compromising the purest gospel of unilateral nuclear disarmament. He was very articulate and of a certain intelligence in his marshalling and spinning of conjured “facts.” He had me shocked, sweating, blushing and totally uncomfortable for his first few minutes, when I would have certainly been speechless had he stopped and dared me to respond. But he went on for a bit, demanding my expulsion from the group and ending with a suggestion of my culpable “personality problems.” And. then, without the slightest pause, when he ended, another member, as if rehearsed, took up the cudgels and a little less smoothly rained down similar condemnation. All of this gave me time to get my staggered wits together, and I was ready by the time the accusers seemed to have exhausted their bile. At first, almost every one present was shifting uneasily, and our almost speechless chairman sputtered words of hoped for reconciliation. I was getting more confident of my case, mobilizing my thoughts during this interregnum. It was another of the not very numerous occasions when, under pressure, I expressed myself to my entire satisfaction. I calmly, without counter-aggression, explained the reasoning behind my conference efforts, as a believer in sane address to the problems of nuclear armament. This had led to my getting the speaker from Rockefeller who had, as I expected, given a singularly sane exposition of the issues. I said I would stay with the group unless I thought my contributions were useless, or that others wouldn’t work with me because of their personality problems. The Chairman was then all aflutter with assurances that I was appreciated and welcomed, and that he was sure that everyone could calm down and work together for the higher purpose. The meeting adjourned a few minutes later, with no sign of relenting by the two grand inquisitors. I thought hard about going to the next local meeting, discussing it with Madge the woman with whom I had been driving there. She had been so upset as to be speechless at the last meeting and now wondered how I had kept any degree of self-possession. Madge said that she would stop going if my accusers didn’t apologize at the next meeting. She went and I didn’t. She later reported that the inquisitors even expanded on their criticisms of my positions, as inappropriate for the purpose of the group: to “Ban the Bomb!” And they seemed to have a few supporters although others were disappointed over the harsh turn of events. The kindly chairman urged Madge to urge me to come back. But from the tone of her report, I decided that my active attendance would serve no useful purpose. My friend Madge, and I understand some of the others, dropped out and ceased attending meetings. Shame and Shine Summertime always meant baseball, with one local team or another. One unusual game was inside "Sing-Sing" prison, playing with a Yonkers team. Our "dugout" was actually a securely penned-in area, where, when at bat, a gate was opened to let only the next batter out. I distinguished myself in right field by letting an easy fly ball drop behind me, in a self-doubting moment. But there were some occasions for pride in performance. The following year I was playing with the North Tarrytown team, at 3rd Base, a position I should have chosen from the start for any career prospects, since I was a good reflex fielder and a merely adequate hitter. (At higher levels, it usually is the hard-hitting Strangelove who gets stuck on 1st Base.) With our fine young left handed pitcher, Hal, going for a no-hitter in the late innings, one of the desperate opposing batters laid down a perfect bunt between the pitcher's mound and the 3rd base line. Hal made a strong move to field it, but as a lefthander he could not possibly have turned and made the play at first. So I shouted him off and nipped the runner at first to save Hal’s no-hitter Again, John and Baseball By the following summer, when John and I both played ball again with Armonk, he had married Barbara, a white fellow social worker. They had moved into a sixth floor walk-up apartment in an ill-maintained building on East 116th St. John's job was now with the nearby LaGuardia House, a community recreation and meeting center, on the "Spanish Harlem" border. Because of odd working hours, John missed many of our practices and gigs. But I occasionally climbed up to their Harlem flat for some comparatively intelligent talk. John was a bit better here, but Barbara was the chief talker. My woman problems were often the topic. One night I went with John and Barbara to a night club where a well known jazz combo that I wanted to hear was playing to an attentive responsive audience. I never settled down and eventually felt so “claustrophobic,” that I up and went outside to pace around. I tried to go back inside once or twice, but couldn’t overcome that massive anxiety/panic feeling. That had happened once before while I was in DC, when I suggested to the friends that I later visited in Maine, that we go to hear one of my favorite jazz musicians., Bud Shank. Inside the club, I soon felt that unbearable anxiety that drove me outside, where I tried to mobilize my mind for a return, but failed. Love’s Fallow Season After the Goddess of Love had passed from my scene, there were several lean months on that front. But over time I made some scattered new connections and dated some possibilities. Some quickly vanished and a few got to foreplay. In most of these encounters I wound up with a sense of rejection and self-doubt, lasting weeks and sometimes expressed in anxiety attacks. I had let my expectations repeatedly outrun good sense regarding long run probabilities. A once popular song that has become something of a 'standard' jazz ballad, "I Fall in Love Too Easily," simplified my weakness. But love doesn’t seem the right word for these and similar obsessive emotional investments in a half a dozen or more other young women over the several years between (and including?) my two marriages. Perhaps a better description would be a yearning for affectionate response to my unpolished, unsure expression of this desire, where carnality may have been more or less secondary. The quick, ready responses of Mary Evans, Mignon, the Goddess of Love and finally, Zee, my lasting wife may have been exceptions, but they very rarely overcame my interregnum self-doubts. My insecurities at the game must have limited my charm and promise for the ladies of the moment. In two or three cases unbridgeable political or religious views contributed significantly. But looking back, those outcomes were probably for the best. A few opportunities I hadn't pursued might have turned out better. Helen Helen may have been such a case early in my New York years. We came together through my old high school buddy Bob/Groucho, when I visited him and his new wife in New Haven for a day at a park beach. In and out of the pond Helen and I were completely easy with one another’s bodies in our swim wear. She was a real delight – in his invitation, Bob had described her as “pleasantly neurotic”- New York-bright and ready for anything acceptable in that public setting. Not a beauty but entirely presentable, especially in lithe body. I was in one of my better forms, loosely matching her devil-may-care manner. For one frolic, Helen had lamented the lack of a diving board and I offered to make do. In about five feet of water I would submerge in a crouch and Helen would climb on my shoulders. Once she was securely there I would stand up, giving her a platform to dive from. This went on numberless times until we both had enough. At the end of our day, as we walked along to go get dressed, I came up behind Helen and hoisted her astraddle on my shoulders, as one often carries small children. Instead of being surprised, she acted as if this was actually expected and began playing the rodeo bronco rider for the rest of the way to the dressing rooms. There may even have been a kiss before I had to head back to Hastings-on Hudson, and we exchanged a note of two in the following few weeks. Helen’s family lived in the lower east side of Manhattan, and she visited frequently on weekends. Helen wrote that she might visit me on the way, and I gave her directions to my pad, a completely separate and private bottom floor of a small family home. About a month after the swim, on an autumnal weekend day when I was in a very down funk, I answered door knock to face a beaming Helen, looking quite tasty as I later recalled. I was really dead on my feet, my unease persisting, and instead of embracing and kissing her, I stepped well back to let her in. In fact for the rest of the time she was with me, I made a point of avoiding contact with her, feeling somehow embarrassed, even ashamed, totally unsure of myself and the possibilities of this encounter. Helen seemed to recognize, if hardly understand, my mood. Our conversation went nowhere, as I stayed on meaningless abstractions and talked about furnishing my new digs. Looking back, I am certain that I missed a chance for a real warm contact, maybe ecstasy in a long term relationship. I believe that this occurred in a lapse between assignations with the Goddess of Love. I told Helen that I needed a chest of drawers for my stuff and she suggested a second hand furniture shop to visit. This resulted in a purchase thrown into the back of my Jeepster. That evening I followed her car to her married brother’s flat in lower eastside Manhattan. Here I was only a bit more relaxed by talking in impersonal abstractions about class warfare with the bright working class brother. I drove home not satisfied with myself for the way the day went. That was the last, lost contact with the promise of Helen, soon overwhelmed by renewed encounters with the Goddess. Pat One of my pursuits was particularly damaging. I had found a badminton group that played in Bronxville High School, and there I encountered Pat, a handsome, athletic girl, whose Vassar education seemed reflected in her mannerly, understated, unpretentious style. Not being a Don Juan, I approached her only after some time by first asking her to be a doubles partner, and we often played together. I had long since entered my trade-mark crush stage on Pat. We had a few antiseptic dates. Lacking a sign of encouraging spark in Pat, I hesitated to make romantic advances though I was soundly smitten. I was probably just seen as behaving strangely, what Earl might have called gauche. One evening we went together to a movie. After the show was over, the winter night was relatively mild. The winding single lane, asphalted road to her off-the-beaten-track, modest family home near Chappaqua was covered with a perfect veneer of wet sheet ice. With almost no traction, even at the slowest speed, my Jeepster was constantly sliding , barely controllable. It was a kind of fun until I lost it and gently slid into a large boulder, which knocked my right front wheel about 90 degrees out of alignment, and it seemed impossible to drive further. In her laconic way, Pat was a good sport, making no fuss, and we set off on the quarter mile trek to her house. I insisted, as chivalrous, on accompanying her, with the romantic, not so much lustful, part of my brain feverishly churning incomplete visions of happy developments. We slogged the distance, now through an accumulation of slushy snow. Once in the warm house it was well after midnight. As we stood facing one another, I suddenly hoisted Pat up and gently jiggled her there. She seemed startled, but calmly asked, "What are you doing?" Her cool response was chilling, and I could only say that I had .been showing-off. Unruffled, Pat said that I should spend the night, because it seemed I had no reasonable way of getting home. Her parents were already asleep but there was a spare room. The thought of being under the same roof with Pat, so near and yet so far, seemed nightmarish. Without much thought I said that I couldn't leave my car so unprotected, and that I would sleep in it if I couldn't get it fit to drive home. She repeated her offer, as if I were mad to go off in such a night, but it seemed from pure good sense, not affection. I trotted back to the Jeepster, managed to get it back onto the road and to a nearby access onto the Sawmill River Parkway. The car was half dragging the off-line wheel, even after I straightened it a bit. The late hour and the buildup of slippery slush seemed to have eliminated all other traffic on the usually well trafficked Sawmill. But the slipperiness seemed to relieve some of the dragging of my wheel. Anyhow, I did get home. I became so shaken by my obsession with Pat that I was afraid of losing all ability to function normally, on the job or anywhere. Almost everything I came across reminded me of Pat in a way that made her world seem infinitely more important than my meaningless world. I lost almost all self-esteem. Finally, I asked a knowledgeable friend for advice leading to a very Freudian psychoanalyst, and I entered his on and off care for almost two years. I slowly came back to full function, but I suspect it was the passage of time and other events that were as influential as the psychoanalysis, not that the latter was totally worthless -- it certainly cost enough. During the ‘Pat” period I was on a good friends basis with a post WWII immigrant couple, the Melfords, near my age also living in Hastings on Hudson and I saw them often. The wife, Peggy, the very essence of a British ‘games mistress,’ at a private girls school, seemed to be in touch with a few young women that included Pat in some way, most of them on the athletic, but ladylike, side and some also games mistresses. Pat had another job. Peggy Melford loved pulling my leg as a presumed naïve American. She followed my interest in Pat from a privileged position, seeming to have information about the younger women beyond my ken. Since much in her observations had her tongue in her cheek, it was hard to sort hard truth from raillery. Once she realized that I was trying to put Pat out of my thoughts, she began hinting that Pat may be a Lesbian, noting her remarkably close attachment to another from the cohort, including a joint domicile. That didn’t benefit me greatly since it implied an even greater question as to my hold on complicated reality. Next Attempt One morning on the commuter station platform, Madge introduced me to a young woman, probably in her late 20s or early 30ss and attractive in an understated quintessentially Manhattan manner. Lindsey was an editor at one of the major publishing houses on 3rd avenue. Without any other specific amorous interest in my life, and so afloat, at the time, I soon asked Lindsey out, and she fitted more comfortably than me in one of Manhattan’s upscale eateries. She gave off a sort of tired worldliness. Another time we had lunch in mid-town. For about two weeks I strategically pursued her, with hardly more than luke warm encouragement. I learned that she had become separated from her Unitarian Minster husband, with whom she had a son, now about four. Lindsey implied that her husband had been too goody-goody, and she now seemed to defend hedonism as a way of life, on which value system I challenged her, while avoiding any claim to faith-based ethics. One evening when I called Lindsey at her nearby apartment, she immediately asked me to come over. I brought a Herbie Mann-Machito LP since I never tired of trying to convert everyone to a jazz taste. Surprising me and requiring adjustment of my options, her husband was there. I was let in, and tersely introduced to the young man at the same time as she was returning to sit at a small table opposite him. There Lindsey plunged back into what seemed an intense, low volume discussion that must have been interrupted by my arrival. Ignored and in considerable confusion, why I stayed , not decisive on leaving, I am not certain. Instead I turned to a record player and put on the LP which I had intended as a gift and to watch her small son playing on the floor at some game. After a more than quarter hour in this configuration, Lindsey suddenly got up and calmly asked me to take her out of the apartment, leaving the handsome young husband in apparent wonderment. I responded like a sheep dog. We went to a small local restaurant, empty at this hour, and sat in a booth, opposite one another . For a while this handsome woman just sat there looking into the distance with hardly any expression on her chiseled face. Then in hard bitten words Lindsey laid out how her visions for her life had been blighted by the early marriage and child; as if some all but tangible malevolent external force had worked against her so far. It had derailed her wish, and still intention, to move with the beau monde. After nearly an hour of this, during which I interjected only a few solicitous questions, the restaurant was closing . I asked her to come to my apartment and she assented, as if in a trance. Once inside, I picked her up, unresisting, and placed her, fully clothed, like myself, on my bed and I lay down beside her. She had on a fine quality sweater over a blouse and a below the knee length earth toned skirt.. Lindsey just lay there, perfectly still, as if she were comfortably resting. Unsure of what to do next for consensual erotic progress, I laid my forearm across her flat stomach. Since this lifeless beauty made not the slightest response, I was less sure than ever how to proceed to instinctual, but blocked, lovemaking. Although I made my own slight body shifts, we lay like this for an eternity of no more than several minutes while I waited, anxiously running advances through my head, none of which seemed promising, for her slightest movement that I might interpret as an exploitable moment. Maybe there was a game of who would move first, affectionately or, worrisomely to me, defensively on her part. Nothing happened! I finally, said I’d take her home. She got up quite calmly and without a word or expression. I, too, was speechless. I proceeded to deliver her as promised. Somehow I felt defeated by her, and perhaps not of the same world, and so gave up any further pursuit. But when I sometimes recall this event, I speculate in fantasy that an aggressive lover’s move on that bed may have made for an evening of sexual indulgence; but that that might also have led to a more disastrous entanglement. Lindsey was not for me. “Ellen” One, more substantial, relationship had a most strange climax (pun unavoidable). It started in my next to last year in NY. In discretion I will call her Ellen, Mrs. . . . She was at IDS, Hudgens's Executive Secretary, attractive in a conservative way, certainly not going for glamour. She could have vied for the World's Greatest Secretary Award, alert to every possible misstep, and an excellent editor of almost everything that left the office. So I had seen Ellen from my first day at IDS, without becoming particularly interested then. As much time went by, we became friendlier. Her business-like manner melted somewhat. We had a few pleasant lunches, sometimes with a group. I even began using Ellen as a confidant about my amorous misadventures, and she grew ever warmer and more sympathetic, and even, mutatis mutandi, empathetic. I cannot remember the exact critical incident or initiative, but we began, after these more than four years in daily, quite correct contact, to stay behind after the office closed and to caress one another into very arousing foreplay. Ellen said in her very direct, undoubtedly sincere, manner that no one had ever moved her to such a level of excitement before. It was after a month of such excitements -- again, I’m foggy on details -- that I was made aware that she would like to be invited to my bachelor's pad. So ordered! In her characteristically jolly straightforward manner, as it had developed with me, Ellen promptly disrobed to her very revealing undergarments. Her fine woman's body had not been much hinted at in her dress on the job! I was undressed almost as fast as her. After a brief ogling at her splendor, and giving deserved praise, to her delight, I immediately carried her tall, well-proportioned frame to my bed. We excitedly finished undressing and went for preliminary erogenous play. When the time seemed ripe, I mounted a receptive Ellen and began what comes naturally. But THEN! . . . She began giggling! The more I labored at man's work, and became more aroused, the more her giggling mounted to a high laughter. This seemed to suggest that, while passive herself, I was cutting, in her eyes, a very ridiculous figure in my sweaty exertions, even as I climaxed! Needless to say, I did not get the full measure of total pleasure one expects from such outings. Her laughter had reached such a pitch that it only slowly died down after I slid beside her. In my puzzlement, after a short, awkward silence, I thought that she might need reassurance over her failure to experience high excitement. But Ellen seemed in the merriest of moods and unconcerned.. I did express some surprise and disappointment since I had given her one of my better efforts. Her apology, if you can call it that, a barely muttered "sorry," was cast in a jolly mood, as if she couldn't get over a recently heard great joke. I got the impression that Ellen had half expected no significantly different response on her part to my penetration, and was not entirely surprised at her failure to reach climactic arousal. Ellen and I remained the closest of friends and confidantes during the last of my six years with IDS in NY. We were easy, but not overly intimate with one another's bodies. Some nine years after I left NY and had gone with CARE to Turkey and then Belize where I married, I visited Ellen in another Rockefeller Center suite where she reigned. I was in NY, between jobs, without one in view, and must have appeared down. She was sweetly kind and supportive. She made suggestions and went to great pains to have her new boss (a friend of the retired Hudgens) meet with me on the moment. Nothing came of that, but, by this sympathetic response, Ellen had assured me of our still mutual affection, and of her great decency. Rebound? Sometime after my disturbance over Pat, a cute, rather petite, blond girl showed up at the same old badminton courts. Birte was from Denmark where badminton is played seriously and she was quite competent. I pursued her. I became her transport to the badminton evenings, and after them I would park in a woods and caress her We became something of a doubles team in a few tournaments. I took her to the play, Westside Story. On a day off we went on an isolated picnic below the steep, sheer Palisades opposite Hastings. Birte prepared some Danish style open faced sandwiches and in due course accepted my vigorous caressing, leading to her dutiful masturbation of my aching gonads.. She responded most keenly to my oral exploration of her ears. But caressing her pudenda elicited not the slightest sign of enjoyment. Her heavily accented English was functional but not advanced, and this limited the range of conversation, but she always spoke quite softly and in general seemed extremely blasé. It seemed that she had entered the USA rather fraudulently as the alleged relative of the 50ish bachelor manager of the elite Danish silver shop, Georg Jensen on Fifth Avenue. She had no other job than to hang around his fine house in Scarsdale and serve him in ways I never explored. In my emotional need, I got romantically fixated on Birte, even thinking of marrying her, and she seemed willing without any show of exuberance. Without requital, these feelings drifted away and, anyhow, Birte soon went back to Denmark. “Jane” Still another girl friend was something else. Jane was of highest achievement Jewish provenance. She had gone to Wellesley with honors, gained a law degree, played beautiful piano, married a psychiatrist, and was now divorced of same. She had come to our IDS office pursuing employment. There was nothing with IDS, but I put her onto the editor of the small magazine, Current, then known to some as the 'intellectuals' Readers' Digest.' They hired her, But she and the liberal editor, Aryeh Neier, quickly fell out. We dated a few times and then became quite close, We began spending most of our spare time together. There was a lot of intellectually challenging banter, since Jane was a “Goldwater Girl” Great! but I was also keen for smooching, with the implications for getting our bodies more completely interlocked sooner or later. I allowed as how she had often let me get all hot and bothered without hormonal release. After much such pestering, Jane set a date a few weeks ahead for the Big Night at her apartment in Manhattan's east 70s. Well, it was Big, worth the wait! But that was the last! She promptly became bedridden for a week, claiming a spinal disc problem, something I had experienced since my hobbling leg injury at U of C. I visited her nightly after work. Though she didn't want me in bed, she wanted caressing, even to climax. I knelt on the floor beside her and happily complied. A few times she reached down and relieved me. After Jane left her bed of pain, we recommenced regular get-togethers. But Jane was less interested in any physicality, and the romantic edge was off. I sensed that she wanted more of a temporary supporting pal or escort rather than a lover. With that insight, I reasoned that continuing this affair would not be good for me, and I decided that I had to make a clean break Since Jane and I were always at pains to be carefully rational, even intellectual in our verbal manners, I felt that I needn't beat around the bush. I rehearsed a sensible, but gentle phrase or two to convey my decision. Jane struggled to hold dignity, no weeping or anything like that. But she was clearly hurt and even said so. I felt genuinely sorry for her. Later I came to feel that her hurt was largely from the loss of control of the situation, something central to her personality. With a little return of her self-control, Jane earnestly proposed that we meet at least once again. There was no reason for me to deny her that meeting. I wasn't dying to rush off that evening, but it was clear when time to go. That last meeting was about as I had expected. She was entirely poised and let me know that perhaps I had made the right decision. The style was studiedly almost business-like, but softened just a bit to allow for a parting as "friends." As I reviewed this overall encounter with Jane, I began to feel proud of myself for, for once, thinking clearly, and acting intelligently, in these matters. And this woman had been by far my most sophisticated, brainy challenge while it lasted. Tied by Music We met in early l957, in one of the merging urbs of lower Westchester County (NY), when called together, over the air, by a local disc jockey of admirable musical taste. The purpose of the meeting was to form a jazz fan club.. As a single (divorced) man of 32, I was new to this part of the world, having spent the previous six years in Washington DC. Earl was at the meeting with his wife Grace. Although I later found Earl to be painfully shy and with a serious stammer, near the end of the evening, Earl asked for the floor and then asked, amidst stutters, if any present were interested in playing jazz as well as discussing it. Surprisingly, no one spoke up. But after the meeting I approached Earl and uneasily mentioned that I had fumbled with the drums at home, and we two shy guys agreed to get together. Earl it turned out was a very, very good, largely self-developed jazz pianist,. So far, he had been playing just for his own fulfillment. We started meeting at the Bergendahls’ basement flat, with spinet, in the upper Bronx just about every weekend. Earl had one old battered cymbal for me to use; otherwise I plied the wire brushes on any hard, slightly rough surface. My own antique kit was back in my parents' home in Menominee. Some months later, after a vacation trip to my parents, I brought back my Rudy Vallee-era painted bass drum, with interior flickering light. Around the same time I bought a cheap second hand snare and a well-worn high-hat rig; a cymbal or two were added later. Shortly before I gathered parts of my old kit, I reconnected with my friend from U. of Chicago days, Ivan, and we rediscovered our shared interest in Jazz. Ivan, I was reminded, played some trumpet. He soon joined the Bergendahls’ salon musicale, also trying a washtub bass, later replaced with the real thing. Highly energetic and very bright, Ivan demonstrated a sort of deferential extroversion. After many weekends at the Bergendahls’, he, somewhat impatiently, began urging us to look for somewhere to play in public. Ivan had already scouted some interest, no doubt influenced by the offer to perform free, among proprietors of a few small bars and lounges. Earl was particularly reluctant and I was not all that self-assured. But on a Friday night we finally set up in an almost unpopulated bar and played just what we wanted, mostly what are usually called mainstream jazz standards. No one objected, imagine! Ivan turned up a series of such nondescript locales for Friday or Saturday "engagements." We finally settled down in a somewhat classier venue, "Johnny Ringers' Black Angus" in Ardsley, where we were unpaid -- but fed -- fixtures every Friday or Saturday for over three years, alternating sets with Harry, a friendly, mediocre house pianist with whom I sometimes drummed. Absconding Shortly after Ivan and I reconnected, he asked me to help on a rather serious matter which we turned into a giddy escapade [sic]. He wanted to escape, with possessions, unnoticed, from a rented house in Monmouth, New Jersey where he had a dispute with the landlord. He had already arranged for an apartment in Flatbush (Brooklyn) where his wife and twin children awaited. Under the circumstances Ivan planned the escape under cover of darkness. He rented a beat up commercial van of adequate size. Once at the New Jersey starting point of our miscreance, we soon cast the whole episode as a farce, a parody of an imagined, generic occurrence. So almost every lift of household goods and later, sometimes flawed maneuvering -- wrong turns -- on the long drive through metropolitan traffic, all this set off comic or wordplay exchange and bouts of “in the zone” laughter. The late night arrival in Flatbush was met by Ivan’s much more sober, in fact worried, wife Rose who still couldn't entirely dampen our non-alcoholic giddiness. Earl was remarkably talented, a graphic artist, then working for an ad agency in Manhattan. He designed and painted, among other things, LP album covers for his own amusement. Like the short stories he wrote, these were never offered, to my knowledge, to anyone's (maybe to Grace‘s) view; I only got a glimpse of some covers by accident, and they looked damn good to me. I do believe that our playing together, which seemed to absolutely transport him, in public gradually moderated Earl’s self-protective shyness. Ivan, incidentally, was also a talent, aside from his music. He then worked as a writer in the public relations end of a major pharmaceutical firm, and later wrote novels, at least one of which was published though under an assumed name. Freedom Dance in Greenwich Village At one of our self-sent ‘rehearsals’ for nothing in particular, John said he had an interesting gig for our non-profit quartet. It would be a ‘rent party’ for some indigent artists in Greenwich Village. We haltingly agreed. We were to arrive at midnight the next Saturday. With my Jeepster loaded with my drums, Earl, John and I – Ivan couldn’t make it -- found our way to the rundown two-story house just off 6th Ave. As we started to mount the narrow, creaky stairway, we were driven backwards by a descending horde of weirdly attired apparent musicians. We had to squeeze up through the press to get to a huge, deliberately scruffy, unfurnished room with a few wall patches of aborted varicolored paint jobs and a well worn bare wooden floor The only illumination was a single unfrosted light bulb hanging near the middle of the room by a long, frayed cord. There was a beat-up upright piano to one side, and at the far end of the otherwise long, bare room was a crescent shaped quasi-bleacher comprised of about four rickety tiers of crudely joined unfinished wood, fully occupied except for a few gaps by a collection of 20s and 30s got up in the most garishly funky threads conceivable. This room occupied the whole upper floor of the house except for a grubby mini-W.C. which I discovered in answering nature’s call later, as night became morning. It was truly a closet crammed with slopped over paint buckets, mop, broom, etc. . Throughout our extended gig, the dance floor was usually well populated. Earl was blowing great stuff and seemed inspired by the appreciative crowd, some of whom admiringly hung over his piano at times. A high point for everyone, especially Earl, the closet artist, was the arrival of Larry Rivers. a very ”with it” artist of the time, with his alto sax, who shortly joined our musicale, much to the delight of all. Also at about the same time in came David Amran, another major figure in his set, who pulled out his French horn and climbed to the piano top where he took his solos. At some point, well into the event, I can't remember exactly when, a young man of comparatively respectable appearance sidled up to me and said he was a drummer and could he take a turn at the kit. Often having yearned for the same favor, I said OK. He worked there busily for what was intended to be one extended blowing session, but before the group ran more than a few choruses the other band members demanded that I return to the drums, since my sub had seemed to play everything but any kind of jazz beat. I make no apology for feeling appreciated. As our ensemble played to general appreciation. Several couples, not all mixed gender, jumped onto the spacious floor and cavorted in singularly creative fashion. I might note here that perhaps the most off-trend, and so, magnetic, personality was a balding young man in a business suit. He was an immediate hit and became the favorite dance ‘partner,’ presumably because his prim suit was so much more far-out than anything anyone else had on.. We played on and on for almost the whole two and half-hours in residence. The music and dance seemed themselves adequately intoxicating since I saw little evidence of alcohol's influence although I suspected some small scale unobtrusive tasting. As we played away, quite late to a slightly reduced corps of dancers, suddenly a tearing crumbling sound followed by a great drawn out, mounting shriek got everybody's attention -- even the band stopped! The jury-rigged bleachers had collapsed. Although there was much after-moaning, it seemed that no one got seriously hurt. There must have been several large scratches and bruises. I don’t remember that incident completely destroying the evening or not even all the dancing. But it was near the exhausting end of things and must have clouded any enthusiasm to go on indefinitely. So after about 2:30 AM we packed it in, struggled back down the long narrow stairway, sleepily found the Jeepster and headed back up the Westside Highway to home base in Yonkers. There we split for our separate wheels and ‘hoods. Grace & Earl Over time I developed a sort of one-way confidante, quasi-family relationship with Grace and Earl. We came to see a great deal of each other, including occasional picnics and beach outings. I did much of the talking, especially in times of pain over my unrequited, premature infatuations with females whom I had witlessly misread, more often the case than not. Grace seemed to follow my stories, but was neither particularly censorious nor sympathetic, at least on the surface. I learned only a little of the Bergendahls’ past or 'inner' lives. I think they saw me as somewhat exotic and very gauche for my comparatively undisciplined, at times only affectedly unguarded, adventurous manner, in big bad old New York. They were certainly not gushingly sympathetic to my readily exposed contretemps, nor were they overtly impatient or often unavailable when I felt the need for their audience. When they were unavailable, it was bluntly stated, somewhat heartlessly to me then. We almost never exchanged views on larger social or political issues. Although much on my mind, these I soon recognized as generally off-limits. Even non-jazz aesthetic matters were rarely discussed. We did gossip about acquaintances, including Ivan and John. Off the subject of music, Grace took a strong role in directing conversation. Looking back, we, strangely enough, seem to have had relatively little in common that was tangible beyond my very keen pleasure, and presumably, Earl’s in making music together. But there seemed some sort of reciprocal but asymmetrical needs being met. Of course there was the music, the one area where Grace deferred to Earl. Unwelcome Advance Back to our music -- in a way. For one summer Sunday Ivan cooked up one of his most unusual connections. We would go to the home of a young, allegedly jazz piano player in a well to do Scarsdale neighborhood for just some “blowing.” Earl copped out, and the event was a ’drag,’ because the kid, our host, just didn’t have it. In the process we were shone around the fine house and were introduced to the father. While at work at the beginning of the next week, I got a call from the kid’s dad, who must have got my work number from an innocent Ivan. He claimed to be infatuated and wanted to “see” me again! I said no thanks, but didn’t hang up immediately. He seemed so pained that I tried to let him down gently. To my suggestion of ’counseling’ he said that nothing of that sort had been able to help him. Finally, he pleaded with me to at least let him have the blue trousers I had been wearing at his house, they had so bewitched him! That, I thought, particularly called for some serious therapy for his seriously deviant condition. I said so and despite his pitiful pleas, I finally hung up with as little disapproval as possible. Long Distance Shock As noted in my security episode, my old job in Rockefeller Center disappeared in February 1963, and I went with CARE who assigned me to Trabzon, Turkey on the eastern Black Sea. That very green part of the country was a sort of wonderland for me, among other things rich in Byzantine ruins and history -- and lovely Appalachian scenery right down to the sea. I would travel over most of the eastern Turkey’s more rugged and sere hinterland over the next year and a half. (I later worked and traveled widely for three years over all parts of Turkey where every region held fascinating remnants of preceding ancient civilizations.) Hardly a month after arriving in Trabzon I was ensconced in a small, drafty one room office, provided by CARE's counterpart organization in Trabzon (and Turkey), the Red Crescent Society (Kizilay). There I received the most surprising phone call of my life. It was from Grace in Yonkers. My time was about 10 AM, so it must have been her 2-3 AM. She was hysterical, mostly totally incoherent! She had been frantically trying to get through to me for some time. As best I could tell, Earl had got into some sort of liaison with a young woman from his workplace. Grace did manage to make clear to me that he no longer raised his nice big erections and had stopped making love with her at home. But mostly she was just achingly weeping. What could I say? I tried to say soothing things. Since her call suggested some unique confidence in me, I said I wished I were there so I could help her talk it out. To that she gave a profoundly bitter, "Yeah, just talk!" I never learned all the implications of that. Earl and I exchanged occasional letters, but no hint of Grace’s call’s import ever appeared. To skip over intervening events, I next saw Grace and Earl two years later when we had arranged to meet in Rome on our respective vacations. All went very smoothly and pleasantly for the week or so we were together in Italy. Grace’s call to Trabzon could be imagined as never happening. So went all of the rest of our long-continuing, though mostly separated, relationship. When passing through New York between assignments, I stayed with the Bergendahls, sleeping on their apartment's living room 'castro.' After I married Zee in l968, we, with a subsequent new daughter, Holly, always spent pleasant times with Grace and Earl when in New York. Grace seemed to be particularly taken with our little daughter. The last time I saw them together, in l983, I went with my family, now including son Randy, born in Afghanistan, to their newly purchased retirement home in Claverack, on the Hudson River. I was about to depart for my next assignment in Somalia, by now with Save the Children. I corresponded with Ivan less frequently, but in a letter I received from him after about one year in Somalia, he wrote that Grace had died, and, further, that Earl was all but destroyed emotionally by her death, and he was now sheltering with some old friends in Buffalo. It took mail, with this news, two or three weeks to reach me in Somalia. I tried to phone Earl immediately; Ivan had written the number. International calls could only be made from Mogadishu's grubby central Post Office, always teeming with hawkers and young men in slovenly clothes without any clear purpose, hardly distinguishable from the actual office clerks and officials. One sought out the right, if always harried and officious, clerk, handed him a slip of paper with one's name and the intended phone number, and got a terse "wait!" -- if he conceded that such a line was in operation. If not, he would snarlingly advise coming back in so many, apparently randomly chosen, hours. There was a line of eight small phone booths, apparently one half out of order, or at least without doors, or with those that hung loose and couldn't close; the last two conditions providing callers, already straining with usually bad connections, with the background noise of the of the swarming groundlings. I spent most of a day being fobbed off before I finally got a clerk's call to a numbered booth. Even there, struggling to get the door somewhat closed, I waited for some time before I was linked with Earl. He, now, was hardly coherent. From his weepy, foggy voice it was clear that he was still in some stage of grief shock. I assured him of my deep sympathy and of how important his friendship was to me, and that I very eagerly looked forward to when I would see him back in the States. Other than communicating his disturbed state, Earl said nothing of substance that I can recall. In the summer of l986 our family returned from Somalia. After a month-long visit with my mother in Menominee where she seemed comfortably set up in the nearby Luther Nursing home, we set off for Zee's Belize in a just acquired two year old Isuzu Trooper, packed to the gunwales -- and on top. Shortly after we arrived in Belize City, having transited eastern Mexico, we got back in touch -- I'm vague here, perhaps through Ivan -- with Earl. He had recently remarried and was living in Minneapolis with his new bride, Martina. She held an elevated position in the city's public library system, and was about to retire. We exchanged a few letters and perhaps a phone call or two. And in the summer of l988 we planned a motor trip from Belize to my mother, via Ivan and wife, now near Albuquerque, and Earl and Martina in Minneapolis. That last reencounter was light and delightful. No painful reminiscences were rehearsed, and Earl seemed his old self, allowing for the aging process. I even used jazz brushes on old LP jackets to accompany his undiminished piano skills. At the end of this great circle route to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, and after a month there, seeing Mom every day, we headed back, more directly, to Belize in the Trooper. We stayed in Belize until the summer of l993, exchanging more or less semi- annual letters of joyous wit and length with Earl -- he always wrote marvelous letters -- now with add-on notes from Martita. In that summer of l993 the rest of our family followed Zee, to Kent State U. where she had been hired to teach Creative Writing and where I hoped to find something to do. Well, I didn't for some time, and I was getting very depressed. We had sold the well-worn Trooper in Belize and in Kent leased a new car. Then after a few months Zee and I agreed we would function better with a second car, obviously to be old enough to be cheap. A ten year old Tercel seemed a good deal. But not long after that my depression got hardly bearable, and relations with an unsympathetic Zee deteriorated accordingly. To be fair, I believe she simply didn‘t understand this kind of ‘illness’ and saw it only as strange or bad behavior. Tying to sleep at night was an anxiety laden problem, and I made my self groggy almost nightly with enough sherry to do the trick. I wanted to take a trip somewhere. Long drives usually relaxed me. I thought of friends where I might be welcome. A couple composed of Marian, known from college days, and her husband, David, who was added in Washington where I served as their Best Man and saw them often, were now living in coastal Maine and had written welcoming letters. And by that time Earl and Martita had moved to Cape Cod. I phoned both parties and got the hoped for 'come already.' I still vividly remember Earl’s lively, typical hanging turn of phrase, “looking forward . . . ” at the end of my last phone call from Kent. After a trip in the old Tercel, I spent three or four scenically lovely, talkative, gut-spilling days with my Maine friends, calling Earl and Martita once or twice about my visit plans. The evening before I was to drive to their Cape Cod home, Martita answered the phone and said that Earl was rather ill and couldn't come to the phone just then. But I should come ahead. From her tone Earl's condition didn't sound serious, and I went to bed in Maine feeling pleasantly expectant about the morrow's reunion. Being a late retirer, I got up about 9 am. An hour or so earlier Martita had called to say that Earl had died during the night! My dear hosts had not awakened me, but gave me the news as soon as I appeared in the kitchen. I promptly called Martita to give my sympathy and express my own distress. I asked if she felt I should still come, now to see her (whom I only knew slightly). She answered to come by all means. It took me about five hours to get to her home in a new, pleasant development on the Cape’s base. Somehow, in the presence of her tragedy, my own lingering depression receded. Although Martita seemed rather surprisingly composed, more as if adrift and dazed, the atmosphere was heavy with sadness. We chatted delicately, not a great deal about Earl, except for her idea of having a memorial event with a jazz theme for Earl, featuring a well-known jazz pianist, Dave McKenna, whom Earl had admired and who lived nearby on the Cape. With genuine excitement, I applauded this idea. Later in that afternoon a son of Martita, from an earlier marriage arrived, now a computer consultant of some sort, after earlier qualification for some religious pastoral credentials. The three of us chatted rather brittlely, through dinner with wine, and so to bed. When I was preparing to leave the next morning, Martita urged on me an off-white cardigan of Earl's, saying we were both big men. Then she invited me to take whatever LPs I might want from Earl's jazz collection. I did this with extremely mixed emotions, taking only a small portion, those familiar to me or of fame among musicians. Earl had been a major presence in a sizeable part of my adult life. But, perhaps, because I was accustomed to extended periods of great distance from him, his permanent passing was borne without great grief. Now as I listen to his old LPs or other music that he loved, I just remember the delight n playing along with him. IDS Transitioned Nearing the end of my sixth year in NY, with IDS, Pete Hudgens announced that he would be retiring and planned to hand IDS over to one John Lee who had recently left, amidst some controversy, the position as President of the State University of New York at Stony Point. He, like Hudgens, had gone to The Citadel and had some other, seemingly exaggerated, southern roots. I was introduced to the conventionally handsome executive type, Lee, at the Hudgens’s venerable Century Club on 54th St. I didn't like him; he seemed too slick by half. Antipathy was probably mutual. While still in the transition stage, but with Hudgens away, Lee flippantly ridiculed a project proposal I had sent to him. It seemed more a signal that I wasn't wanted anymore around his IDS. As soon as Hudgens was well off the scene, Lee announced that IDS would move from NY to DC. The two Vice Presidents and our comptroller, as well as local support staff were not invited to come along. Taking my clear cue from Lee’s attitude toward me, I checked with an old SID friend from CARE (Cooperative for American Relief Everywhere) and arranged a transfer to their employ and entered their training regime. Seven years later, after my hitches with CARE in Turkey and Belize, my new wife and I visited Hudgens at his retirement home in Chapel Hill, NC. He told me how profoundly disappointed he was over the way that Lee had reshaped IDS, and that Lee had even tricked him out of pension money that Hudgens thought he had arranged for during his IDS presidency. Chapter . . . Into Turkey With the CARE training over, a fellow new officer, Neil, and I were shipped to the Mission in Greece for a vestibule experience before going on to Turkey for our separate long term postings, his to Adana in the south near the Mediterranean, and mine to Trabzon on the eastern Black Sea, earlier classical Greek Trapezus and then Byzantine Trebizond. The mini-empire of Trebizond lasted for some ten years after the Osmanlis’ Mehmet the Conqueror had finally broken through the defenses and swarmed into Constantinople in 1453. Trebizond fell when the Osmanlis got around to it. (I will spell place and proper names in the Turkish, Romanized alphabet, but without the markings here described: C with a tail is pronounced like our ch and plain C without a tail is pronounced like our J; Ss with a tail is pronounced like our sh, and without a tail just like our S; Os and Us sometimes have ‘umlauts,’ and Gs with a ‘hat’ are silent but never appear at the beginning of a word; other Gs always are as in our good; and I has two forms, one without a dot and that sounds like’ uh.’ ) Travel with My New Boss The Director of the CARE program in Turkey was an old CARE hand, previously employed as a traveling accounting officer. He had recently been traumatized by his German wife running off with an American military officer. He was drinking heavily and tastelessly sought and invented opportunities to vilify his betrayers. The happy hour at the rather posh US Officers Club seemed his favorite venue. There was a bizarre start-off for me in Turkey since a special project was getting underway in my region-to-be. The eastern Black Sea region had recently, putatively suffered two catastrophes; one, a severe storm that had devastated grain crops and fruit and hazelnut trees, the other, the blight "blue mold" that hit the tobacco grown along the coast. The latter seemed somewhat more factual, I later learned. My own impression was that the whole scheme, to distribute large amounts of US surplus foods to selected areas, was promoted by a prominent regional military politician who maneuvered our CARE-Turkey chief's support. Turkey was still under a military coupist regime, after a l960 takeover. The General in question, having been a leading figure in the coup had, like the others, been made life-time Senators. To make sure he was identified with the largess for his home region, a cavalcade, more a royal progress, through the coastal part of the region, where I would represent CARE, was set up by the Senator and our boss, with me as an add on. The string of vehicles with the entourage of government attendants had to lumber, and get stuck a few times, over the coastal road that was very much "in progress," rutted and muddy on that high rainfall littoral. We had wonderful meals in the provincial (Vilayet) and county (Kaza) centers along the way, expectantly laid on by local officials and social leaders. The General, in full uniform, starred and was fawned upon. Our poor CARE boss, who seemed uneasy away from the States-styled Officers club in Ankara, must have had regular access to stashed booze wherever we were because he seemed to always be in an advanced alcoholic stupor and still obviously uncomfortable; he kept awkwardly mumbling excuses on claimed illness. When alone together, he wanted to confide in me as the innocent, hopefully sympathetic, new hand, because he seemed to have alienated the other four American CARE staffers in the country. To our somewhat larger Turkish staff component, the boss seemed more of a puzzlement or amusement. Before ending the Black Sea tour, our General, with some pride in his overriding authority, took us through check-points right up to the ceremonially bridged rivulet that marked the, then Soviet (now Georgia), border. We were invited to mount the Turkish elevated observation post which looked across to an identical Soviet tower, with a soldier apparently slumbering, with his head down on his arm which was resting on the railing. Back in the Ankara head office I squirmed in the turmoil that our boss's deterioration had created. But I managed to provision myself, much from an American military PX, for the long haul in Trabzon, and to hire a Turkish assistant to work with me there and over the northeast of Anatolian Turkey, my territory. Trabzon Like several ports on the Anatolian coast, most notably Izmir (formerly Smyrna), Trabzon had retained a substantial Greek population until after World War I, when in a triumphal fit of megalomania, the Greek army attacked the recently defeated Ottoman Turkish enemy of the victorious Allies, The latter had drawn maps indicating their respective regions of "influence" throughout the defunct Ottoman Middle East which, aside from reborn Turkey, they actually dominated through World War II. Many of the several mosques in Trabzon had been Greek churches, now cleansed of icons, with mosaic floors boarded over in some cases, and with more minarets hoisted there over the Trabzon skyline. Much earlier (ca. 400 BCE) Xenophon's "10,000" arrived in Trapezus after their remarkable year long slog over the geographer's rugged Armenian Knot from what is now northern Iraq after ending their mercenary gig for a Persian pretender when the latter died in his effort. One striking token of the post-WWI departure of the Trabzon Greek, in addition to the made over churches, is the lovely Villa, now called Ataturk's Kosk (Koeshk), above the city on a shoulder in the lovely green foothills of the towering Kalkanli range that closely parallels the coastline. One is told that the villa was a gift to Ataturk by a wealthy Greek whose departure in the general Greek expulsion was thereby probably rendered a bit less of a bum's-rush than his countrymen faced. I would be a close neighbor to the Kosk. My Digs For my first year and a half in Turkey, I lived in a simple cottage rented from a Trabzon merchant family who had used it before my residency as a summertime retreat. The cottage was only about 100 meters from Ataturk's Kosk, further up the now unpaved road -- the pavement ended at the villa. This graveled road ended at an alpine meadow summit, a modestly popular picnic spot for Trabzon's ordinary citizens, some 300 meters further up beyond my cottage. My neighbor Musa, a gardener in the town’s central park, and his family informally looked out for me. I hired his wife to clean the house once a week, and his two young children seemed to on the lookout for evil doers. My large yard had a thick partial border of hazelnut bushes, which Musa and the kids harvested and filled my one empty room. (Most were wormy.) My simple winterized summer cottage, just beyond the hillside Kosk, had a post- card view of the coastal Trabzon below and the sea beyond. A clear view of the extensive Byzantine castle walls was in the intervening foreground. Immediately to the east of the city, looming above the port, is the abruptly dropping bluff of Boz Tepe (Grey Hill), on the seaward pinnacle of which were the large domes and other apparatus of an American ("NATO") radar station, the main installation for monitoring any Soviet airborne activities in that region. I avoided any regular retreat to the base, but I ‘happened ‘ to visit Boz Tepe when I was pretty sure that they might be playing softball on a field up there. I got intro practices and also a few games, reassuring myself that all athleticism hadn’t left me just yet. I got on well with the Colonel and made friends with an African American (short-stop) captain and with a young, intellectual lieutenant. I even loaned my drum kit for a rock ‘em, sock ‘em musical evening at the base. But as a general principle I did not visit the base often, not wanting to be seen as associated in local eyes with the military. Solitary Lunches and The Black Birds of Boz Tepe. Life in Trabzon had its moments of serenity. For one, I spotted a tranquil little patch of green just a mile or two outside the city, beside the babbling Degirmendere and obscured by an overhanging tree and a drop down below a banked turn in the moderately traveled road to the interior. This small Arcadian grove became a place for solitary packed lunches during warm weather. Another place for reflective solitude was on a reach of Boz Tepe well away from the NATO radar base. There was a spot where the broad bluff became a cliff with a perpendicular drop, with even a bit of overhang and a face of irregular broken rock, perhaps created by the building of the road near its base, some 300 feet below. This overlooked the eastern edge of the city, the port and the Black Sea beyond. Aside from the unpeopled peace of this perch, there was a fascinating acrobatic show by raven-like black birds. As I sat with my legs dangling over the cliff’s edge, nearby an endlessly cycling game was be being played. Several dozen birds would take turns jumping off the cliff into a free fall, never fully using their wings as the apparently erratic wind currents off the irregular cliff face twisted their plummeting bodies about. Then near the bottom they would unfold their wings and sail out over the sea and then back to the cliff top. Here they seemed to wait their turn in rapid but more or less good order, apparently happy and excited to the layman's eye. At any time there would be up to half a dozed birds in the air, falling free till pulling up. On all of my occasional retreats to the cliff, the birds' game was always underway and never ceased during my reveries. Selahattin and Early Days Selahattin, who was accompanied by his wife and a child, was smart, very much an urban type, always impeccably dressed in the Western manner and rather exaggeratedly unbending and on his dignity. He was far from servile, and I tried to treat him as a colleague. This I suspect may have been a cultural mistake. Selahattin may have been more comfortable had I been more authoritarian, rather than being a somewhat tentative American-style buddy. His frequent duties, among others, as translator implied a hierarchy, which insofar as I acted upon it only erratically, seemed to puzzle him and feed his touchiness. He didn't hesitate to suggest correction in my wording or even ideas, and this probably was as beneficial for communication as it was sometimes off-putting. Landscape The Black Sea littoral climate is anomalous in generally dry interior Turkey. Rainfall here is abundant and keeps green the seaward side of the mountains that rise almost immediately inland from the sea. Any travel inland from Trabzon started by climbing along the side of a verdant storybook valley and mounting to a 7,000 foot high pass that winds for several miles before the modest decline where the scenery suddenly changes from green to dun and is generally treeless. Inland there are wondrous vistas from the many great heights, of dramatic, twisting gorges and of tightly clustered villages where houses are most often mud walled, with flat roofs of packed mud over timbers and flattened basketry. In contrast, Black Sea hillside villages are scattered, and with wood being locally, uniquely abundant it had been commonly used in housing. Off and Running Our first ‘field’ event as a sort of lord-bountiful followed a request to visit a school-home for orphaned boys right on the Black Sea about 30 kilometers west of Trabzon. The US-NATO base in Trabzon had also been tapped, so the American colonel in charge came a bit later, in time for a splendid meal with all of local officialdom. I had been curiously enthusiastic and draped a huge Kizilay flag (Red Crescent on a white background) across the hood of my Jeep. Selahattin interpreted for my brief ex tempore speech. In the afternoon I joined the boys for a dip in their Black Sea. CARE had become well known to the school as a supplier of surplus American flour, corn oil and powdered milk. On this visit I left behind two of our prepackaged kits, one a small collection of Turkish books and the other a set of carpentry tools. And I assured them that the US foods would continue. All was happiness. Much of our work took us to all corners of this region, from Samsun in the west on the Black Sea, to Mount Ararat in the east on both the Soviet and Iranian borders, embracing the headwaters of the Euphrates River and the rugged and dramatic mountainous landscape of the irregular Armenian Knot. The central duty of our CARE mission was trailing the distribution of US government's surplus foods to schools, hospitals, rural health centers, orphanages and similar welfare institutions after we were assured that it got properly through the Customs at Trabzon's port. Along the way I tried to spot appropriate opportunities to also arrange to hand over, usually on next trip, some simple pre-packed CARE kits such as school "libraries" (In Turkish), carpentry and masonry kits -- even some of the strange surplus objects that CARE received from American companies, such as Prell shampoo, and even bowling shoes at one time. Another time when we had the gift of large two man saws, the Governor of the far eastern, forested province of Artvin said he could use them. So on my next trip there, I delivered the saws.. As if a simply warm hearted personal gift, he gave me a large, poorly treated grey bearskin whose bearer he claimed to have shot. We occasionally arrived at schools at feeding time and had to share in a cup of usually ill-mixed CARE powered milk; no problem, and a presumed encouragement for the curious children. One of my favorite memories has been a relayed tale of a CARE American who covered another region of Turkey. As told by his Turkish traveling assistant, on their arrival at a village primary school, it was feeding time and a cauldron of CARE milk was being ladled into students' cups. The schoolmaster offered a cup to my American counterpart. This horrified visitor quickly lurched backward and made a noise, face and gestures that made it clear that, "You'd never catch me drinking that stuff!" Knowing that stuffy American, I clearly 'saw' the scene and still can. Erzincan On a visit to schools and an orphanage in the provincial town of Erzincan in central Turkey, Selahattin and I spent the night in a typical provincial hotel in a room with three beds. Just as we were turning in, another man in working togs calmly shed these garments revealing pajamas underneath and climbed into the third bed. Thus I learned that it was common practice in Turkey for hotels to charge per bed and not the room. Ramadan in that year, 1964-5, fell in winter and snow was heavy around Erzincan. Very early, way before dawn, the stranger had got up and shoved off, presumably with pajamas covered. He was probably a truck driver; men of that profession seemed the highest proportion of the patrons of provincial hotels. Somehow I awoke at about the same time in the unbroken darkness and heard some strange music from out in the cold. When I looked out of the window, there was a Chagall-like tableau down below under a dim street light, set off by the totally white landscape. It was two rustic men trudging all alone on the street where snow was falling. One was playing the zurna, a throaty flute, and the other beat a large base drum. They were providing the wake up call for good Muslims to rise for the early meal, before daybreak and the day long fast of Ramadan. Timber! An interesting sight near Trabzon in my early days was the lower part of the Yaglidere (Oily Stream) which descends steeply from the hills to the sea. At this point the sea side highway climbs sharply inland before returning to the coast. Vehicles briefly climb high above the lower Yaglidere, and I looked down on an endless pileup of snagged and high and dry yellowing logs which I guessed were meant to be floated down the river from upland forestry operations. But the stream's flow must have prematurely subsided. This may not have been all that unexpected. The following rainy season, as I later learned, had overdone it and washed the Yaglidere logs well out into the sea. Since wood was and is scarce and valuable in Turkey, all forestry operations were under government control. But many of the numerous boatmen along this coast managed to illegally tow "government” logs to their own shore and kept the national forestry police desperately busy. Sumela Monastery About 20 kilometers up the valley from Trabzon toward the pass, near the town of Macka (Matchka), where the valley stream is now called Altindere (Silver Stream) there was a track (Now I understand that there is a proper tourist approach and parking area.) leading to a forlorn caretaker’s shack. The relaxing forest guard gave me a very large, ill-forged key that one could imagine of medieval provenance. That would let one enter the simple wooden gate to the ancient monastery of Sumela after a substantial climb to a shelf on the precipice. That uneven stony ledge covered the area of a good sized house. Back into the face of the precipice was a shallow grotto; natural or hacked out one couldn’t tell. The wonderful thing about this cave was that all the sides and the concave ceiling had been plastered over and on the surface were, painted in bright colors, the faces of, I suppose, religious figures of ancient mien, covering all the space available. There appeared to be one or more plastered surfaces underneath, also painted with saintly faces, made visible because vandals had attempted to cut out some faces of the top layer, or maybe it was strict Muslims whose tradition forbids representation of human features. Out on the shelf was a miniature chapel covered with what looked like surreal tattoo art, no larger than could enclose a single person or two. On the downward edge of the shelf was a substantial set of linked masonry buildings, that I came to understand were for a library and dormitories for the clerics and visitors. These had been added in the 1800s when Greeks still lived about and made pilgrimages to Sumela. These buildings went off the edge of the ledge and seemed to cling to the face of the precipice but rested on a lower shelf. Looking up from the valley road, these buildings did seem to be glued onto the side of the precipice. The legend is that two Orthodox Byzantine clerics had a dream of this place as a site for a monastery and proceeded to establish it around 400CE. Alone in this different world, for which I had only the least preparation, I felt transported by imagination that was obliged by the setting. When Kennedy Died . . . in Kars One of our trips had us sleeping in a Kars hotel in the far northeast. (It may have been the same hotel that Orhan Pumuk spins his novel Snow around – if he had in mind a real hotel). It was the night of the day of the day President Kennedy was shot and killed. (Turkish time was eight hours ahead of Dallas.) When I followed Selahattin down for breakfast, about 6:30 AM Kars time, he had already heard on another guest’s transistor radio that Kennedy had been shot, but the extent of his injury wasn't clear. While we were eating the news sounded ever more serious, as everyone (male travelers) at the simple breakfast leaned toward the radio with the most intense interest. I hardly knew what to think and could only hope it wasn’t fatal. That was an altogether stressful day. It was freezing when we got to our Chevy Carryall for the long journey back to Trabzon, expected to take about fourteen hours. We found a flat tire. We changed that in the cold, but for the trip ahead we didn't want to travel without a spare, so we searched for an awakened repair shop in vain for over an hour. We finally aroused one and got on the long road. The bleary-eyed tire repairman had heard something about Kennedy’s shooting and asked us what had really happened. We gave him all of the news that we had. After some hours on the road, at our first stop for gas at a typically simple government station, when the attendant finally came out he was in high excitement and waving a national news paper with a huge headline, even I could read, (translated:)“KENNEDY DEAD.” He seemed distraught as for a personal loss, and his heartfelt sympathy for me was overwhelming since I hadn’t yet got my feelings straightened out. I think I remember tears in the gas man’s eyes. Selahattin was sympathetic but characteristically reserved in his expressive behavior. I remember two other gas stops en route where the attendants expressed similar strong sympathy. Most expressive of all was the proprietor of a small bakeshop where we stopped for a bite. As we were there for a spell, he had more time than the others to hang over us with his laments. I felt somewhat embarrassed with all of these encounters because my own emotions had not yet reached a clear, unmixed pitch. I was more bewildered. Back in Trabzon I was visited in my office, and by some in my rather remote cottage by local officials and acquaintances, even some people whom I had never met. There was no doubting their sympathy and even a sort of personal loss. I responded gratefully as graciously as I could in my limited Turkish. Kennedy’s death was so unthinkable to me that I almost willed it away. I rather stupidly blurted to a fellow CARE man that it was worth risking a President’s assassination to keep our society open and officials in close touch with our people, as if Kennedy was a martyr to that principle. Winter Weather
 My one full winter living in Trabzon was considered by my local friends to be unusual for that area. What usually fell as steady rain was this year endlessly accumulating wet snow. There was no hope for the Jeep getting traction on the road all the way to my cottage. It made it to near the top, but I had to give up and leave it beside the road a few hundred yards short. The most direct route from there to home was trough a fairly thick patch of old evergreen forest which the road looped far around. When I described using this passage to Kenan Bey, my gentle Red Crescent associate in town, he was alarmed and said that I should be wary of wolves in such precincts. My locally made kerosene space heater gobbled up fuel, so twice during the week or ten days of walking that stretch home I had to lug one, or two at a time, Jerry-cans full through the pines where the snow on the ground was not very deep since it seemed stuck up on the burdened trees. That trek, where nearly full, tree-filtered moonlight was all the illumination after the wintertime early sunsets, gave me a sense of being alone somewhere primeval, with out contact with proximate humanity or civilization, and there was among the feelings a hint of self-reliant, pioneering bravery with the wolf imagery adding a frisson. This made the safe terminal at my cottage both a triumph and a welcome sanctuary. Even as the snow kept falling it was intermittently melting, nothing crisp about it. Since the road to the Kosk and my house formed an ascending and descending loop, which we crested, there was an alternate route to the city which I usually, in good weather, took to work in the mornings because it caught the early sun, just as the western route home caught sometimes lyrical sunsets along the coast So I left my office early one winter day, with my usual route home still not open, to try the other side of the loop. All went well enough till a kink in the road where snow had especially deepened and had lingered because a bank had kept the sun off. I bogged down and couldn’t extract the Jeep, try as I might until I burnt out the clutch and couldn’t go anywhere. That meant walking back down the hill to the office. From there I called the NATO/US radar base on Boz Tepe and asked for help. They kindly responded with a heavy duty Dodge truck that pulled me down the hill and to my familiar local repairman. Where the loop road entered the main town there is a playground where the children clapped and seemed to be jeering as our little caravan slowly lugged past. Blood? On the Snow On a winter trip returning from the interior to Trabzon, Selahattin and I were in the Zigana Pass with its numerous twists and turns. There was much snow all about, and the roads required a bit more caution in driving. As we rounded a bend, we saw a startling sight. On the counter slope was a great red swatch at the bottom of which was a nose down banged up typical Turkish lorry. Since in my memory, these open bed lorries often took on poor passengers, some times supplementing their cargo, I envisioned a massacre when the lorry must have slipped off the road. Our road wound around to where two men stood at the point of the trucks departure from the road. We asked what had happened and what caused the great red streak. They indeed had misjudged the bend on the road just behind them. And the red came from the mashing of their cargo of tomatoes. Somehow they were uninjured. They were as likely to have jumped out in time so as not to have rolled down with the truck. We asked if we could help, or go and send someone for them. But hey calmly said that they were waiting for someone who had already seen their plight would send help. New Helper My colleague/assistant Selahattin and family never seemed comfortable in Trabzon, where, for example, his wife didn't dare be seen driving their small Czech Skoda in that religiously conservative region. But they stuck it out for almost a year. Then I had to find another assistant, ideally of another sort. The son of a local tailor spoke English and had become a sort of unofficial liaison person to the local community for the American Air Force men of the Boz Tepe Radar Base. This certainly seemed to help his tailoring business, and I joined the clientele. This "Tom" (Kemal) put me onto another young man, Metin, who became my assistant for my last six months in Trabzon. Metin, also a merchant's son, was eager to tackle this new job. Around the city of Trabzon, he was energetic and as knowledgeable and as helpful as one could ask, a distinct improvement over Selahattin. But to my initial surprise, and for sometime annoyance, once we reached the crest of the mountains and were traveling into the suddenly dry and elevated interior, he changed, becoming surly, lethargic and sluggish for almost any sort of activity -- a whole change of personality; he even looked different. My expressed expectations of the better behavior he manifested on the sea side just made him more withdrawn. Only after several such trips did Metin confide in me that leaving the low, humid seaside to which he was accustomed made him quite ill. I had noted a few nose bleeds even though he had tried to conceal them. Not long after these trips I left Trabzon, but we tried to make the best of the situation while I was there. Metin was eager to learn to drive, and I coached him to where he could handle the Jeep competently on the long stretches of unchallenging major tarred rural roads, never more than two lane. One day as he approached a fairly sharp right turn just before a short bridge, he seemed to freeze on the steering wheel; he didn't turn at all but flew straight off the embankment down some 6 or 7 feet to land Ker plunk, upright in the deep mud at the streamside. We struggled for hopeless hours to move the Jeep from the mud and up the embankment. At length a trucker and his partner stopped to help. With his truck's pull on a chain and three of us pushing mightily, we got the Jeep back onto the road and still operating. The jolly trucker and his passenger wanted nothing more than our thanks. I asked Metin if he wanted to continue driving -- on some psychological theory I had heard about. He said no, thanks! Fish (Smelt) Village At the head of the verdant valley of the Degirmendere (Mill Stream), and just before the pass, with a breathtaking view, is a roadside village, Hamsikoy (Smelt-village), now quite far in from the sea. I was told that the name came from the fact that some of the abundance of this small, tasty fish caught around Trabzon was carried up the valley and sold to the eager villagers along the way. But by the time the purveyors could get to Hamsikoy, whatever the remainder had usually spoiled and was typically dumped there, probably used as excellent fertilizer. Hamsikoy was also justly famous far and wide for the uniquely superb, super-creamy and tasty sutlac (rice pudding) at its single eatery. Since the village was on the only route from Trabzon into the interior, I never failed to stop for a bowl. Bird Village While doing the CARE rounds from Trabzon, on rare occasion I visited the US Radar Base on Boz Tepe, and was probably expected to appear there more often, since for a time -- until some Peace Corps nurses and English teachers were assigned -- I was the only other American in that region. On one occasion I, and the Peace Corps Volunteers, were invited to a relatively formal do (occasion forgotten) at the base where I met Anne, an American free lance journalist who was passing through. She was a large, mature woman of some attractiveness, and we made friends. Anne's mission was, with Mobil (oil) support, to visit a remote mountain village for a news story. In Kuskoy (Bird Village, appropriately named, as will be seen) up in the hills not far from Trabzon, Mobil through its Trabzon Turkish agent, Ridwan, had built a walking bridge across a narrow but deep gorge and its rushing stream. Before the bridge was built the two parts of the village could not visit one another except by a discouragingly long, round-about hike. Because of this barrier, over an uncounted number of years, the interrelated villagers had developed a whistling code and related skill by which they could communicate, often about meetings and exchanges at the weekly market in the county seat. Mobil had commissioned Anne to do a publishable story that would do credit to the oil company's humane image. A date was set for the villagers to receive Anne, Ridwan and bigger Mobil representatives, the Commander of the US Radar Base and some provincial dignitaries. It was the dead of winter and snow lay deep throughout the region. Anne suggested I come along and the two of us made the trip of about 15 miles in my CARE Jeep. Another passenger, and necessary guide, connected to Mobil was a driver for the nation's biggest transportation company Tuzcuoglu, (Son of the Saltman). I was quite pleased to have him compliment me on my skill at driving on the snow covered, rutted main road and then the treacherous mountain track to near the village. We hiked down into one side of the village and then over the sturdy bridge to the other side where an outdoor entertainment had been arranged. There were speeches and villagers' dances and musicians. But it was awfully cold. Anne did some convivial running around as one of the celebrities, but I just stood there, regularly stomping my feet for the whole time, and despite some interesting episodes, I was eager for the end and departure. Anne and I stayed in touch, and several weeks later I visited her in Istanbul where she was visiting friends.. We had a very strange and intriguing evening in a villa on the Anatolian shore of the Bosphorus with the family of an Ottoman Grand Vizier that Anne had become acquainted with. The setting and the tired worldliness of the descendents all but hypnotized me with an ambiance suggesting Durrell's Alexandria. Later that night, Anne and I had a jolly, satisfying romp in her hotel room bed. Anne left Turkey not long after. Several months after I said goodbye to Anne, I was in the US for a few weeks, in connection with a new project. There I came across a New York Times story about Kuskoy. It could have been written by Anne, but it was not. I remember her expressing some concern about someone else beating her with the story, and I believe that there was at least one other American journalist at the village bridge ceremony. Ankara and a New Project After a year and a half of living alone on my green hillside above Trabzon, I was transferred to Ankara, the Capital, out of which I was to second the CARE Director of a new joint program with the Peace Corps, which was already very active in Turkey. CARE was to manage for the Peace Corps-Turkey a new cohort of Volunteers who were to carry out a new Rural Community Development Project. 
 An uber Boss In Ankara I met, and seemed to hit it off with, Judd Roberts, the PC Representative in Turkey. Our PC/CARE Project office was housed in the modest Peace Corps rented building in the Kavaklidere (Poplar Stream) district. Roberts’s management style in Turkey came to interest me. Judd Roberts (a pseudonym) arrived in Turkey in early l964. At the time I was out in Trabzon when he came as the new Peace Corps Representative (a.k.a. Country Director). Roberts was said to have been defeated in a previous election as a Democratic candidate for Congress from the camp of Senator Estes Kefauver. It was also said that the Senator had urged the at-liberty Roberts on Sergeant Shriver, the first head of the Peace Corps who was reluctant until he heard that Roberts had been a star running back at a southern university. At this intelligence he snapped up Roberts and sent him to Ankara. My own relations with Roberts ranged from usually business-like to sometimes friendly. He openly complimented my performance on one or two occasions. Only near the end did I come to view his overall tour for its conflicts with socio-economic development values I held important. 
 Roberts was certainly decisive in the Kennedy manner, of which he was a near burlesque; same gestures, salty talk, vigor, unelliptical speech and all. I strongly suspect that he was quite conscious of the style and theatricality of his self-presentation. In Turkey he found a very small, carefully placed group of about thirty-nine Volunteers. This small scale of operation he instantly judged to be unacceptable although his own experience in international aid and development work was apparently nil. He announced that there would be bold expansion, proceeding at forced-draft. This promptly followed until the numbers were in the 600 range, in less than two years., second only to India, of course unfair competition, in the PC league standings. I was closely involved in this swelling of numbers. Our PC/CARE was unique in that it was the only segment not managed directly by the Peace Corps's own staff in Turkey, but rather by CARE through contract. Since our office was in the same building as the Peace Corps, in many respects we resembled other elements of the Peace Corps staff. Our PC/CARE staff sat in on the weekly Peace Corps staff meetings where Volunteer numbers were always at or near the top of the agenda. Roberts's enthusiastic reports on the 'league standings' saw Turkey drive steadily upward, eventually moving past every Peace Corps country except India. When Roberts arrived, there was no Peace Corps program of village community development in Turkey. But these programs were dear to the heart of Peace Corps-Washington leadership, and this was adequate stimulus for Roberts. Actually, just before Roberts arrived, from my provincial base in Trabzon on the Black Sea, I had urged our own CARE leadership in Ankara to open discussion with the Peace Corps office on just such a project since that field was also dear to my heart. I have no idea as to any influence my suggestion may have had on what followed. Nor, since I was not in Ankara, was I in on the details of a fairly briskly achieved agreement between Roberts and CARE, now with a new more serious country director, to work together in this field. CARE, having a nationwide food distribution program and having representatives in key provinces, and a scattering of "self help" projects, appeared to Roberts to have a ready-made, in-place expertise that could get this new, modish project off the ground quickly and successfully. It took longer, and more awkward, negotiations with the Turkish Government to get an agreement on which to begin operations. But even before this last step was complete, recruitment of the Volunteers began, followed by training at the Institute for International Living in Vermont. While they were in training, a hitch occurred which gave the PC/CARE Project a handicap that persisted until the effective windup of the Project in l967, over three years later. The cooperating agency of the Turkish Government, was to be the Adult Education Department, then in the Ministry of Education. Its senior staff had helped work out the details of the operational agreement, which presumably, they believed in. But before the Volunteers arrived in Turkey, a new Ministry of Village Affairs came into being, and the Adult Education Department was transferred into it. The Department's members were given the choice of staying in the Ministry of Education or transferring with their Department to the new Ministry. All the key people who had worked on the Rural Community Development Project agreement chose not to transfer. The new leadership of Adult Education was dubious to hostile toward the PC/CARE Project, and almost all of its staff was initially unaware of why and how it had come about. They would surely have liked to have indefinitely postponed or terminated the Project. But Roberts pressed on regardless, unconcerned to work out new understandings under the new circumstances. Rather, the Ministry of Foreign affairs was believed to have been tapped to override, for its own higher purposes, Adult Education's hesitations. Willing village sites for the soon to arrive PC volunteers were hurriedly identified. I did most of the leg-work with a Turkish colleague, Imre, frantically rushing around over much of western Turkey by Jeep. Another CARE man with previous Turkey experience, was brought in as the Director of the PC/CARE Project, and I became his assistant, and for a time the only other US staffer. However shaky, and little understood, the ground under our feet, the PC/CARE Project started bravely, placing PCVs in several villages in western Turkey. The first PC/CARE Rural Community Development Volunteers, fifty in all, had been in their villages a relatively short time when Roberts pressed our staff to justify and begin planning, in the face of our own misgivings over prematurity, for a second larger group, for a significant expansion, with all regions in Turkey to provide village. I won't belabor here the details of the Project which eventually had a total of three intakes of new Volunteers, whose active numbers peaked at 100. In spite of a few stand-out individuals, the Project as a whole could not be considered a success. One obvious factor was the failure to start off with adequate understandings with the key cooperating agency as to the purposes and methods of the Project. This almost assured the absence of cooperation -- but not fabled Turkish hospitality -- by underinformed government agencies at the field level. Aside from the later frequently expressed perception of our Project by Adult Education people, as being of "little contribution" -- which seemed to mean disappointed expectation of material input by many of them -- relations between the USA and Turkey had begun to sour, because of strong Johnson Administration pressure -- more like threats -- frustrating Turkish plans at the time to invade Cyprus, using NATO (US) weapons. Activist students, the Left press and some of the politicians were steadily increasing criticism of the Peace Corps and its numerous Volunteers, most of whom were in other project activities, such as teaching English, outside the PC/CARE village-based project. But the village PCVs were most worrisome, being suspected of CIA connections and of sympathizing with the Kurds, who, of course, “didn’t exist,” as such, officially. One of our young married couples, in a Manisa Province village, felt they had made warm friends with the two young Turkish men who were doing their national service as teachers in the village. They treasured this friendship as one of the little victories of their posting. To their heartbreaking disappointment, coincidental with a visit to our Ankara head office, one of the most read national newspapers, Hurriyet, had a long “exposure” story written by these very same school teachers. The message was that they had carefully observed the disruptive behavior of the CIA agents, Gary and Ellen Smith in their village. Details of their transparent cunning were listed at length. Ellen in particular was in tearful near shock. They asked to be assigned to another village site for the short remainder of their two years. This was done, but there it seemed they just marked time till it was time to go home..
 After a long honeymoon between the Peace Corps and CARE, the Peace Corps rather suddenly, in these unpleasant circumstances, began to level harsh criticisms at the CARE stewardship of our Project, and the agreement between them was dissolved in early l967. Now under direct Peace Corps management, in a short time the last of the PC/CARE Project's Volunteers were assimilated into other Peace Corps-Turkey activities. All this was the area of my direct involvement. But I was a nearby observer of another troubled development. Not long before he left Turkey in early l966, Roberts latched onto another emerging field of excitement at the Washington headquarters: urban community development (urban CD); and he bent his energies and his office’s resources toward adding such a project. He seemed to have a deal with the entrepreneurial and well-connected owner-President of Hacitepe Hospital-University, already the recipient of much US aid. (Because of this I was pleasantly welcomed and given free physical therapy there when I had a knee problem after a football punting contest with some much younger Volunteers.) Under the agreement, the Peace Corps would supply Hacitepe with a dozen 'specialist professors' and in return, Hacitepe would take the responsibility for placing and supervising some 70 'generalist' Volunteers in so-called "Gecikondu" (built-overnight) poor neighborhoods in Ankara and in other major cities, to facilitate community level outreach activities based on local health centers. Having put this project into the Peace Corps "matrix," thus adding to his monumental achievement regarding Peace Corps statistics for Turkey, Roberts left for the reward his good works elicited, the Directorship of the Far East and Pacific Region -- about which more later. While the urban CDers-to-be were still in training in the USA, it became clear that while Hacitepe's President was still keen for the specialist Volunteer professors, which Peace Corps was having trouble finding, he could not use, or take. responsibility for, the more numerous urban CDers. Then began a desperate canvassing of all possible 'employers' for these Volunteers already in the pipeline. Their training had been suspended with the thought of restarting when new jobs were identified and their related skills built into the remaining training. There were a few false starts, or hopes, for a local cooperating agency, with attendant lurches regarding the on-hold Volunteers' training. Finally, there appeared to be found an adequate connection with Verem Savas (VS), a private, non-profit tuberculosis service agency with comfortable connections with the Ministry of Health and others in the government. The VS was well established and had clinics in all major cities. The Volunteers understood that they would be placed in these big city clinics, where, along with part-time work in the clinics, they would spend half their time on outreach activities in the poor sections of their respective cities. After friendly receptions at their base clinics, the urban CDers found that almost all of their Turkish colleagues had no idea of what the Volunteers were there to do. In the quite conservative, old-line VS they were typically given what were to the Volunteers boring, dull routine tasks, such as keeping the office files in order. When they asked about or simply left the office for their expected outreach activities, they were told that VS had no such activities, and they were gently censored for violating office discipline when they did leave the office to attempt their "promised" community work. Several weeks of rumblings of discontent among the now 65 urban Volunteers culminated in their assembling, uninvited, at the Peace Corps office in Ankara. They felt that they had been badly misled regarding the urban CD work they were to do in Turkey. This was now the interregnum before the arrival of the departed Roberts's successor. And who was rushed in to fill the gap and to resolve what amounted to a mutiny by this batch of Volunteers? Ironically, it was the man who had been Roberts's predecessor whom Roberts had regularly ridiculed for his "pitifully small" program, which Roberts had found and promptly headed upward. This conscientious trouble-shooter tried discussions with the disgruntled group's leaders and various combinations to seek a resolution. The crux of the matter seemed to be that a high proportion were so disenchanted with the Peace Corps and Turkey that they simply wanted to be sent home at Peace Corps expense. Some would accept assignment to another country. A small number were satisfied with their present arrangements, but these supported the disenchanted on their wish to be sent home, or for reassignment elsewhere in the world, since their unhappy presence in Turkey could spoil things for those who willingly remained. At the time Peace Corps policy was dead-set against the payment of homeward passage for Volunteers who simply "wanted to quit." To show the force behind this policy, a team of bigger shots from Washington were flown in, to be greeted by jeers, shout-downs and water-bombs from upper floors. (As far as I know, no one suffered a direct hit.) In the end, while a few of the urban Volunteers paid their own way home in disgust, most were reassigned to other projects in Turkey. Our PC/CARE Project got marginally involved when Volunteers willing -- or feeling pressured -- to accept new assignments were shopping among other existing projects. A few were interested or curious about our sort of work. But our PC/CARE project was grinding down, and no one that we talked with seemed appropriate for the uncertain site situations that we faced.
 This urban CD disaster never got tagged on Roberts who of course had gone on to better things before the deluge. But it signaled a subsequent steady decline in the scale of Peace Corps operations in Turkey. As noted, our own PC/CARE Project had labored under a similar handicap of poor initial planning and failure to nail down concrete arrangements for effectiveness. But in our case we were ground down and faded away less dramatically, over a considerable period of time. By l970, all Peace Corps activities were coming under a steady rain of communication media and politicians’ criticism; and even physical security of PCVs became a worry. In the end this ambience led to a more or less voluntary withdrawal from the turbulent Turkey of that time. Another military coup was imminent. 
 The overshadowing political climate seemed to have masked the planning errors of over-enthusiasm for big numbers on the Peace Corps scoreboard, and, in Turkey’s case, catering to current enthusiasms at headquarters regardless of little understood local circumstances. 
 Seven years later, after intervening CARE assignments and a year in academe, I was being oriented at Peace Corps headquarters for an imminent assignment to the Peace Corps staff in Afghanistan. Among the readings thrust upon me was a thin house history of Peace Corps ‘hi-lights.’ There I read that one of the landmark administrative advances had been the expansion and reorganization of the Far East and Pacific Region under Regional Director Judd Roberts in the late ’60s. I remembered that Judd, before he left Turkey, in l966, had been encouraging our near “completion of service” PC/CARE Volunteers to “re-up” for his already ambitiously envisioned Micronesian program. I later came to understand, from PCVs who were involved in that program, that after a few years, that program, too, required drastic reductive surgery. But again, apparently, Judd had moved on in time. When last I saw him, near Washington’s DuPont Circle, during my Peace Corps orientation for Afghanistan, a friendly Judd told me that after his praised work with the Peace Corps, he had become the President of a women’s college in Maryland, and that he was in Washington as part of the Presidents Commission on Physical Fitness, or something like that.
 Life in the Trenches Because of the major reorganization of relevant Turkish Ministries, there was uncertainty about starting the basic step of identifying actual village sites for assigning the new PC/CARE Volunteers although a cohort was already in training. So when the clearance came to go ahead, Imre, my Turkish assistant and I, launched into a near frantic tour through western Turkey to identify appropriate homes for the first wave of soon to be village dwelling Volunteers. When we visited one of the first places suggested, what first struck our eyes was a huge, ancient looking stone structure with a few people and pack animals casually moving in and out of it. As we talked with village leaders about the village’s appropriateness for a sojourn by Volunteers, the Muhtar (‘mayor’) told us with considerable pride that the monumental building had been a way station on the old Silk Road and that it was still in use though part of it had caved in. In the end we passed on the village because it still seemed a bit too large and was a center of regional commerce, missing our criteria of modest size and remoteness. Joe and the Turkish Midwife In the urgent search for villages that would be welcoming and generally promising as assignments for the first Volunteers (PCVs) the village of Akpinar in Izmir province seemed one to fit the bill. Our plan was to assign both a male and female to each village, ideally a married couple but not necessarily when that supply ran out. The idea was to have contact with both genders and be useful to each in a culture where the sexes were severely compartmentalized. We assigned Joe Franklin and Margie Lynch to Akpinar They were a more mixed than usual pair. Margie was a somewhat distant -- perhaps it was shyness -- white of blue collar family background, fresh out of a small Catholic college. Joe was a 30 year old African American who had most recently been a social worker in Washington, DC. Joe somewhat anticipated the Eddie Murphy persona of a generation later. He was most outgoing and gregarious, comfortable with both academic and jive talk, and the only Black in our Project. At the time this story begins, Margie and Joe had been in Akpinar between two and three months. Margie shared the upper floor of a rather better than average village house with an equally young village midwife, assigned to this and the surrounding cluster of villages. The situation of these typically young Turkish women with modest training was almost as anomalous in rural Turkey as that of the Volunteers. Many of them accepted these assignments away from home only if their mother or some other protective member of the family would accompany them. This Muslim country, while not the most conservative, sets many constraints (and 'protections') around its womenfolk. So a young midwife in Bilge (Bill-geh)'s position, on her own, had to be braver than most of her age and sex, and perhaps of a relatively liberal or modern family. Bilge was probably more pleased than Margie to have a joint housekeeper in her Akpinar situation. Joe, meanwhile, was staying in the house which the government and the village provided for its three, non-village, male school teachers who were doing this as an alternative to military service. It was understood that Joe would soon find himself separate, appropriate quarters, but this had not yet taken place. Perhaps Joe hadn't pushed the matter because he was comfortable enough and felt that he got on adequately with his housemates who took some delight in his novel personality and, to them, no doubt humorous efforts at the Turkish language. When visited by another PC/CARE staff member a few weeks before the episode being recounted, Joe seemed to be thriving, grooving on what he perceived as the village's hale-fellow, well-met attitude towards him. Margie, rather more dour, was the one that 'management' might have had more grounds to worry about, if only because of her more limited communication and contacts. Joe usually took his evening meals in the common kitchen of the two lady outsiders. His presence in their quarters was apparently accepted, although culturally strange, by the villagers who had a good view of their goings on since the girls' house fronted on a large open area that was something of a village center or crossroads, with much coming and going. That was the situation when a critical incident occurred that suddenly changed Joe's life in Turkey. Joe had complained to Margie, perhaps in the presence of Bilge, that his bed didn't have a pillow, which he needed to sleep really comfortably. In a day or so he received hints that Bilge was making a pillow for him. On an evening shortly thereafter, Joe mounted the stairs to the long veranda in front of the girls' rooms, which faced the village square, for a routine evening meal. As he was climbing the stairs, Bilge went into her room and brought out a pillow she had just finished for Joe. In a manner already common in US urban circles, Joe threw his arms around Bilge and gave her an enthusiastic buss, amidst exclamations of boundless gratitude. All this on the veranda in full view of at least a few villagers. Bilge was horrified and rushed inside her room. Joe's instinct was to try to follow her and to apologize. But she made it clear that she wanted nothing more than to hide away from Joe at that moment. Joe had had the usual Peace Corps exposure to the ideas of "cross-cultural sensitivity," with particular reference to the delicacy of cross-gender relations in Muslim Turkey. He probably realized after a moment of thought that his behavior had somehow been inappropriate, which explained Bilge's reaction. But Joe apparently thought little more of this at the time. In due course he returned to the house of the teachers, presumably with his new pillow, and had an ordinary, or better, night's rest. The PC/CARE community development Volunteers had no specific task assignments when moving into their villages. They were expected to find a useful role of their own devising. At this early stage Joe had no routine schedule, and on the next day set out on his usual meandering through the village, stopping to talk with groups of men, now at a gap in their agricultural cycle, among whom he had always been jovially welcomed for some conversation in "Tarzan Turkish." Today he found these groups a bit less welcoming, but concluded that they probably had some village business on their minds. That evening, at a meeting in the schoolhouse, convened for the visit of a government rural development team -- with whom Joe and Margie were already familiar -- Joe felt himself shunned by his usual village "brothers." (The Turks also call their close friends by this kardes term.) That night after the meeting, he perceived that his housemates were more distant, but Joe retired with only minor misgivings. Although he slept through it, that night a number of village men gathered around the house in which he slept, muttering about the outrage that he had committed on the midwife's veranda. But the group was apparently indecisive over what to do about it. The next day Joe's housemates advised him to stay indoors without much explanation. Of course he was very troubled but not certain about the reasons for this changed atmosphere,. Meanwhile the village men and a few elderly women (who have social exemptions) were besieging the Muhtar to have Joe removed or else they would have to take vigilante action since the insult to Turkish womanhood and the village's honor could not go without appropriate response, which implied some sort of physical violence, were Joe to remain in the village. The Muhtar went to the nearby county town to urge the head of the county government to have Joe removed from the village, for his own as well as the villager’s sake. The county head, appointed by the central government, confronted with this novel situation, involving something in the way of "international relations," took the matter to the team of well-educated government development technicians who were doing a pilot project in the county (kaza). As noted, this team of four or five, one a woman, knew Margie and Joe quite well, having visited their village often to discuss possible joint activities. They had found Joe a jolly companion. Some of the team spoke passable English. The team decided that it was too late to do anything that day, but they promised to go to Akpinar the following morning. During the ensuing night there was a near constant clatter of high-pitched conversation and occasional shouts from the group of villagers around Joe's house. Of course he didn't sleep. By now he had a pretty clear idea of how upset - and why -- the villagers were. Joe felt that there was something terribly unfair about the misunderstanding or misinterpretation of his behavior on the midwife's veranda, which seemed to have been turned into a rumor of attempted rape. Next day members of the development team arrived in their vehicle and advised Joe to pack up and leave with them as quickly as possible. They offered to take Margie out as well, but she felt no threat to herself and chose to remain. Just before the development team went to Akpinar for Joe, they had telephoned the Provincial Director for the Ministry of Rural Development in Izmir to inform him as to what they were about to do regarding Joe, and about the situation surrounding the necessity. That same day the Provincial Director's office called the PC/CARE office in Ankara, asking that someone come as quickly as possible to deal with the matter. At the time I was in charge of our Ankara office, and on the same day, with Grasim, my senior assistant, I caught the first Turkish Airways flight to Izmir, upon arrival going immediately to the office of the Ministry of Rural Affairs. Here we got a sketch of events. By now it was late afternoon, but the Director loaned us a vehicle to take us to the county town where Joe was staying as a guest in the quarters of the development team. Joe seemed terribly shaken, hardly able to give a coherent account of events. Members of the team admitted that they had only sketchy information, but they were able to give Rasim and I a general picture of what had happened. By now it was night time and we had to return the Ministry's vehicle to Izmir. We took Joe with us to our Izmir hotel, after agreeing with the team to return, without Joe, next morning to go with them to Akpinar. Next morning Grasim and I went to the county town and picked up a few members of the team to proceed to Akpinar. Our plan was to talk with village leaders about the horrible misunderstanding of Joe's behavior. On the way I had given my views on our approach, and it was agreed that Grasim and the team would carry out the conversation at the village. This took place in an open area outside the main teahouse, with the Muhtar and numerous other village men. They accepted the withdrawal of Joe as a satisfactory solution although it is doubtful that they completely accepted the 'harmless' explanation of his behavior. Our side of course attempted to get across Joe's great sorrow over having offended village standards and his most sincere apologies. When Margie's position was considered, the village leaders protested most vigorously, almost angrily, that she was perfectly safe there, and they would go to the greatest lengths to assure her safety. Margie herself seemed quite willing to stay. As a bow to the village's honor, we all decided that she should remain for the present. With all this behind us, we booked the first flight back to Ankara for Joe, Rasim and myself. All along the flight Joe seemed terribly disoriented and confused, most often just shaking his head and muttering variations on "How could this have happened?" Back in Ankara we decided that Joe should be left on his own for several days to put his ordeal in some sort of perspective and to decide if he wanted to ask for another village assignment elsewhere in Turkey. After almost a week, when it seemed necessary to make such a decision, Joe seemed a little better off, but still far from his old ebullient self. He said that he would like another village assignment. Our small staff thought hard about this, and in the end, with many misgivings, decided that Joe could be given another post. This didn't work out. Maybe we assigned him to the wrong situation. Or maybe Joe's trauma at Akpinar left too great and enduring a wound for him to recover his equilibrium in a strange society. We assigned him to a village in the hills inland from the eastern Black Sea, amidst lovely Appalachian scenery. His village site-mate was till then an out-of-pattern, unpaired, small girl of remarkably tough, eccentric and solitary manner, who had seemed to thrive in her remote setting. Despite her shrugging acceptance of Joe's reassignment, it seemed that she resented this invasion of her turf. She avoided Joe completely. He couldn't handle that scene and soon regretfully asked to be sent back to the USA. The only, and of course feared, recognition in the Turkish press on Joe's episode at Akpinar was a small item in an Izmir paper a few days after the incident. While the wording was not very clear, it implied that a Black American had assaulted a village midwife and that the authorities had removed him from the village. One reason for assigning Joe to the opposite end of Turkey was the minimum likelihood that this or any other news about him would have penetrated to the region of his new village. Joe had been well liked among the whole group of our Volunteers, and we all felt somehow defeated over the necessity for his departure. The Stones of Karkamis Aficionados, as well as scholars, of ancient history and its sites in the Middle East will probably recognize the name of Karkamis (Carcamesh), a major Assyrian-Hittite site along side which there is now a Turkish village-town of the same name; all just inside the border with Syria which the mighty Euphrates crosses at this point. We had assigned to Karkamis, a 30ish ‘American gothic’ couple from the farm lands of Iowa -- call them Joseph and Mary. Mary had a solid Home Economics background and found local women very keen to learn - in some part no doubt because of her very novelty -- by gathering with her to discuss and practice western household arts. The couple even had their first child in Turkey, at a nearby Gaziantep missionary hospital. Mother and child promptly returned to the village, and this supremely womanly achievement wiped away any lingering legitimacy problems Mary may have had with the Karkamis women. Joseph was a sort of rural jack of all trades, and among his lines of general competence was construction. Noting that this large village was planning to build an Ortaokul (middle school) for itself and nearby villages, Joseph quickly identified himself with this project and made himself quite useful. The plan was to build a two story building, big enough to hold 100 students. Cement blocks were to be the main medium of construction, but a strong foundation had to be put in place first. This required a good deal of stone rubble. On one of my first visits to Karkamis, as part of my circuit, I went to the school building site with Joseph. While having a general look around the site at the edge of the village, I observed something that looked like a part of a fluted classical column. I asked what it was for and how it had been found. The interestingly shaped large stone, which was actually peeking out from a pile of sand, had come from the ancient site about one half mile from where we were standing. I understood that in the early l900s the best remains had been spirited away to a British or German museum. But the remains at the site were still quite extensive, even though well picked over. Bases of columns, broad stairway entrances and extensive stone platforms (floors?) for long vanished buildings were still there, as I saw on a visit to the old site. It seems that stone for the school's foundation rubble had run short, and the villagers quickly turned to the ancient site (not for the first time) at which they loaded large pieces of the ruins onto the village truck and took them to the construction site to be made into rubble for the foundation. Karkamis was a large village with a fairly well traveled road connecting it to larger centers. It was also on the rail line that runs along the border with Syria. So it got more official visits than the typical remote village; if not by the Vali (Provincial Governor), then, and more frequently, by the Kaymakam (county head). On a visit by the Vali, he noticed a piece from the ruins not yet rubblized and he dressed down the Muhtar and other village leaders for vandalizing the ancient site. They of course feigned abject apologies and promised certain compliance with the Vali’s orders to abstain from vandalizing the precious ancient site. But the villagers had no intention of giving up their source of foundation rubble, so they simply guarded against its being discovered by unannounced visitors by covering the classical pieces with piles of sand until they were ready to be broken up and put into the foundation. Joseph told me of one rather startling event in the villagers' undiscouraged career as quarriers of ancient Karkamis. The site is almost exactly on the Syrian border, and because of the heavy smuggling in the area, part of it had been sewn with land mines by the government. The villagers had been in the habit of taking their truck into the site for carefully picking up large pieces of stone, whatever their ancient, honorable use, and hauling them up the slope to the new school site. On one of these excursions, with the driver confident that he knew his way through the mines, the truck tripped off one that blew off the rear end of the truck. No one was seriously injured since the cab section was relatively unharmed. The story as told to Joseph had been accompanied by hearty laughter among the village men. Joseph had made a few attempts at dissuading the villagers from using the venerable stones once he came to know of the vandalizing and the officials' attitude. However, the Karkamislar (proper plural) just laughed. Joseph had a passing thought about I informing the officials, but decided to remain loyal to the village. If any informing on his part got back to Karkamis, it would have surely queered his hope to participate in their activities. The foundation was well finished and the walls going up by the time Mary and Joseph, with their child , finished their two years in Karkamis. So, presumably, no more Assyrian-Hittite rubble was needed in that structure. However, since the old site had regularly been a source of building materials, illicit quarrying in some degree probably continued. Having lost touch with Karkamis once Joseph and Mary left, and with so many years elapsed, I would be hard put to even guess how many of the stones of Karkamis remain in situ. Crash in the Pass After another visit to Joseph and Mary in Karkamis, I had headed off to check on our PCV couple in a village near Dortyol in the orange-growing region between Iskenderum and Antakya (Antioch). Joseph had some reason for visiting our Ankara headquarters and I took him along. By midday we were on the road traveled by oil tankers bearing that product from the oil fields of northern Iraq, in an eastern ridge of the Taurus mountains. When carefully descending, in second gear, in a pass several miles east of Gaziantep, just below the crest and rounding a sharp right turn blinded by an outcropping, suddenly I faced a laboring, ascending, weathered tanker cheating into my narrow lane which was limited by the mountainside. I had hardly a second or two to adjust and found my brakes helpless on the oil slicked asphalt road surface. So I slid rather slowly into the side of the truck which had belatedly swerved away from me. The damages were hardly more than the proverbial fender bender, but it did take out my left headlight and dented some non-tank apparatus on the empty truck. I took a picture of the final placements which showed me pulled to the left directly into the side of the truck. This completely blocked the road. The solitary truck driver made much of having swerved, or being pushed, to the side of the road that overlooked the sharp downward slope of the mountain although he was hardly hanging there by a thread. There were soldiers in one of the vehicles that soon piled up waiting. They summoned a young officer who took charge of the scene. He spoke a little English, just as Joseph and I spoke a little Turkish. Our prolonged reciprocal politeness didn’t take us very far and he asked me to drive with him to the police station in Gaziantep There, after due politeness, I was eventually asked to write a detailed description of the accident, which I did in confidence that I had been helpless to avoid the collision. Thankfully, all was conducted in a ‘professional’ manner despite some awkwardness in cross-languages communication. With that we were sent off, and reached our village goal well after dark. That left only to report the accident at the insurance office in the next major city of Adana on the next day, and on the way home. Alfie A clear case if unreadiness for participation in our sort of project was demonstrated by an older single male PCV, Alfie. He was assigned to a village with a structure that resulted from a program of population exchange with Bulgaria, with roots from long ago Ottoman days. One or two of our other village PCV sites were also affected by his exchange program. The typical result was that the village now had two distinct halves, with degrees of distrust and cultural differences, with few if any common village concerns. Alfie was very solitary, being older and without any connection with the younger PCVs; one reason he was one of our few unpaired assignments. This personality trait carried over to his few months of village life. According to the villagers, he just walked around, anywhere he chose, sometimes, unfortunately, watching women at work, wanderings that were indiscrete and locally offensive. He spoke with no one and the villagers told us that he seemed to know no Turkish (despite some intense training that took in varying degrees with the others). When our field staff visited the village they heard these village comments, voiced in the most regretful, apologetic way. But the biggest concern for the Muhtar was that Alfie wandered just as freely in the clearly different exchange ‘village’ as in the original village, something just not done. Although there was no demand that Alfie depart, it was easy to infer this local wish. We decided that there was no hope for Alfie in any Turkish village, so home he went without protest. Cultural Invasion One Volunteer village was Salipazar (Tuesday Market), for Tuesday was the day it regularly hosted the market for surrounding villages and itinerant merchants. Visitors on any other day of the week would enter, after crossing the bridge from neighboring Bereketli, and first pass through a seemingly abandoned, roughly assembled ring of shuttered, low adobe and cement block buildings. But come Tuesdays the spacious open ground in the ring's center became a roiling sea of rustic images, both human and animal, and the abandoned buildings would be thrown open for business. The village dwellings were behind the farthest part of the ring. Here were stationed two of our young PCVs, Tony and Betty, living in separate dwellings, with no more than a comradely relationship, such as would be acceptable for cultural correctness. Of my half-dozen visits to Salipazar over the two years the PCVs were there, one, on a Tuesday is still most etched in my memory because of its unexpected, incongruous turn. One building at the far end of the irregular market ring was announced to be a sinema. It proved to be a rectangular, dirt-floored shed with a screen at one end and at the other a row of three or four 'loges' (box seats) separated from one another by unpainted boards and from the front, screen side, by a three or four foot high partition Each of these was entered by a crudely fitted rear door which was expected to be closed during occupancy. Only in the loges was there wood-planked flooring and some rough chairs. The bare ground between these box seats and the screen was filled with some 20 to 25 irregular rows of crude, backless benches for the bulk of the viewers, true groundlings. It seems that this village-pride (probably not for all of the Muslim villagers) facility was operated by an entrepreneur from the 'county seat' of Carsambe (Charshambe) near the Black Sea coast some 30 kilometers from our inland Appalachian site of Salipazar. The businessman brought his projector, film, generator, etc., and opened this sinema only on market (his niche) days. He perhaps took his modern show to other such hub villages on their market days. On the night of our sinema attendance, urged and arranged by some of the modernization-proud village leaders, the groundlings were almost all army recruits from a nearby camp. (In those days, and probably still, the Turkish army was a prominent presence in most parts of Turkey, filled by universal draft and numbering some 2 million in a national population of then some 30 million). Of course no Turkish women were seen. (But who knows who may have been in the other loges once the lights went out?) No doubt one reason for our being somewhat covertly ushered, at the last minute, after the 'auditorium' (all) lights had gone out, into a loge, was because of the unseemliness of any female, here our Betty, being seen in such a setting by the Muslim groundlings. As we took our box seats I already felt a sense of time-warped incongruity over where, in a sinema in a Turkish village, I found myself. But immediately, to the accompaniment of roaring, scratchy Turkish music, we were treated to a crudely spliced-together five minutes of climactic belly dancing of a comparatively lewd sort. Wonder upon wonder! This startling opener then suddenly gave way to the feature film. It was built around Turkey's favorite comedian, whose name I have forgotten, in a slap-stick, pratfalling B-minus movie, faintly suggesting a Charlie Chaplin/Jacques Tati hybrid. The comedian's favorite lick was his periodic celebrant nasal shouts of "YESH-SHEH" (untranslatable, I was told) which invariably triggered uproarious laughter from the groundlings, similar to the phenomenon of my youth (Radio Days) when any ether-borne American comedian had only to pronounce "Brooklyn" to get reflexive guffaws from the presumed broadcast studio audience. But the startling piece of unexpected, gonad-stirring belly-dancing was of course the piece de resistance. All down the bumpy road back to the coastal highway, and beyond, my mind kept marveling over the recent encounter with the out of place sinema, and its screened belly-dancing, of Salipazar. Sailing to Farya Two of the brightest of our Project’s initial group of Peace Corps Volunteers, a young couple, John and Susan, had played a trick on the staff. The Turkish village to which they had been assigned, on my search recommendation, didn’t suit them, and they moved out and found another. This could have been seen as an untoward act, even one of disrespect for the staff judgments. But the Project was brand new and we weren’t that confident of our judgments, so we didn’t make a fuss about this. John’s explanation, in a letter after the fact, was that the original site was at a road junction with urban qualities, whereas he and Susan wanted to work in a truly rural village where they could actually make a difference. Although I had never seen their new village, Farya, we uneasily accepted the fait accompli, largely because this bright couple seemed very sincere and responsible about the Peace Corps ideals. Farya was indeed well off the beaten track. John’s description of their new village made it sound like a challenge to even visit. That fact only excited the interest of the Deputy PC Representative for Turkey, Jess, a rugged African American who had been a football All-American -- and me, the field staffer for our special Project. We had an informal bet on as to who would get to Farya first. I won, because Jess had too many other things to do. The date when my other duties left time for Ergin and I to mount the expedition was in early February of the cold winter of 1965, but with little snow around headquarters in Ankara. A letter from John gave no hint of snow around Farya, on the seaward foothills of the range of mountains paralleling the Black Sea coast. On the way we visited another PCV couple in a more accessible village in Kastamonu Province and spent the night in a Kastamonu hotel. There was snow thereabouts and much fell overnight and the following day. Advisors at the hotel said that we might have trouble getting over the mountains to Catalzeytin, the coastal town nearest Farya; there was no road of any sort to Farya. Our first foray was on the road most directly connected with Catalzeytin As we were packing into our Chevvy Carryall and putting on chains, we observed a government road grader setting off to clear the road, and we were soon on its track. Even so, we were soon into 4-wheel drive and lugging along not very rapidly in the fast accumulating snow. After about eight kilometers of this, we met the big grader coming back. The driver had given up on getting farther in the overwhelming, accumulating snow That news, of course, dissuaded us, too. Back at the hotel some local worthies got interested in our expedition and advised on an alternate plan, plan B There was a more traveled road to Inobolu, a Black Sea copper-ore port about 50 kilometers west of Catalzeytin. The seemingly knowledgeable people at the hotel said that road was more likely to be open and that a sometime Black Sea steamer stopped at Inobolu, and then Catalzeytin, where we might find passage by sea. That was all we needed to hit that trail. The new road had been cleared but snow fell continuously through the mountains and our speed had to be moderated accordingly. We passed several times under a criss-crossing overhead cable with here and there idled buckets that must have carried ore to Inobolu. On the slopes down to the sea the snow turned to sleet and then rain. At Inobolu we were directed to the hotel, the no-frills Seker (sugar) Palas, where we checked in. The manager directed us to the shipping company’s ticket office, where we learned that a “liner” would indeed land there the following morning, take on some cargo and continue on to a brief stop at Catalzeytin. We purchased First Class tickets at a modest fee. The ship’s arrival would be early morning and the departure an hour or two thereafter. Ergin and I were up dull and early in the chilly damp of the coast. The “Tara,” didn’t arrive until late-morning. Meanwhile we were shivering with others in a barely heated waiting room, downing regular doses of warming tea. We finally boarded and ensconced ourselves in the first class lounge of what we learned was the British-built, some 75 years ago, “Tara.” It was near noon by now and a pleasant lunch was served. In the lounge of well-faded elegance we found a few other passengers of the clearly Turkish elite, who were friendly and chatty in spite of our un-elite attire. When they heard that we were headed for Catalzeytin, there followed a collective groan that implied great pity. While boarding, we observed a sizeable horde of traditionally attired folk headed for steerage below. At least the lounge was warmed. Once underway, the Tara cruised along the Black Sea coast where I could hardly tear my attention from the bordering mountains that slowly rolled by in their solemn wonder. In late afternoon we stopped off a small town picturesquely pinned before the foothills, Abana. Hardly before we had clearly stopped, when a fleet of small, open, motored boats seemed to be racing to be the first alongside to take off cargo and passengers. As they neared they compressed into a chaos of pushing for access to Tara’s side. Once the winners were clear the others subsided and waited their turn. Village types awkwardly boarded the “mohtors” (sic) while maneuvering all sorts of domestic items, with much shouting and screaming, suggesting a degree of competition and much anxiety. After moving off again, we advanced into increasing darkness until we learned that we were stopping at Calatzeytin in pure blackness except for a single faint light on the shore. Catalzeytin, the ’county seat,’ had no better, lacking electricity. Only when they were alongside, did I realize that a reprise of the Abana flotilla, all without lights, was occurring. This time some passengers from steerage and Ergin and I clumsily reshipped. I actually got a small cut on my hand from a rusty bedspring that accompanied a fellow passenger. Even then we were all transferred to another motor when our first mount was needed for grain off-loading, via a free fall, into our original motor. Since there were no lights on our motor lighter, only a roving spotlight from the Tara illuminated the chaos. In the pitch dark and the cold, our lighter headed for the single light on shore. Our bow grounded short of the shingled beach. A teenaged boy waded out and fastened a hook onto our prow. This ran to a multi-manpowered winch well up the beach. Once cranked up as far as seemed possible, but still not entirely clear of the lapping waves, to disembark the able bodied, including Ergin and I, waited until a wave receded and then leaped over the gunwale for some six feet down into the shallow surf and headed the few yards to dry land. Without this preponderantly male weight the winch was able to pull the boat right up onto the shore so the women and children could alight without getting wet. A few other lanterns were now visible and a gathering of townspeople was on hand to watch this apparently significant local event. A few men in well-worn suits and ties selectively greeted Ergin and I with some excitement and surprise. It was the county head (kayakam) and town officials. They seemed to be delighted with such unusual visitors as us to their fair city, and they welcomed us to join them in the nearby ’terminal’ building where more lantern light, pastries, hot sugary tea and relative warmth greeted us. After the local great-and-good chatted with Ergin (largely) and I for a time about our mission and news of the larger world, we were taken to the usually unoccupied, and apparently never warmed, local ‘hotel’ for the night. It was understood that a small group, mostly of our recent fellow Tara passengers from steerage, would be climbing up to villages on the way to and beyond Farya the following morning and we were advised to join them. Early next morning the hikers gradually assembled at the terminal building, where Ergin and I were served a fine breakfast of fried egg, brown bread, rose-petal jam, goat’s cheese, and of course, tea. Once the troop of about 12 had gathered, we set off. I had on my heavy wool trousers tucked into my calf-length gunboats and a marginally waterproof parka. Ergin had on a wool, but hardly waterproof, coat under a smart brimmed hat, ordinary trousers and ankle-high boots. John’s letter had warned us that rugged clothes would be needed. The hike to Farya was estimated at 18 kilometers. It was drizzling rain the whole day. Only the first kilometer or two were fairly level. Then it was varying degrees of ascent. With dense shrub-like vegetation, largely wild rhododendrons, and uneven muddy soil all about, often the best paths chosen by our leaders were the stony beds of running rivulets. I had recently been having more episodes of my chronic back trouble and this, some times scrambling sort of hiking, gave me some discomfort. Both Ergin and I were struggling more than our fellows were. We did stop for welcome tea at a village about half the way, where it was home for a few of our starting troop. Then onward and upward to Farya Once there we were guided to a large village kahve (teahouse) full of male village worthies huddled around two blazing cast iron stoves. By now both Ergin’s and my coats were soaked through and our boots and our lower, and wet, trousers covered with mud. The arrival of our strange duo was again the source of considerable excitement, even merriment, and we were invited to choice spots near the stoves where our coats were hung over chairs. Since Farya’s dwellings, like a typical near-sea, mountain village were widely separated, few present knew much about John and Susan. After some time for partial drying, we were led to a part of the village where neighbors were known to be friends with our Volunteers. To our great disappointment, these friendly neighbors told us that John and Susan had left the village for one nearby. They had been invited to a wedding. They would of course be back before nightfall. We were advised to wait there by our, again, excited and wholehearted hosts. Abundant food and tea were brought. When our muddy and wet pants were noticed, our hosts, which included women of the house, insisted that we take them off for instant washing, to be temporarily replaced by the baggy trousers worn locally. My replacements were more clownishly ill fitting than Ergin’s and every body just about split their sides when I modeled mine. When my coarse wool pants were returned all dried, they had been miserably shrunk and misshapen. But who could cavil with the extravagantly good intentions. One of the women of the house was brought forward and identified as a Kurt (Kurd), very unusual in this part of Turkey. Her dark tattoos on her chin and lower jaw were pointed to as proof of her strange provenance. After some two hours of celebration over our exotic visitation, Susan and John appeared. They took us to their surprisingly large old wooden house, set quite apart from others, where they used only two or three rooms. So there was plenty of room for Ergin and I to sleep on floors in our sleeping bags. Ergin was a very creative snorer, so I soon moved to another empty room. Susan prepared some food for all of us, and we listened to their respectfully apologetic explanation for having moved from our assigned village. The sincerity of their wish to be in a place where they felt useful was touchingly obvious. I cannot now remember any details about how they found this particular remote village of Farya, a considerable distance from their first assignment. Of course they told us of their activities and resulting satisfactions here. The couple later sent me some excellent photos of village girls being trained at sewing by Susan and of farming activities involving John. John, though obviously bright, had a severe stutter, but he had worked hard on his Turkish where he stammered less. This was confirmed by Ergin who had asked our village hosts about this before the Volunteers had returned. It seems when John used his relatively good Turkish, he spoke very slowly and earned respect for his effort. Susan and John felt that they well liked, and they found the villagers completely tolerant and helpful on communication, again confirmed by Ergin’s chats. We gave them news of our broader Peace Corps Project in Turkey and on the doings of other Volunteers from their training group. We honored their early retirement hours, and Ergin and I found another empty room to try to sleep. Ergin, it happened, was one of the world’s most creative snorers, and I soon found still another empty room with better prospects of uninterrupted slumber. After a fine breakfast conjured up by Susan and a relaxed chat, we headed on the ‘trail’ back to Catalzeytin. Since we would surely have got lost on the unmarked overgrown and treacherous route to the coast, a young boy was assigned to guide us. It was again a drizzly day and the ground was everywhere soaked and often muddy, making our footfalls routinely tentative at least for us strangers. Ergin had awakened feeling quite ill and feverish. So the return hike took its toll on him and he tended to fall behind. So we moved fairly slowly, to the annoyance of our guide who just tripped along till he stopped to wait. Once in Catalzeytin, Ergin wanted to find a local doctor for whatever medical aid was available. After much head scratching and argumentative chatter, among the men who gathered about us out of curiosity, a doctor was sought. He speculated that the worst for Ergin might be pneumonia, and he administered a shot. Even rural Turks seemed to favor injections for any ailment. At more or less the same time, we asked how we might get back to Inobolu where sat our vehicle. Of course this had to be by sea. This again caused some head scratching and chatter. No local motor had ever made that voyage. But one boatman said he might try, for what he must have meant to be an impossibly high price. It wasn’t so much as to be beyond our city pockets, but the impression given was that accepting his “offer” would have been suicidal if the boatman felt obliged to follow through after his bravado bluff. While we were puzzling with boatmen on the waterfront, one of them spotted a boat with a flapping sail several hundred yards out to sea, beating along east to west, in the direction of Inobolu. We even thought we could hear a throbbing motor. A local boatman offered to try to take us out there to see if they were going to Inobolu and if they would take us aboard. We hopped in his small motor and in rather rough seas set of to intercept our only hope. We did manage to pull alongside and, sure enough, the ‘captain’ would take us on his open deck with its pile of grain corn. The little vessel was about 50 feet long. The sail didn’t seem to be catching much wind most of the time. But the engine housed in a little shed at the stern banged away steadily and we seemed to be moving forward. It had been about noon when we got aboard. Ergin was of course miserable. I was intermittently feeling seasick as we rocked along. The drizzle only stopped when it turned to snow flurries, usually briefly. The wind, too, would regularly pick up and drive home the penetrating chill. Ergin eventually found two or three ’crewmen’ hovering around a glowing brazier on a somewhat sheltered recess at the prow -- the wind was usually trailing. I soon joined them there. From that vantage point, after about two hours, which seemed far longer, we began to make out the harbor with a few large ships standing offshore at Inobolu. But that ‘mirage’ seemed to never get any closer, forever out of reach for at least another two hours of yearning. We had stayed well out to sea, unable to see the shore most of the misty time. When the reality of Inobolu became certain, our relief and impatience rose to the heights. Had I been a man of belief in any sort of supernatural protector, I would have certainly raised my voice in a shout of divinely directed thanks! We dropped anchor and boarded a thrown overboard dinghy to make the landing. In my eagerness to hop ashore I almost fell out of the dinghy, and figuratively kissed the concrete steps of the landing. We had paid he ship’s master generously and hardly bothered to wave goodbye as we headed for our vehicle. Once there, we dived in frantically, turned on the engine and heater, and just sat there for a long while. When we had thawed out, we headed back up over the mountains to Kastamonu in the long winter twilight. There Ergin sought another doctor and got some pills. He somehow recovered once in more up to date Ankara. Isaac or Ishmael? A PCV couple of striking contrasts in size and personality, Larry and Emily, were assigned to the village of Muhipler (‘close friends’) in west central turkey. Larry was a near hulk at 6’5” with a braggadocios motor mouth. Emily had the brains in the family. She spoke far less often and was rather frail looking at about average height. Larry at least was eager to compete for “success” among their fellows in the first PCV cohort. He made dubious claims for achievements at our first all-PCVs annual meeting. But the event clearest in my memory from visits to Muhipler occurred on a chilly day in November. It was a Muslim holy day of some sort. What seemed like the whole village had gathered around a bare patch of ground, most looking down from a low rise on two sides. A boy of about ten, rather bulkily dressed in a thick outer vest and baggy pants, was lying face down on the ground. Suddenly a small man in ordinary village garb, shirt, coarse sort of vest and baggy pants, appearing to be about 50, came out of the sidelines brandishing two small curved silvery daggers. While approaching the boy he began click-clacking the cutlery in various attitudes, over his head, behind his back and every way imaginable. When he reached the boy, he began a very slow circling. His movements were gracefully stylized and unbroken by any hesitation. This was a clearly traditional event, not improvised except possibly in some small detail of the dance. The dancer’s body control was strikingly athletic as he continued to circle with clicking knives for at least ten minutes (Picture). Then he knelt at the feet of the motionless boy. He made a mock cut near the boy’s Achilles tendon with one of the knives, and appeared to blow into it with all his might. That done, he peeled the top layer of the clothing from the child. I recognized this, from past observation, as the way that a sacrificial sheep is skinned after its neck is cut for the sheep to bleed to death. Blowing into the cut -- I had seen it done through a hollow reed -- near a rear foot, if done properly, loosens the skin from the whole carcass so that it can be easily peeled off. Once the boy’s top layer was pulled off, he jumped up full of life and the tableau vivant was over. As best I could understand it, this was a symbolic reenactment of Abraham’s “sacrifice” of Isaac (Ishmael in Islam) where a lamb was miraculously substituted. The young boy seemed to stand in for both victims. While in Muhipler the previous night, I had one on my non-specific anxiety spells. In an empty room in the volunteer’s better than average village house, I would sleep on a common piece of Turkish furniture, a broad bench built against the wall. But once arrayed there in my sleeping bag, vague anxiety akin to entrapment set in. I was about to jump up with no purpose when, through a window above my head, my eye fell on the full moon in a cloudless sky. Somehow this was wonderfully consoling and implied safety. I still didn’t sleep easily and half awake, and anxious, a number of times, in near desperation, I would look out the window for the bright moon which I could find each time over a period of perhaps two hours. That was enough to settler me down each time until I fell into deeper sleep. A Turkish Bath The first cohort in our Peace Corps/CARE Rural Community Development project were welcomed upon arrival in Turkey in an address by the Peace Corps' Representative, Judd Roberts, which included a questionably inspiring figure of speech; something like this: ‘You all are the first wave of this entirely new project, analogous to the World War I infantrymen who threw themselves over the enemy barbed wire so that the following waves could clamber over their bodies to attack.’ So much for their encouraging entry; now an episode at their close of service, two years later. This was l966, summertime, when tossing well-dressed partying friends into the swimming pool, a la the Kennedy gang at Hyannis port, was duly reported by the USA press for followers of pop culture. Now it was late summer with the evenings turning a bit cool in otherwise temperate Ankara. As a staff member, I planned to go to the farewell party of our "Turkey IX" Volunteers at Ataturk's Farm, a pleasant retreat a short distance out of Ankara. But when I had finished my pre-party ablutions and was about to leave, my best Turkish friend, appeared at my door showing an expression of great urgency. I had met Dr. Cevdet Aykan shortly after I arrived in Turkey with CARE. In my first, and most others, circuit tour from my base in Trabzon, of my territory of northeast Turkey, I called on a standard set of provincial officials, such as the Governor, the Directors of Health and Education, and the local representative of the Red Crescent Society. (The Red Crescent was CARE's official host in Turkey.) In Tokat, the capital of an inland province in north central Turkey, I was directed to the modest surgery of Dr. Aykan, the Red Crescent Representative for the province. He was about my age, hovering around forty, English speaking and unusually cosmopolitan for his situation. I understood over time that he had some part of his higher education in England. He was a big man, suggesting the gently puckish side of Peter Ustinov. He was also unmarried. On my half dozen or so visits to Tokat I always sought out Cevdet and we had occasional meals at local restaurants, sometimes happily including his friends. He seemed something of a favorite of a small set of better educated young men. On one occasion we shared a visit to a local hamam (Turkish bath), much more than a quick wash-up. I came to know that Cevdet's training had included some psychiatry and of how this knowledge helped him deal with psychosomatic ills of the town and its catchment area. To him I seemed to be a welcome connection with the outside world. Sometime after I was transferred by CARE to Ankara, Cevdet ran for a seat in the national Meclis (parliament), and winning it, relocated, with his practice, to Ankara, where he seemed more at home and where I could see him from time to time. On the evening when I was preparing for the farewell party for the Volunteers, Cevdet found my small modern house on the rim of Ankara. He had a great favor to ask, bordering on a demand. The next day he was to leave for Oxford, England, where he was to deliver a paper on the psychological aspects of general medical practice in Turkey. He was frightfully (just that) concerned over the correctness and quality of his paper's English which he lay before me, and I started in. His grammar and sometimes clarity of meaning needed a pretty thorough going over. After an hour or so I reminded him that I really had to make the Volunteers' party. But he agitatedly (so unlike Cevdet) urged me on, and two or three more times when I was anxious to leave, he directed, more than urged, me to continue on his paper. The fact that his meaning was not clear to me at times caused the greatest delay as we had agonizing discussions over these substantive matters. Finally, sometime before midnight, he agreed to let me go if we could return to work after a short visit at the party. He would come with me, probably hoping to get a glimpse of an American sub-culture as well as be sure of my return to his paper. He was generally aware of the presence and nature of the Peace Corps and its Volunteers in Turkey, partly from my comments on them when we got together. So I drove us to Ataturk's Farm, which was well known to Cevdet. The party was on the edge of a large swimming pool in the shape of the Black Sea. (There was another pool elsewhere on the Farm in the shape of the Sea of Marmara.) At the time when we arrived the party had been going on for several hours and spirits were very high. As soon as I was seen, a squad of the young men surged toward me and hoisted me in the air, and their intent to toss me in the pool was quite clear. Pool ward we marched to triumphant shouts on all sides. (I later learned that the other American staff members had all been dunked before me.) One kind volunteer, knowing what I was in for, when I was airborne, unstrapped and held my watch. I was allowed to squirm out of my light sport jacket, and I think my shoes were yanked off on the way. And so I was kerplunked into the pool at a depth of about 5 feet. Knowing the sport -- there had even been rumors beforehand that the Volunteers had planned and eagerly awaited this opportunity -- I hadn't made any real resistance. After milling around in the water where a few others were already milling, for a respectable interval, I hoisted myself out and acted the good sport, working my away back to where Cevdet was standing at the outdoor bar. He seemed almost apoplectic, wide-eyed at what he had witnessed. As I tried to play it cool, insouciant, he struggled to ask me how this could be, an 'officer' being so treated by the 'underlings.' Even though my jacket and shoes were dry, I was otherwise ringing wet and feeling chilled in the cool mid-night air. Cevdet and I soon slipped away and I drove back to my house, and we did a little more work on his paper. He had returned to his usual controlled self and even seemed pleased that he had been privileged to observe what must have seemed to be a bizarre American tribal rite. I didn't see Cevdet again for a few weeks. Then in his smiling, calm way he assured me that his paper had been well received, and expressed his thanks. I finally left Turkey in May l967. We have exchanged New Years greetings with limited news ever since. After leaving Turkey and later, while at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex in l972, I came across two Turkish scholars who informed me that Cevdet Aykan had recently been Minister for Village affairs (this was a field we had discussed avidly.) and then Minister of Health in a government of 'technocrats' that had been installed by one of the seemingly regular, quietly managed military coups. Though not then in office, I was assured that Cevdet remained a serious figure in Turkish politics. Time Off
 In my second year in Turkey I had two weeks of vacation. The first part was mentioned in my story about Earl and Grace. I met with them in Rome and we drove to Florence through delightful Italian countryside. I won’t try to compete with architectural and historical writers on the glories of Firenze, but I felt in some sort of world other than one I recognized, starting with our pensione with its huge wooden door for this villa built for a princess of one of the city’s great Renaissance families. From sunny Italy I flew south across the Mediterranean to much cooler Algiers to spend several days with old friend Ralph D, now working for CARE. I had earlier helped him get so employed. I still had some vacation time left and flew to Denmark, rented a car and drove around, mainly to wind up at Elsinore Castle. Wandering there all alone and looking around from the ramparts on a gloomy day, it wasn’t hard to imagine some of the scenes from Hamlet On a large modern ferry I crossed the Kattegat to Goteborg on the Swedish side. While there, feeling peckish I went into a café where the clientele seemed entirely female, most in stylish furs. After having a creamy shortcake like dish, I returned to the ferry for the return trip. Next I flew to Berlin to visit some old haunts, including the much-upgraded 279th Station Hospital, still there. West Berlin was swinging along, all neatened up, with plenty of new buildings and neon, and with construction apparatus widely at work. On my trip through Check point Charlie into the Soviet sector, I saw some of the war damaged once grandest old buildings apparently untouched except for further decay in the East. There were a few patches of refurbishing and an outlandishly monumental cemetery for the Soviet dead, presumably for those who fell in the cataclysmic battle for Berlin. When I had been in Berlin right after the war, I saw little burial mounds and markers for Soviet soldier scattered quite widely, it seemed wherever they had fallen. I rented a VW Beetle in Berlin and drove to Prague, mostly on the fabled Autobahn. The road which passed Dresden, with a view of the city, had almost no traffic except a beat up truck or two and was becoming a bit seedy, as if not maintained. It was still a good drive in the Communist East. In Czechoslovakia (sic) the two lane main road was carrying more vehicles, mostly ancient, with a strange three wheeler quite common. Prague set me back at first. In late afternoon, I went to the recommended large hotel where I was laughed at for expecting to find a room. I asked for suggestions and was referred to a nearby “tourist” office. They were just brusquely closing and showed no interest in helping me.. This treatment angered me with Communist Prague. I did have ability to speak with ordinary Czechs in my survival German. I got the idea that there would be inns along the road outside Prague. Five miles out I found one where the accommodations were uncompromisingly “simple’ on a plank bed with lumpy straw filled mattress, -- and plenty of flies, indoors for the coming winter it seemed. But on each of the four days after the nights that I slept there ,I left in early morning to return to Prague with its marvelous old buildings, streets, plazas, bridges. I had adequate meals in severely undecorated People’s restaurants. It was not long before Christmas. St. Wenceslaus Square, with its huge statue of the storied old King, was on a rise at the head of an interesting street with frequent clanging streetcars. For most of my wandering around the ordinary streets of Prague I found only dreariness, many boarded up buildings and shabbiness everywhere. But on St. Wenceslaus St, starting just below the sloping Square, for about 300 yards there were stores with well lit, glittering windows full of quite attractive Christmas things. Once past this showcase stretch, along the same curving street, one was immediately again facing the old rundown faces of the same kind of buildings just passed but not nearly so well tricked out.. Next, a relatively short drive to attractive Vienna where accommodations were no problem. But I did now have a potentially disastrous problem, inadequate funds to get back to Turkey. When I sought a ticket back to Ankara from the Turkish Airways office, I felt I might not have enough of any currency even with my bundle of Turkish Lira. Fortunately, the Turkish agent was a sweet young woman who sold me the ticket with the Turkish Lira I had. Later back in Turkey, I got a bill from Turkiye Havayolari for the deficit in what I should have paid the woman in Vienna. That seemed fair enough, but I wondered at the process, so fortunate for me I was back on the job in Ankara. The Second Cohort Shortly after the end of the first year in Turkey I was out again to find appropriate villages for a second cohort of PCVs, to be larger and to be more widely sited, now to be in each pilot county (kaza) that the government had designated for special rural development attention. My new territory in which to find villages, that I would, again, later have the job of monitoring through regulars visits, was most of eastern Turkey. (All of Turkey is somewhat larger than Texas). As Ergin, a new aide, and I started searching, in each province, in each case I asked to meet the Governor (Vali) and to explain my mission, asking about his interest, and if positive (all were, or at least polite) asking him to make suggestions of villages. I n Ordu province, just west of Trabzon, the Vali enthusiastically, and I believe seriously, suggested two actively murderously feuding mountain villages where, with the presence of Volunteers, they were to be somehow tamed and shamed into stopping the reciprocal bloodshed. I cannot remember just how I squirmed out of that one. But I did find two other villages to recommend in the hills inland and above Trabzon; one, Kadikoy, with a breathtaking view over the vale of Macka, the other, Calkoy in similar 'West Virginian' surroundings, neither of which was easily reached, even by jeep. The Wine of Trabzon But my present tale gravitates to Trabzon city. On one of my regular swings to my (by now our staff had expanded and we had subdivided Turkey) project villages in the large, more rural and poorer eastern half, I planned to include visits to the two villages, Kadikoy, with two young men, Frank and Mark and Calkoy with a single young woman, Alice, and a single young man, Howard. But when Ergin and I arrived, over some tough road-paths, in each of these villages we were informed that the Volunteers were not there and had left no clear word as to where they intended to go. Tired and somewhat disgusted, we then visited the 'coffee houses' (where only tea is served) in each of these mountain villages, which, again, were much more scattered than those in the interior and flatlands. Finally someone suggested -- no surprise -- Trabzon. And Ergin thought of the compound of the old Italian Catholic church, still in business but relating to few, if any, besides the occasional European traveler. I knew of and had visited the church during my first period in Trabzon. The rather large and probably once humming compound was now tended by a solitary Brother, and Priests rarely visited these days . Behind the high walls and through an ornamental iron gate one immediately came upon a small Italianate courtyard with a central, but not working, fountain, now all looking a bit seedy. One entered the gate from a narrow, little-used street that sloped down to the sea front. Although almost no one from Trabzon visited the church, those adventurous local social deviants who did never returned. I had come to understand that the church and its compound (with dormitories for the cadre of Religious who once lived or often visited there) had flourished before World War I when Trabzon was much more cosmopolitan. It was now understood that only Muslims populated Trabzon, and this northeast corner of Turkey was reputed to be more intensely concerned with their Islamic religion than other regions, and here community pressure was stern on anyone seen to visit the abbey. And this is where our regional Volunteers had come for generally secular sanctuary when a break was needed from slow moving, Spartan village life. So, on an autumnal evening Ergin and I found all four of this area's Volunteers at the abbey with the single Brother who must have appreciated some such rare company. And without any particular religious concerns for the moment, the group was about to descend to the cellar to process the season's grape harvest, as apparently had happened from time out of mind, now with this fortuitous work force's bare feet. When we (Ergin, like a good Muslim, had fled when this scene unfolded) got below and underway, the scene was ill lighted and cave-like. Such illumination as there was came from a distant single low wattage bulb hanging low from a frayed cord. While this purgatorial area was extensive, the ceiling was low and the sole distant bulb made oversized shadows of moving bodies bend from floor to wall to ceiling in an eerie manner. Most of the distant reaches couldn't be clearly made out in the feeble, and sometimes fluctuating, light, which seemed more designed for creating the eerie atmosphere than actual illumination. At the heart of our business was a large concrete tub, basin or vat which had room for four bare-footed grape stompers. A wooden grate was set on the bottom of the vat -- to me it resembled a huge square bathtub -- onto which the Brother emptied baskets of grapes at practiced, discriminating intervals. To the emanations of a cassette tape player, providing what I took to be Italian pop music, coming from the direction of the light, up to four of us at a time were in the tub and stomping in a moving circle, leaving permanently outside only the Brother to catch the squeezings at a tap at the end of the tub and to feed in fresh grapes. All the while we were approvingly sampling last year's vintage of this delightful, humble but still arrogant white wine. This fueled an ever faster, wilder animation among the stompers, roundly encouraged and enjoyed by the Brother. Mark, from New York city, contributed a stream of borscht-belt humor and, at a transported high point, brought out his never far away trumpet and played (or brayed, shades of Mickey Katz's Borsch Belt Band) as he stomped on with a Marxist (Groucho) slouch stride. Others were 'singing' or emitting wildly witty commentary. Our movements turned into free form, highly original dancing, twisting and turning as by the music and/or our own spirits ordained. The oversized shadows, when noticed at all, magnified our clownish capers as if trying to outdo our inspired Terpsichore. This comparatively innocent bacchanal circled ever more giddily for some two to three hours, till the last celebrant -- not me, I had been the first to give up my place in the tub -- admitted exhaustion. The Volunteers and I dreamily (a nice way of putting it) headed for our beds. The four Volunteers bunked down in the church's very basic dormitory, and I went to the nearby Benli Palas (almost every hotel in Turkey, no matter how humble, is a palas) where Ergin had long since retired Turned Back at the Euphrates After an overnight visit with the PCV couple living in a village near Malatya, Ergin and I planned to visit next our two young men in a village near (then) Urfa, now Sanliurfa, and once Edessa of the Byzantines and Crusaders. On our usually reliable map of Turkey there was shown what appeared to be a tempting shortcut on a minor road to Samsat (once Rome's important frontier fortress of Samosata) on the Euphrates, where a crossing was indicated to a continuing road on the far side leading directly to Urfa. When we arrived at the then much reduced county town of Samsat, we saw no sign of a crossing. At the Kaymakam’s office we were welcomed and served the inevitable tea when we made inquiry. We were directed to an undistinguished point a few hundred yards upstream, past an enormous, obviously artificial flat-topped mound that appeared ancient, arising starkly out of the flat surroundings. At waterside we were astounded to see a rough-hewn wooden 'barge' in contours of a mason's cement mixing tub, liberally plastered with tar. It seemed about to push off with a standing load of about 12 passengers in peasant clothing, mingled with goats, sheep and donkeys . . .(picture) Ergin asked the boat master if it was feasible to carry across our large Chevvy Suburban/Carryall with a few hundred pounds of cargo, including us. He answered that he'd have to think about it. In any case, this trip was fully booked as was obvious. If we would wait for his return trip, he would see what could be done; most likely an example of Turkish hospitality to strangers by saying what they might like to hear. Since it was early in the afternoon and a crossing here would save us several hours to Urfa, we waited and puzzled over the prospects. As I imagined that the Romans must have had better crossing facilities than this, and that this present scene must have gone unchanged for centuries, we watched the crossing. What we saw was hair-raising! At the sides of the 'boat" were men wielding long thin poles. They slowly poled the craft several hundred yards upstream staying close to the bank. Suddenly they vigorously poled out into the current. Now their poles became useless and the boat seemed to be helplessly, endlessly tossed and twisted about in the forceful current. Somehow as the craft was drawn far downstream it was moving closer to the opposite shore where it eventually got close enough to again use the poles and land at a point farther downstream than the takeoff point on our side. Because the Euphrates was (sic) very wide at this point, we could not really make out movements on the far side. The return trip, empty, repeated the essentials of the dramatic, seemingly life-risking crossing. I and, I believe, Ergin had, with the evidence at hand, decided that our crossing here was a non-starter, but we waited for the boat's rustic 'captain' and pretended to dicker. Even he didn't seem enthusiastic, but said that he was willing to "TRY"! OoooWwwelll, Ergin and I were soon off for the long route to Urfa, which now meant an overnight in Gaziantep along the way. Trying to find Samsat on the current map of Turkey is frustrating, in fact, impossible. Ancient Samosata seems to have disappeared under the huge lake created across the course of the Euphrates by the more recent Ataturk Dam, part of a massive regional development project A very detailed map does show a small Yeni (New) Samsat on a finger of land in the meandering artificial Lake. In Gaziantep we parked and registered at a typical old style Turkish hotel, adequately addressed to only basic needs, of the sort I had long since grown used to. Once inside I immediately sacked-out while Ergin wandered off in some personal quest. After some time, after dark, I woke up hungry. I went outside to take the Suburban on a search for a restaurant. A rear tire was flat! I had become something of an 'artist' through numerous exigencies, at the quick change of these heavy tires. Alone in the dark I got the spare on, and, since the extension handle was somehow lost, crawled under the rear of the truck to release the jack. Suddenly the car dropped way down and the rear axle just touched the hair on the side of my head.. an inch or so more and it would have crushed my skull like an eggshell! The spare, too, was flat! (some artist!) At that point I gave up, and with a chilling shudder forgot about eating and retired to my hotel bed. The Long Way Around One of our PCV villages, home to Marv and Janet, that I had visited twice before meant crossing a bridge over small river in the East. I had been alerted to floods in that area and so was not completely surprised to find the steam swollen to the point where only a bit of the high arched top of the bridge was visible and the approach deep under water. Getting out of the Chevy to document the scene with a photo, I saw a village type and asked if there was another road to our village. He answered yes and led me to where a he said a road of rocks left the paved road. But all I could see at first was a sheet of water covering hundreds of yards of flat land. But up close he pointed a stony track about a half-foot to a foot under the water. He assured that me that the track was never under deeper water and it would by a great loop lead me to the intended village. Because the narrow road was some inches elevated over the field, I had to crawl along; hanging down out my open car door to be sure I didn’t slip down onto the earth where I would be sure to get stuck and beyond human help since no one was in sight. But I made it, over two or three miles submerged road, to Marv and Janet ‘s village where mud seemed everywhere. They hadn’t left the village since the water had risen, and I offered to take them out if they chose. But they wanted to stay, claiming they had enough provisions and felt that their villagers would help them if needed. Actually the water level had lowered overnight which I spent in the village, and I was able to make my way over the normal route with only shallow water at both ends of the bridge. The Girl on the Samsun Road On a dreary, chilly late fall afternoon in l965 I was riding beside Ergin on our way from Trabzon toward Samsun, the next big city to the west on the Black Sea coast. As we neared a small side road leading to a village a half mile or so distant but visible on this flat littoral, we saw a group of six to eight school children, perhaps 8 to l0 years old, in their short black gowns and trousers, moving about agitatedly. They seemed in some distress so I asked Ergin to stop. At first we observed two of the children propping up a girl who was holding her weight on one leg and looking pained, but not in extreme agony. We learned that shortly before, a speeding truck had hit the child and had continued on. To my shock when we looked at her leg through the large slit in her trousers, it seemed to be half amputated just below the knee! All Ergin and I knew was that this was extremely serious. One of the children had already gone to tell her parents about the accident, but no one had appeared yet. No more than a few minutes passed before the kind of thing happened that tempts one to believe in miracles! The Peace Corps had recently stationed a young doctor in Trabzon, some 80 kilometers back to the east, to service the burgeoning number of Volunteers stationed in northeastern Turkey. He was not a Volunteer but, as I understood it, was fulfilling his obligation of public service in return for his training at US Government expense. I had just a day earlier talked with him in Trabzon. On the clear view for distance that we had on the straight road to the east I had a momentary, not trusted, fantasy that I saw the doctor's Jeep coming; but I became more and more inclined to believe that it was in fact him until I excitedly, thankfully flagged him down, with his passenger, a Volunteer. He took a look at the girl's leg and said she must be immediately rushed to a hospital. Not more than 15 kilometers behind us was a health station at Terme, but that wouldn't do, and we decided to take her the 50 some kilometers to Samsun which had a general hospital known to our doctor. He recalled having an inflatable type of 'splint,' which could stabilize the leg, in his Jeep's luggage and that was quickly applied and blown up to tightness. Now he felt that we couldn't afford to wait for someone from the village to show up. Since our Chevvie Carryall had the wider back seat, the girl was laid there. . We promptly took off for the 40-odd minutes to Samsun along this main two lane coastal road. Although she seemed conscious all the way, the little girl made no more sound than a low moaning, and there was, remarkably, little or no bleeding from the huge wound. Our two vehicles drove in convoy directly to the Samsun Hospital and we quickly found our way to the emergency room, such as it was. Our Peace Corps doctor seemed to want to give only the barest information and leave. When we were asked to sign a register as to who had delivered the girl, our doctor refused and advised others of us not to sign, but I did. He later explained that he understood that we could get into serious involvement with the Turkish legal system if someone wanted to see us as culpable if, as was likely, the girl would suffer permanent damage; or even if the authorities simply wanted to involve us in any investigation. Following our doctor's lead, we all left the Samsun hospital as quickly as possible and found a hotel for the night. I never heard anything more about it, but I felt some lingering, suppressed curiosity about the little girl's medical fate. My hotel room, hardly modern, did have one marvelous advance - over the standard squat and hole --of a reasonably up to date toilet seat, but placed so creatively that in its full use one’s feet were in the bathtub against which it was jammed. In the Land of the Kurds Mus, (rhymes with bush) a provincial center in southeast Turkey is in the heart of Kurdish country. A very young, squeaky-clean Volunteer couple was living in a village not far from the city. Ergin and I had spent the night there, quartered in a ground level ‘room’ that in wintertime became the cattle fold, for the good practical reason that the animals' body heat warmed the living quarters above. Our ‘beds’ were benches on the walls shaped of soil and cattle dung for binder. When Ergin and I emerged from our sleeping digs in the morning, I saw Laura, the young wife, in her Nordic blondness attempting to harangue, in her half-learned Turkish, six or seven smiling, swarthy and very grubby men with rifles or shotguns slung across their backs. It turned out that the men were Kurdish guerillas who came down regularly from their mountain lairs for food and other sustenance provided by their kinsmen in the village. Laura, the daughter of a Lutheran pastor was didactically urging the men to return to Godly ways, to give up fighting and killing, to return to law-abiding society. The men seemed to be enjoying the event, almost as if they had come to hear the lecture, having heard it before, and to be entertained. They stood on a rocky hillside looking down on Laura, nudging one another and occasionally hitching up their guns. When Laura stomped away angrily, the men drifted off, chuckling. On another visit to Mus, I had checked into your basic provincial hotel and in the early evening I started on a stroll 'downtown.' What seemed an amazing coincidence promptly occurred. As I was passing a clothing shop, the merchant ran out and asked in Turkish, that even I could understand, “Are you from the Peace Corps?” (Baris Gunululeri). I gathered that a phone call had somehow come just then to the store (perhaps one of the few phones in Mus) from one of our Volunteer couples who were stuck in Bingol, about 50 kilometers distant from Mus. This young couple had come from their village to the west, near Malatya, intending to visit Laura and her husband, but they had missed the last bus onward to Mus. They had somehow failed to find lodging in Bingol and were desperate. I learned all this when I got on the store's still open phone. So I promised to come for them and bring them to Mus, only slightly more of an urb than Bingol. The deed was done, even though in descending darkness on a road only spasmodically tarred, and the Bingol bus station hard to find, I found them alone in a nondescript hut of a building with their anxiety showing, but delightedly dismissed when I appeared for their 'rescue' and the drive back to Mus. On one of my early drives nearing Mus, I was fascinated by a huge pile of masonry at a crossroads, obviously once of some size and intended use. It was one of the large kervanserai (caravan saray) along the ancient Silk Road, as I was later told. There was still at least one cavernous chamber open to access. I had to explore. Well into its maw, to a point of near total darkness, I suddenly had my first of two too close encounters with bats. I had aroused what seemed to be millions of them, fluttering all around me, stirring up the smell of unpleasant dust and fanning me with the strong, unwelcome breeze of their near misses. A hasty retreat toward the light at the opening of the tunnel seemed appropriate. Kicking the Ball Around While even in my prime I had never played much serious team football, except briefly in he Army, I had played every sort of touch or tag football, and I had some facility at kicking. passing and catching that ball. Always looking for some opening for a little sport, I had carried a football, as well as a baseball and glove on almost all of my travels. Around the PC office in Ankara were a few jocks, including the ex-all-American footballer Jess, and on the empty lot next to the PC office we would vigorously flip the ball around until a good sweat clued us that it was time to get back to work. Even in Trabzon, on one of Jess’s visits we found a wide, empty street and led one another with passes in back and forth bursts . A few Trabzonlular of course saw us in what must have appeared to them as some sort of manic dance. Undoubtedly the strangest setting for such stolen ‘back home’ moments was in the village of Sarikamis deep in remote southeast Anatolia, seemingly more Arab than Turk or Kurd, near the Syrian border and ancient Harran, and where nightly smuggler troupes passed through There were posted a pair of our male PCVs, and one, Chet, on one of my visits, reckoned as how he missed American sports. Well, I pulled the football from the back of my Jeep and we launched into a duel of punting and passing to one another implicitly to see who could outdistance the other. Chet was every bit as good as me and neither one consistently out distanced the other end. But there was an odd element on our not well leveled open area in the village. Some modest distance behind Chet was a good-sized ‘pond’ that appeared to handle the fetid waste for the village. Once or twice one of my better efforts got away from Chet and rolled toward that cesspool, so that he had to desperately race and throw himself over the ball just short of the abyss. We did inevitably draw a small clucking crowd. Since I had already spent the previous night t here and had to leave right after our contest, I never learned what the Sarikamislular thought of our punt and pass duel which completely absorbed Chet and me. As noted, the provincial center for Chet’s village was then called Urfa (now renamed S(h)anliurfa, implying hero status for resistance to post- WWI occupation by the Allies). On the very first, and most successful of the Crusades, Lord Baldwin had taken Urfa, named Edessa from Hellenistic days, as his baronial seat and held it for a number of years until the Kurdish Mongols sacked the city . A huge citadel, first built by Romans, then added to by the Byzantines and later Muslims sits on a hillside at the edge of town, with a deep wide trench all around. I circumnavigated the impressive structure in the bone-dry moat but couldn’t find an obvious way to get inside, besides, there were other wonders near by to give my limited time. On the level area below the citadel is a famous mosque and religious school compound. In a long pool running the mosque’s length was a remarkable sight. The pool was packed with sacred carp. When food, such as a whole cabbage was tossed into the air to them, they voraciously formed a ladder on top of one another to reach the food several feet above the water! In the serene surroundings of the large graceful religious structure where the pool seemed shallow and where the huge fish seemed almost too crammed for comfort, the feeding fish were a spectacular wonder to watch. Social Occasions In my travels I was often invited to have meals with friendly Turks. Village families sometimes had me in. At other times it might be a dinner with a town’s bright young men, usually civil servants at the Sehir (City) Club. In Tokat, at every visit, I called on Dr. Aykan, and on one visit he arranged for a night out with his circle of bright modern men at Tokat’s best lokanta (restaurant). In all but the village settings, at such occasions it was quite the thing, with or without toasts, to down numerous swigs of raki (ouzo?) from thin cylindrical glasses, in which the drink would appear water clear until water could be added and turn the glass‘s contents milky in color. Straight raki makes a stiff, soon intoxicating drink, and discretion argues for sociable sipping. When taken straight, an equivalent in water usually followed. The licorice taste isn’t bad but not my idea of fun. The Cadaver of Harput While visiting a PCV couple, Wing and Bob, from a village near Elazig in east central Turkey, they asked for a ride into Elazig to buy supplies. Since we had some spare time, I was interested in visiting the near by site of the ancient city of Harput, reworked by successive civilizations, later the scene of a major Armenian massacre. What’s left of the town is on a rocky bluff looking out high over Elazig. At first I found not much left to see except the splendid view from the crest. But as the volunteers and I wandered about rather lackadaisically, a leathery older man made a point of catching our attention, indicating that we wanted to lead us to see something. There down a low slope was what from a distance resembled a boxed gardener’s’ hot-house” where young plants might be warmed under glass before time to plant them. As we got close enough we could see inside a laid out naked human form, intact except for the skin being drawn tight to the bones. Our guide, apparently motivated only by pride. Lifted the glass, or was it Plexiglas, lid and asked us to touch the now clearly male cadaver’s hide which was firm to the touch, ever so slightly waxy, and bereft of hair. As best I could tell, our guide was explaining that the figure was a holy man and that magic preserved the body as we saw it. Coping Device I admit to resorting to a shameful device in order to cope with a few situations with PCVs. Early in my Peace Corps work I had a few episodes of escape-anxiety, in visiting certain Volunteers. These had nothing to do with any real threats; only the most insignificant or quotidian matter could trigger. I kept a bottle of the best raki in my vehicle, and took heavy drinks with which to ease my way. I believe this was always undetected, but I can’t be sure. I was not aware of anyone noticing and I was generally popular with all but a very few PCV. Only one other time, much later, in my life did I have a spell of ‘needing’ intoxicating drink, described in my earlier tale involving Earl. Weeks Disturbed over Lael I first took a fancy to Lael when I saw her half jokingly pitching at a softball game of PCVs gathered in Ankara for a conference. Her larky behavior suggested that she wondered how she had got into that situation, so unfamiliar to her. Since Lael was a few yeas older than most PCVs and was bright and mature beyond her years on serious matters, she was given a staff-like role, visiting Vols in their far flung sites in cases where the PCVs may have needed help in personal or work adjustment problems, especially likely for the women in this male centered culture. Not long after the softball game, Lael would accompany Ergin and me on a regular cycle of site visits After those planned were seen, we were heading on a circular route back to Ankara. The Chevy Carryall began sputtering and conked out at the crest of a pass above the farm town of Boyabat. in north central Turkey. The carburetor was the problem. Ergin and I tinkered, but it wouldn’t give more than a few coughs. A passing truck driver stopped to help on the little used road but he couldn’t do better. But he gave Ergin a lift to Boyabat. It was summer and the weather was warm. That left Lael and me alone in the front seat of the Chevy, with no middle divider in those days. Lael must have wondered what to expect of me. My feelings were painfully contradictory. Here was a woman who attracted me and was showing no hint of guardedness or displeasure, just being a good sport. As I remember, we chatted amiably, if somewhat clinically, about psycho-sociological issues of the PCVs visited. Lael had also graduated, if later, with an MA from the University of Chicago, hers in social work. What I remember most clearly of this talk was Lael asking me what I thought of sophisticated married couples who knowingly approved of one another’s separate sexual liaisons. I answered that I made no ethical judgment against such an agreement. But I thought that it would only be possible, without great psychological stress for at least one, unless the couple were culturally emancipated personality types. Lael just seemed to mull over her query and my response which continued the clinical mode. Through that more than an hour alone with Lael in the car. I never laid a hand on her as we sat just inches apart. She must have had some interesting speculations as to why I made no advances since she knew I was interested in her. I believe that my inhibition came from a wish to show that I was not a cad, taking advantage of an advantageous situation. Ergin finally brought back a presumed mechanic who could do no better with the carburetor. His was a small car with no means to hitch onto, or the realistic capability to tow our much bigger vehicle. But we sat on the very top of the pass, so a form of dare-deviltry got us all the way to B. With a slight push, as the car began to role we jumped inside and I took the wheel. We gathered speed,, sometimes alarmingly, trying to keep momentum to get over the few counter elevations on that road of many curves, ours alone throughout these events. My only controls were the steering and the brakes, the latter of which barely lasted for the distance. My driving skills and ‘nerves’ were at full stretch, and my passengers could hardly have rested calmly. Finally, we coasted to within a few pushes of Boyabat. We inquired about a repair shop, but analysis of our cripple would have to wait till morning. By now it was ten or eleven o’clock, long after bedtime for Boyabat. Ergin, Lael and I were directed to the only possible hostelry in town, a single upper floor room with adjoining primitive toilet/bath facilities. With few choices for civility, I asked Lael to use the ablution setup first and climb into bed while Ergin and I made ourselves scarce. Once we knew that she had settled into her top bunk bed, Ergin and I cleaned up and got into bunks on two other sides of the small room. I feel sure that the locals who knew of our trio were certain that Lael was our shared concubine. I guess that I got a reasonable sleep, but I remember a lot of donkey braying from what seemed just outside our open window. In the morning we reversed the order for emerging from the room and washing. The diagnosis of our Chevy was glum. The carburetor was judged beyond repair with no on site replacement, which had to come from afar. We were able to phone the Peace Corps office in Ankara about our predicament. Our only way of return would be finding the local taxi man with his aging sedan, with whom we haggled from a poor point of leverage on a settled price for the five hour drive from Boyabat to Ankara, the office in Kavaklidere. Ergin sat with the driver and Lael and I sat demurely, catnapping in the rear seat for the dusty drive. Headquarters would later send a vehicle to Boyabat with a mechanic and a replacement carburetor. Having established my “:gentlemanliness,” I asked Lael to go on a weekend picnic with me to a pleasant park several miles from Ankara. After the goodies spread on a blanket, we kissed and easily rolled into one another’s’ arms, and as the expression goes, ‘made out’ for over an hour. On the drive back, Lael raised the issue of hedonism, and, as was her wont, asked my opinion and then “why” I questioned that life style. I maintained that to live for self indulgence would make it difficult for a person to deal with life’s inevitable harsh challenges and, also, that it would often be at others’ expense. Lael accepted my offer to come home with me for spaghetti – one of my bachelor achievements – a dinner I promised. As the meal was coming to an end, my painfully mixed emotions and urges must have shown too much affection and yearning. Lael said with a mix of insight and sympathy that my eyes looked too loving. (I remember that Grace had once said that she seemed to see into my soul as I drummed with Earl; I must be a very transparent type.) This was followed by a simple statement that she was not going to sleep with me. I responded that I would like that but that her wishes governed. Not long after the park and spaghetti, I took Lael for lunch at Ataturk’s Farm, a project of the ‘Father of the Turks,’ where watered agriculture and forestry experiments and other refinements created a verdant patch in the austere landscape of the Ankara region. My main memory of that outing was Lael’s asking my opinion of Ron, another CARE employee. I answered that our goals in our similar jobs seemed to be the same, but I felt that Ron’s methods differed in being more manipulative. While registering my answer, Lael kept her opinion to herself and moved to another subject. I didn’t recognize, then, in my emotionally blurred vision, that Lael was regularly measuring me in some way with her questions. On a soon after trip I was delivering new Peace Corps couple to their new site in eastern Turkey. Lael was along to help them settle in. Well, the Chevy failed again on the flat Cukurova plain near the major city of Adana. At that time Ron was stationed there as the CARE regional representative. We had expected to overnight at his Adana house. But about 30 kilometers short of Adana we conked out. I managed to get the car off onto a minor side road, and with the group we hitched a ride to Adana in a passing minivan. Knowing by now of Lael’s interest in Ron, I couldn’t bear to socialize and then sleep under the same roof with that crew. So I asked Ron to drive me back to our Chevy where I would spend the night with the personal effects of the new PCVs. I made it appear that I was so choosing to be able to protect the vehicle and the belongings. Ron thought that was overly noble. I slept reasonably well in the car and got up almost refreshed and scratched myself awake just after dawn. Ron would come and get me an hour or two later. But I didn’t want to look too frowzy for the gang at his house. In looking around over that flat landscape, I realized I had parked over a culvert carrying an open irrigation channel under the dirt road. The works looked new and the rushing water looked clean. So, with a Grapes of Wrath whimsy in my head, I bent over the concrete-lined ditch and splashed the channel water liberally over my head. Ron came for me with a mechanic who got the heap running. With that we re- turned to his house where I picked up my passengers and headed off to the planned destination in Mus Province. In the days following Lael’s query about Rob, it became generally known that she and Rob were a steady couple. I felt awful, again deeply depressed, ego-lost. I spent more time after office hours with an older senior staff member, Rasim, who had become a personal friend, finding some solace there, even though I had to listen to his problems, too. But a final blow was still to come. As the second in command of our overall Project, I had committed myself to spending a good bit of time with the new trainees, including spending occasional nights at their training village site. This site is worth describing for the atmosphere. Out in the countryside near Ankara was a typical village which had been abandoned when the new Near East Technical University (with major funding from the Ford Foundation) was being planned. The village land had been confiscated for the University, which offered the villagers a choice: They could stay there if they would agree to participate in the University’s experimental farming on their old farm land; or they could take a generous buyout and depart. They took the latter, leaving behind the elaborate funereal shrine of their holy man. This became our serendipitous, ideal training site, even better since it was only a quarter mile walk away from the NETU, just erected, whose halls we used for lectures and where one meal a day was served to the Volunteers. One night, late, when I had had a long gab fest with Rasim, I drove my office car to the training village, to sleep in the unimproved village house reserved for staff members. As I approached a parking area at the bottom of the village, my headlights illuminated the arcadian plot of trees surrounding an open area where many training sessions were held. I startled two people who were in the glade, and as they scampered away, into the cluster of houses, hand in hand, I recognized Ron and Lael. Still not over my crush, this was really a stab to the heart. It occurred to me that they were headed for the same staff hut at the top of the village that I planned to sleep in! With some sort of half-denial, stiff upper lip, not to be forced out of my plan -- though I believe that I reviewed, and dismissed, the idea of retreating back to town -- I parked the car and plodded directly up the hill and into the dark village house, where I threw down my gear, spread my sleeping bag on the crude rope bed and crawled in. I didn’t even approach a nodding moment all night!. I was acutely awake, sweating (not only from the heat) and stirring on the uncomfortable cot. Two thoughts pressed painfully on my mind: One, the first, that the pair would come in the open door at any minute and all but stumble on me in the dark, since I was near the entrance; OR, later occurring, when the chance of the first seemed ruled out with the passage of time, that they were already there in the other, inner room, having already passed the area I now occupied. I never checked the other room, but now I tried to even heighten my alert senses to catch any hint that this was the case. But each imagination was denied, still inconclusively! The next morning, with that ineffably tortured night, I was a complete mental wreck. Somehow I made it to the evening. But then, I sought out my friend Cevdet Aykan, whom I had seen from time to time since he moved to Ankara to practice medicine, as well as take his seat in Parliament seriously. I told him the essence of my Lael story, and emphasized my worry about this affecting my work. He prescribed the tranquilizer Librium. That medication and talking to my two Turkish friends, as I could to no Americans, somehow got me back into reasonably normal function. Of course I would still see Lael occasionally and we were decently polite and friendly, but at times, when I saw her with Ron, I felt a little pang. And of course I resented him and even his advertised achievements, which sometimes related, if indirectly, to my work in our overlapping assignments. - The Bears of Cukurova On another trip returning from the wilder Dogu, (the East), Ergin and I were again crossing the Cukurova plain on the main road. Some strange figures began to appear far ahead on the straight, trafficless road. Closer, it looked like two large bears and two small men in typical rustic garb. When we were close upon them and stopped, the men gave a command and the huge gray bears on loose chains stood on their hind legs towering over their handlers who started banging on tambourines, which set the bears into modest gyrations? We marveled, took a picture and handed over a few Lira notes as the bears returned to all fours. As we drove off Ergin opined that these had been wondering gypsies looking for gatherings to entertain. Men at Play After having left Erzurum in the northeast with a few PCVs aboard the Chevy for a return to Ankara in early winter, with light snow falling, we were surprised to see about 30 village men in their baggy pants, jackets and billed workman’s caps in some sort of game. Two teams were on horseback playing on a rather uneven field about 100 meters long, The rules didn’t seem clear, but as we watched the object seemed to be to toss and hit a rival with the long sticks that each carried before they reached the opposite end of the field being defended. Actually, there seemed more to it than that, but it was something of that sort. There didn’t seem much aggressive competition about the engagement. It almost seemed like a reenactment ritual of some sort. We never were quite sure what was going on although we watched for some time through the car windows. Love on the Fly My connection with Mary, on and off by mail, had lasted for several years. Once my marriage, and apparently Mary’s, had dissolved, our correspondence heated back up, and on her side sustained a longing to dwell on details of our loving past. Mary had had another child. Her Mum had died in the meantime, and she had converted the street-facing end of 18 Cavendish Street into a sweets shop. Since the years in Turkey were romantically and sexually unrewarding for me, except for the brief, uninvolving romp with Anne, the passing American journalist, Mary’s warm letters stirred me no little. I wrote to say that I might get some leave, and asked what the situation would be if I were to visit her. She was ecstatic! She could arrange for a friend to take over the shop, and we could do as we pleased for all my days there. In her letter expressing eagerness over my visit proposal, Mary added a short query: “Should I start taking the pill?” With that apparently inviting sign, I wrote to give Mary the dates, covering the one-week, of “my vacation to you”, and to reply that taking the pill would be a very prudent idea. As I stepped off the plane at Gatwick Airport, Mary was on the observation gallery with a friend, to whom she shouted so loudly that I could hear, “There’s Edge”, and she seemed bursting with excitement, smiling and waving without restraint. It had been 20 years since we had said goodbye. I was Edge again. After customs and all that, Mary introduced me to Beth who had become her closest friend and confidante. That closeness w as evident since Beth had driven Mary the 150-odd miles from Abergavenny to London, only to drive straight back alone. After dinner with Mary at an airport restaurant, I rented a car. We drove a short distance beyond London, to High Wycombe, where we stopped at a small inn and I registered us as man and wife. Mary at first affected to jog me as if this were improper, but it seemed just a passing impulse over her not having been consulted on this in advance. By now both of us had just passed forty. Mary was still a very attractive and fit woman, now with her hair in an unfamiliar, modestly more modern style than I remembered. Her still flawless complexion and ever so slightly fuller face made her look a bit softer and sweeter than ever. She later told me that she tried to stay fit with regular, serious badminton and swimming. Later in Abergavenny we played the “bird” game together once or twice. We were both much better than in the old days. I had played a lot in New York. With the merest hint of hesitancy, after all these years apart, we climbed into the inn’s old bed, which to our annoyance creaked complainingly with our movements. Mary’s body was now clearly ‘well preserved’, but I was about 20 solid pounds heavier than the skinny GI. After a perfunctory exchange of ‘news’ and light banter, we turned to one another’s bodies. But we could not, of course, surround the moment with the old, entrancing quality of carefree, romantic passion, though we tried to talk it back till sleep overcame us. Neither then, nor later, did we question one another or volunteer very much about our intervening lives. There seemed an unspoken agreement. We mostly talked about old times together. We continued to Abergavenny where we slept together in Mary’s Mum’s old feather bed. Somehow there I realized that I was rather uncertain about my feelings for Mary, now somewhat of a ‘stranger’ because of the long separation. I certainly couldn't confidently say just then that I loved her, although I suspected, guiltily, that she longed for some such expression. For her part, Mary seemed girlishly tickled to repossess me. She would sometimes cling closely to me when out of broadly public places, and I found this quite pleasant. She was proud that two of her close friends, in whom she said she had confided about me, did see us arm in arm. They gave Mary wickedly knowing glances. The weather was nice and we toured the Brecon Beacons, Llanthony Abbey’s ruins, and the nearby towns of Hereford and Monmouth; and we tramped over once familiar Sugar Loaf and The Blorenge, locally considered ‘mountains‘, that hover above Abergavenny. Lots of warm hugs and kisses whenever out of public view. We seemed remarkably simultaneous in these urges. One day, driving on the main road out of Abergavenny, I decided to fill our petrol tank. Without telling Mary my plan, I turned into one of the small roadside stations. As soon as she was aware of the maneuver, too late, Mary let out a muffled squeal, “Oh, no!” and instantly dived under the dashboard and stayed there till the proprietor had served us and taken his cash. After we had started up again, Mary was all flustered. Though she wouldn’t tell me exactly why her unexpected behavior, I was made to realize that had been a most indiscreet circumstance for Mary in which to have been observed, perhaps by a particular citizen – could it have been that station proprietor . In spite of that, on one other day we wandered around Abergavenny town together and into a few shops. All the nights were spent at number 18, where increasingly more of the old uncomplicated easiness with one another settled upon us. My old feeling for Mary, the deep pleasure of her company, beyond lovemaking, seemed to be returning. At the end of the week I was off to London and my plane to Turkey. The visit had had a generally restorative effect on me, having been wonderfully sensual. Although I reclaimed some genuine tenderness for Mary, no thoughts of longing to marry and live with her seriously entered my mind, or, apparently, hers. The parting was casual and unteary, at least on the surface. I had promised to try to visit her again when I left Turkey on my way back to the States. She was jubilant and ‘prayed’ for that prospect. Last Times with Mar y I finished my tour in Turkey not long after, in November of 1966, and did have a week free before reporting to CARE headquarters in New York. I alerted Mary of plans to visit her in Abergavenny. From London’s Heathrow I headed straight away to the west in a rented car. On the way, just after the new River Severn Bridge, the road passed immediately alongside Tintern Abbey, a hauntingly preserved medieval structure built by Cistercian monks some 800 years before, on the banks of the River Wye. I had been fascinated for years by my image of Tintern Abbey derived from a poem by Wordsworth encountered in college. Here I was, right next to it, so I decided to stop and explore. I was all alone there in that chilly, darkening November late afternoon. For me, such circumstances, amidst evocative ruins, often brought a flooding of reverence and awe for an imagined past. I couldn’t release myself from the spell of the extensive ruins of Tintern Abbey till near full darkness. Since I felt strangely tired from my flight and drive, I decided to spend the night at a small inn hardly one hundred yards beyond the ruins. While making that decision, I, surprising myself, realized I was not in a compelling hurry to reach Mary. Abergavenny was hardly 80 kilometers, perhaps an hour, further. I did call her from that stopover and pleaded tiredness, to her joke-disguised annoyance. We were together the next day at number 18. I had six free days before my flight from London to the USA. I soon realized that I was feeling unusually tired, day or night. In bed with Mary I lacked vigor and that old unquenchable lust in the favoring situation. Mary’s proposals for some of the old rambles, once enjoyed, didn’t interest me. I wanted to sleep a lot. I speculated that the flu or a cold had seized me at just the wrong time. I cursed the bad luck, and felt that I was letting Mary down though she was most sympathetic and attentive. Nothing pleased me, and I even left one day earlier than necessary for London and my flight to New York. Instead of spending that night with Mary, I stopped to sleep that night on the way to London. Because of my tiredness with feeling ill. I somehow had had enough of the role expected of me - by both of us - with Mary in my state and I wanted to get away, although I couldn’t explain why to either her or myself. Parting had a doleful rather than dramatic quality. As I told Mary, there was favorable hope of my returning to Turkey to do a final report on my Peace Corps/CARE program, which was in a closing-out phase. That made it likely that I would pass through England again and visit her for a few days. So the mood wasn’t totally dismal. Weeks in Valhalla Hardly had I touched feet on American soil when I began feeling seriously ill and became so weak that I could hardly stand or even sit upright. I was diagnosed as having too long untreated hepatitis and was admitted to the hospital in Valhalla, New York, near where I was first staying with friends, who, unfortunately for them, were advised to get shots for hepatitis. Mary, much more exposed, was somehow unaffected. I got a kick out of writing to friends, including Mary that I had finally arrived in VALHALLA! Turkey had nicked me. After six weeks in Valhalla, it was suggested that I go to my parent’s home in snowbound Menominee and rest till blood tests there indicated bilirubin counts were satisfactory for a return to work. I spent the long nights of almost three winter months in my childhood bed. I was later found to have Gilbert’s (benign) Syndrome, which always yields abnormal bilirubin test results, accounting for the duration. Throughout this extended convalescence, I often regretted my inability to enjoy the recent visit with Mary, and felt certain that I had disappointed her. But during the time in Valhalla and Menominee, my thoughts were full of pleasing to exciting memories of old and recent times with Mary, and of pleasures to come if I were to see her again, only possible if I were to return to Turkey. I soon learned that CARE did indeed want me to return to Turkey to do the final report, and the headquarters grew impatient over my being still unready each time they called. But the job waited for me. Restored to Life Of course I arranged for days, five, in England on the way. Mary would be in London with her sister, but she met me at the airport where we spent the night at the Skyway Hotel. I was a little out of shape from my enforced inactivity, but Mary’s teasing behavior and, for her, unusually sexy dressing for me, that got the primal juices flowing again. Among the genuine marvels of that Skyway night, the greatest was Mary’s exciting oral exploration of my torso, ending with a worshipful stop at Billy. There she found a spot that excited me to violent arousal. It was the most sexually transcendent instant I have ever experienced! With this miraculous oral caress I seemed to become all animal! I threw her on her back and mounted her with a wild rapacity never before experienced nor later repeated. She of course didn’t resist, having provided the inspiration. Just then my mind must have resembled that of a rapist, sheer self-exaltation! Usually in sexual embrace, at minimum, I felt a tender affection for my partner and tried to give her pleasure mounting to excitement that would increase my own. But not this time! After the airport hotel, we decided to head southwest for Torquay, the alleged British Riviera. As we drove along the main road to the west, it occurred to me, a dilettante map scanner that we should pass near Stonehenge. Sure enough, soon after that, Stonehenge could be seen across the flat land on the horizon. With what seemed plenty of time we drove over to it, parked, and with only a solitary caretaker within sight we wandered, in some awe, among the mammoth standing and lintel stones of the great circle. With the chilly overcast day, which encouraged occasional hugs for warmth, we got a sense of its ancient majesty and of its power for its communicants. We must have overstayed there, because it got quite dark before we were near Torquay. In the long endured darkness we seemed to be getting lost among the contorted, narrow streets of the towns clustered near Torquay. So we stopped at a promising, modest hotel in what turned out to be Paignton. That night together was, as I excitedly anticipated, wonderfully, sensually fulfilling. Included was a modest innovation of my suggestion, which involved rubbing one another with an aromatic oil, before traditional coupling. Mary procured some scented ‘baby oil’ for the eagerly planned experiment. I started by massaging the oil around her delicious and shapely breasts. After a surprisingly short time in this stirring play, I at least, was in high arousal. So much so that I lost patience with even this sensual elevation and I lustily, perhaps selfishly, went for the culminating sexual release though Mary may have felt cheated of further preliminaries. But there were other adequate compensations before late sleep. For balance, we stayed until late in bed before just caching the end of our inn’s breakfast hour, rewarded by a hearty British breakfast. Having so enjoyed that night of bliss at the hotel, we decided to spend another exciting night of our own making there. We did use some of the daylight’s hours to motor around the vicinity. I was almost out of free time, so we drove back to Abergavenny for the last night, and then, sensually sated, I got an early next day start for London and my plane to Istanbul. Our relationship now seemed easy and largely focused on lovingly giving one another sexual pleasure, and that seemed clearly understood by both of us without talking about it.. Although sex was central, there was real affection there, wanting joy for our lover of old as well as for ourselves, a kind of echo and homage of that earlier innocent time. Back in Turkey it took six weeks to produce the draft of a report, which was well received, but not celebrated, in all quarters. For the bulk of the draft’s production, I wanted to be free of any interruption, and when I told my friend Ilhan that I would like to go to a seaside retreat, he offered to loan me his new Chevvy sedan and suggested a location, a modest all-Turk resort on the Mediterranean, near Silifke, about 200 miles from Ankara. There I simply holed up with the portable typewriter. Once satisfied with my work, I rowed a rented skiff out to a small island crowned by a crumbling stone structure suggesting antiquity, no larger than a possible lookout station in the mouth of the bay. The effort reminded me my illness had left me out of shape and easily tired. When my departure plans were clear, I alerted Mary. She would meet me in London. This time we decided to stay at a hotel in Russell Square, which we rarely left for my visit’s brief three days. Among other sexual revels, with me more or less fully restored, there occurred here another remarkable, at least to me, bed top development. After a very satisfying romp in which Mary straddled me, Billy was still in place but naturally now less than fully upright. Mary remained quietly kneeling astride me for a short time. Then she began rocking, or more like gliding, in short movements backward and forward. Suddenly she quickened and then clearly experienced peak excitement. She remained astride for another quiet period and then repeated her slow movements before speeding up and climaxing again. This cycle unfolded twice more. Before the last, she apologized for “being selfish”. But I assured her, in fondest sincerity, that I truly enjoyed providing and watching her supreme pleasure, and because I could caress her in delight while she was pursuing her rapture. Along with the transporting sex, I was feeling ever more real affection for Mary. Despite these feelings, including deep gratitude, I still felt no impulse to plan and propose a future with her. She seemed to sense this, or had parallel feelings, and in all these late reunions Mary never pressed or even hinted of any wish for the connection of marriage. She had always avoided making clear to me her own divorced or just separated condition. Then, too, I never probed. When time came for us to part, I waited with her on the street for the bus that would take her to Paddington station for her train to the west. This was to be our last face to face encounter. We didn’t say much during a rather long wait. A strange, sweet, wistful sadness seemed to envelop us. Her bus came. We kissed. And she was gone. I made my way to the airport and New York. Lost on Mt. Bursa While I was resting in Menominee over hepatitis, I received a very disturbing phone call from Washington. A young PCV couple well known to me had died when they became lost on snowy Mt. Bursa on a wintertime vacation. Bob and Peggy had come from their assigned village of Kurds, Parmaksiz (Fingerless) in the opposite end of the country. I had spent overnight there with them on two occasions Ironically, They were from Minnesota, and so likely to be familiar with harsh winter weather. At first headquarters wondered if I would represent the Peace Corps at the funeral in Minneapolis, but when they learned that I had not yet been cleared to returned to duty, they sent another old Turkey hand. I later learned that Peggy and Bob had been at the tourist lodge at the top of Mt. Bursa. They had started back too late to reach the bottom facilities in daylight and became lost in blowing snow. Search parties went out for them but failed to find them until the following day. They were found huddled together in a hollow where it appeared they had lit a fire. To those who found them it appeared that Peggy had died first with Bob doing his best to keep her alive. Knowing these smart, popular PCVs so well, I could almost picture their stages and last hours - very disturbing for me. Some Turkish co-workers Relations with my various Turkish co-workers often puzzled me. I have described Selahattin at some length above. Metin, too, has been limned to some degree. In Trabzon city he was eager to help, almost in the manner of a happy deferential servant. Then there was Imre. I wanted to hire Imre for the job of accompanying me on field trips, because of Metin’s limitations there. Imre was about the same height and build as me which made him a very tall Turk. Shortly after we met and I had hired him, we tackled the rather frantic tour to identify the first PC/CARE village sites in western Turkey. Under this stress we worked quite well together. Imre came from a substantial urban family, which I met when they visited Trabzon. He had just finished a two year stint of national service as the only teacher in a remote rural village school, which experience he implied was profoundly unpleasant. .This was an option for high school graduates, alternative to universal military service. (Metin had served in the military despite his severe club foot.) I liked Imre who was smart and energetic. I felt that we must have made quite an impression, a team of men so tall for Turkey. With the establishment of the new CARE Peace Corps project, I transferred to Ankara. Although Imre was soon brought to work in Ankara, for a time his assignment had still in Trabzon to work for a young American with a family who replaced me. I never knew the dynamics of that office with Metin also there. But much later Imre told me that he felt a lasting sense of betrayal toward me for hiring him to work with me under certain circumstances, then being expected to work in a quite different setup. Because of his height, Imre tended to bow his neck forward in any standing conversation. In some way, this posture and a very soft polite public manner may have been meant to reassure others that his height wasn’t matched with an intimidating personality. A great disappointment, surprise and self-doubt hit me when we fell out. Imre was ambitious for more education and greatly longed to leave Turkey, most likely for Canada. As we sat over the remains of a meal in a small restaurant – I believe it was in Agri in the east -- his troubling doubts about realizing his plans came out. My awkward efforts to give him advice must have seemed painfully patronizing to Imre who clammed up and became unfriendly and unhelpful for the rest of the day and the next. Given the things that I hoped to accomplish on this trip, visiting officials and PCVs, in the east, this situation was unacceptable. I wired my Ankara office about the Imre problem, and asked that one of my good friends of that staff be flown to Trabzon where I was headed. As Omer arrived, Imre boarded the plane for the return flight. I had hoped for something like lasting friendship with Imre, someone who got similar satisfactions from something more than just a joint job. The defeat of that aspiration didn’t disturb me immediately. All I immediately felt was anger at his uncooperative behavior in the middle of an important job tour. Omer’s pleasant and effective company overrode concern with Imre. When time did allow me to think about it, sheer puzzlement came up, since however clumsy my efforts to help Imre as he sorted things out at our last table talk, my anodyne offerings themselves could have hardly caused the startling transformation in Imre. I think it was there that Imre told me of his feelings of betrayal by my abandoning him to an unexpected, and apparently, unhappy job scene in Trabzon. But that had been some time ago, with much water under the bridge since. It had in fact been my advocacy that had Imre transferred to Ankara in fairly short order. I saw Imre there but had no direct work with him. All I got from him was the coldest and most correct frozen faced politeness. There was no hint of an opening for answering my confusion over our rupture. Omer with whom I felt easiest, even more in common, among my Turkish co-workers was a pleasant, cool city young man who loved Jazz and had his own weekly “Window on the West” radio program. His duties normally kept him in the Ankara office, but he made a good mate on the remainder of that eastern trip, right up t the base of Mt. Ararat in Dogubayazit. When I was leaving Turkey I gave Omer my John Coltrane LPs. He was especially elated over “A Love Supreme” which he valued beyond any price. Overtime, when in the Ankara office, Rasim, as noted became another personal friend, older, pushing 50. He was the senior-most staffer, sort of our business manager and contact with most officialdom. In the case of “Joe and the Turkish Midwife” Rasim was the most needed for help in solving that problem. Rasim was a small neat man of almost jumpy energy and speech. Since he was eager to talk about everything, he became something close to being a confidant of mine, especially in matters cross-cultural. He was pleased that I would casually visit his family apartment and he even briefly introduced his wife (not common in traditional Turkey). There my visits usually found him a bit merry on drink, and I became his confidant. Rasim came from a traditional landed family and had his wife chosen for him. These roots made him feel tied down and wistfully hoping to taste more of modern life, and he had tasted bits through jobs with, never revealed to me, other foreign entities. He asked me to order Playboy magazine for him, but in my own name, since, he claimed, that it would be held up by the post if addressed to him. Actually, none of the issues got through to me either. I understood Rasim was associated with substantial landed wealth in the region around Gaziantep, but that he saw or controlled little steady cash flow from it. As a symbol of his aspired to life style, he bought and proudly parked his fine second hand Mercedes next to the office. Although Rasim liked to give the impression of how well he knew the way the ‘real ‘world worked beneath the veneer of law and idealized customs, I never expected him to seek personal advantage by fraudulent means. But around a year after I left I understood from an American, who had been with CARE in Turkey, that Rasim had been dismissed and charged with some fraudulence regarding the work he did in arranging the frequent international air travel for PCVs and CARE Americans. I wanted to suspend belief, but I could imagine Rasim’s temptation. Chapter 6 Next Assignment, Belize, Still British Honduras In l967, still in the employ of CARE, I was assigned to British Honduras, to become independent Belize in 1981. My mandate was to explore for possible “self-help” projects, largely in rural areas. Belize, as it was already known to most locals, is of course small, roughly the size of Massachusetts, but with exceedingly thin population at the time of about 150,000, with a third then in the coastal capital city At the time CARE’s almost only activity was the distribution of US surplus foods to the schools, hospitals, the orphanage, etc., being managed by a CARE man already there. Guy was a very stiff and insecure person and we never got very close. At one point he found my heavy round of educational travel as suggesting some sort of CIA connection, and so reported to our headquarters, who buried the slander. As common in the British colonies, the government had left the establishment and operation of schools to various religious denominations. Roman Catholics dominated, reflecting their grip on over 60% of the population. But a remarkable variety of Protestant sects found Belize a happy hunting ground and were setting up their own schools wherever they found a niche, an unserved village. The old elite community tended to be Anglican, and their little brick church in Belize City, the capital, was, “St. John’s Cathedral.” At the time Belize had a sizeable minority -- now the majority -- of Latinos. So soon after I arrived, I sent an advert for a Spanish tutor to each of the two daily papers. The next day I was called by the “editor” of the Times, of the party in power. He offered to take the job and didn’t print the ad since I took him on. That didn’t work out very well since Fuljencio and I found ourselves speaking mostly English to discuss local conditions and politics. To me he bemoaned the fact that he was not really the papers proper editor, more an office manager, since the Premier dictated what was to appear in the paper, practically every word. I discontinued the lessons after a while because they didn’t serve my purpose although I did learn a good deal about the country and its politics, discounting for my tutor’s bias. An early mishap befell me when the aging Creole cleaning lady threw out my expensive camera, since somehow it had fallen off my desk into my waste basket. She threw the lot into an out door dirt bin on a Saturday outside our CARE part of the ramshackle old Customs shed , where the workers “accidentally,” occasionally dropped to crack open a promising crate or carton of goodies from which they felt obliged to share just a few samples, including a chocolate bar offered to me On Monday I learned the fate of my camera. The dirt bin hadn’t been emptied over the rainy weekend, and I fished out the drenched camera, a total loss. Courtship and Marriage But much more important and with the longest lasting effect was my meeting Zee Tucker. We met playing badminton at the simple ”Militia Hall,” not to be confused with any major military installation. Her eager style of play and general attractiveness led me to make an overture. Zee seemed rather startled and wary. Perhaps it was my awkwardness of address, or at least as likely, the mere fact of a white foreigner making a friendly opening to a respectable Creole gi’al. On the second or third meeting at badminton, I asked her “ out.” This seemed even more shocking to Zee. Local cultural norms and her own self identity seemed to be at work. It took at least three more badminton meetings before she agreed to meet me at a good local hotel, just to talk. Of course I mustn’t call for her at the Tucker home I learned that Zee was teaching at St Catherine’s, the elite girls’ high school, and was editing a small business newsletter. By fortunate coincidence she had just returned from London where she had been studying and working for six years. We began meeting and talking almost every weekend, after dark in the entry area of the waterside Belleview Hotel. Zee always arrived on foot. Her arrival times were somewhat unpredictable because she had to contrive some sort of acceptable reason for leaving the family home where our liaison could not be named and departure time had to be exquisitely timed to household circumstances. The idea of a respectable single young woman (“spinster,” on our marriage license) having her own digs was inconceivable at that time in Belize. When our friendship became known to him, Zee’s father was alarmed and warned against it. After what must have been a delicate job of preparing the ground, she was finally able to invite me to dinner at the Tucker home on New Road well above the local “dahg-si’down” standard. The hour set was 8:00 PM. I went way beyond the normal in my ablutions and dressing preparations and arrived exactly at eight. The younger sister who opened the door in her hair curlers looked shocked and ran back inside without saying a word. Then from the doorway I caught glimpses of a flurry of young girls, all in curlers and generally incomplete preparations scurrying about. Zee has four younger sisters. It seems I was part of a “clash of civilizations,” as far as time precision values.. Once things had settled down, and a certain amount of humor in the situation was recognized, I was given a kindly tutorial on “Belize Time,” which meant that any announced time meant at minimum a half-hour later. The meal went off without a hitch even if everyone was on his or her best, rather constrained behavior. At least it didn’t result in me being firmly vetoed. A group of local people who had been associated with Zee’s Chamber of Commerce Newsletter were convinced by a visiting American experienced in ‘community' newspaper production to start a new weekly paper, The Reporter, to be of better quality than the two political party dailies. They asked Zee to be the editor and she agreed to a far from predictable future at the endeavor. By now we were steadies and I helped her put out the inaugural issue. Since she often worked well into the night before to get out the Friday paper, on a few occasions when I was returning late from a field trip I would stop at the still lighted shop, sometimes to help, sometimes to flop on my sleeping bag till preparations were finished. and Zee needed a ride home. There were plenty of squabbles among the paper’s sponsors, but Zee stuck with it until shortly before we left Belize. The Reporter still goes to press every week. Well, one thing led to another in greater intimacy and we got married in September, 1968, in a little clapboard Methodist church that was just being returned to use after a period of abandonment, during which it was almost lost from sight because of the flourishing tropical vegetation. Zee’s brother Barry, sang “Because” as part of the service. A grand reception was held at the Fort George Hotel, Belize’s finest, where a jazz-tilted combo, with which I had played provided for the light fantastic, and I sat in on the drums for a piece or two. Jerry and the Band The combo had had another interesting outing on the previous Fourth of July. Traditionally, a celebrating gala was held on the pleasant grounds of the US Consulate, the top formal representation of the US. I had suggested our quintet for the music and it was agreed. Jerry, our eccentric keyboardist, had acquired a creaky Wurlitzer organ, through a loan from me -- never repaid. The problem now was how to get it to the Consulate grounds. No one would provide a truck without outrageous charges. So the pedestrians along North Front Street were treated to the spectacle of the well-known singing drayman and his mule-and-cart hauling the Wurlitzer, with Jerry aboard to steady his precious cargo, right into the Embassy grounds where it was shifted on to the performers' platform. And after all that, the organ didn't work properly; poor Jerry could only get occasional bleeps and honks out of it! As I understood it, he eventually donated the organ to the little Scot's Kirk on Regent Street Jerry was clearly a very talented musician, and seemed absolutely transported when he dug into one of his improvised piano solos. His lifestyle was something else! He seemed to have spent much of his life in Mexico, to which he often made reference. When he spoke it was usually in highly stylized excitement. Stylized in the sense that he almost seemed to be speaking in tongues, even though there was a strong hint of faux British upper-classisms. No one seemed to understand him any better than I could, which was intermittently at best. In Belize he had no regular occupation. I would visit him occasionally during the day where he could always be found in bed at a ‘hotel’ that even Graham Greene would blush to describe. The “Palace Hotel” was jammed between a local monoplex cinema and a business building, both of which looked much more recent though far from new. Everything about the Palace was unmaintained and crumbling. The ramshackle wooden structure, with maybe 10 rooms altogether on two floors, had only a few remaining flecks of once indeterminate colored paint. The effects of the 1960 hurricane must have been ignored. Behind a makeshift, scrap-paper littered desk, at the ground level entrance one might. or might not, find the presumed proprietor, a middle-aged white American in a soiled undershirt sprawled out in a hammock, with every appearance of a stereotypical ’Tobacco Road’, rural southern US background. In Jerry’s upstairs room, he would lie there on a scruffy mattress and long unchanged sheets on top of a creaking, sagging metal frame bed. Occasionally he would brush off a modest accumulation of plaster bits that steadily descended from the decaying ceiling, including a termite from time to time. Aside from our on and off gratis gigs, the ’conversation’ when I visited Jerry was about some grand, quasi-operatic music he was composing. What he eagerly showed me were elaborate scratchings in no notation system that I recognized. I hardly did more than smile and grunt approvingly. Needless to say, there was something strange about Jerry ‘upstairs.’ But he was extremely friendly and quite inoffensive. He had a small coterie of friends at once awed and bemused, who, like me, brought him hamburgers and soup and loaned him bits of money, for which he unashamedly asked, especially when threatened with removal by his no doubt already patient landlord. When Jerry emerged from the Palace it was always nighttime, and then I usually saw him out only at gigs. Shortly before I left Belize, Jerry was reported to have disappeared back into Mexico. No way could I ever forget our Jerry! More Tomorrow In those late 1960s, BH, British Honduras, had its share of eccentrics, such as Jerry, the musician, and the singing drayman with his mule and cart, most of them with an accepted place, as giving quaintness to the community. One morning I was visited in my CARE office in a part of the old run down but functioning Customs shed by a lean creole man of about 50, rather forceful in manner. He announced himself as Charles X Egan, and claimed to be known as ‘Justice,” a name on the band around his straw hat. Part of CARE’s well-known mission in Belize was to distribute U.S. surplus powdered milk to all primary schools in the small country/colony. Justice, who claimed to have recently returned from 16 years in the US, had come home to help.– I later heard the rumor that he was eluding American law. He was now in my office to firmly ask that this food should also be allocated to his village school at More Tomorrow. (Names like this marked the progress of earlier mahogany loggers up the Belize River.) More Tomorrow was on the river, near the center of the country, was inaccessible by motor vehicle. If CARE would give the food to Justice, he promised to get it to More Tomorrow, which I would later learn would be no small feat. Since part of my job was to monitor the correctitude of the school use of our food, I said that I would have to visit the school first. Left unsaid at the time was the fact that a department of the self-governing colony would have to approve of the schools’ eligibility for this distribution. A date was decided upon, and Justice agreed that I could bring along my adventurous new bride, Zee, a well know figure in Belize. in her own right. Zee and I drove some 50 miles up country on the loosely graveled highway to the west, and turned into short track that ended at the river bank. This was as close as my Land Rover could get to More Tomorrow. When we arrived at the riverside, on the rather close opposite bank there was Justice with a few waving villagers. A small dory was sent to ferry us across to their side. After welcoming greetings, Zee (fortunately in slacks) and I were provided each with a horse, which was a bit of a surprise, and along with a mounted Justice we trotted over mostly land that seemed to have been cut over, possibly by loggers, for about one mile. A few thatched huts and several yelping children were at the point where we were to cross back over the river to the main part of the scattered village. Justice promptly and proudly led us to the “School of Mohammad,” so identified by an ill-made flag. The school was simply a 20 by 20 foot space, roughly covered with cohune palm frond thatch over a dirt floor on which were rows of rough plank boards. About a dozen children, silenced by Justice, were squirming on these seats. A photo was duly taken. But this was just he beginning! After Justice’s praise for the villagers support and work on the school, he ushered us across a cleared field to something of a village gala of uncertain occasion (for Zee and me?) which welcomed us as if we were celebrities. Under a roughly thatched-over area we were seated on wooded planks like dignitaries among the villager leaders. Outside was a traditional open ‘fire hearth’ with a cooking crew, and we were genially fed rice-and-beans and roasted chicken. But that was still not all. Horse racing with local ‘jockeys,’ was to follow. I could see no course markings on the rough field, but the riders seemed to know where they were headed. With long gaps between, three or four races were run off amidst great cheering from the villagers who lined the far side of the ‘track’. The races were in fact very exciting, all the more so because there were no smooth striding thoroughbreds under the roughrider jockeys, who were on the most meager of saddles, and who flailed away at the flanks of their mounts. After each race some small symbolic prizes were of course awarded the winner. Justice was demonstrably ordering things about, but at odd times he sat with Zee and I and rapidly expanded on all the progress achieved, with more to come, for the children and adults of this “abandoned” back-water settlement. We were invited to spend the night, but politely declined and asked that we be helped back to our Land Rover before dark. The effusions of regret at our departure were, I’m sure, largely symbolic. With our thanks endlessly repeated, we were ferried over the river and horses were found to get us to the return ferry. We thanked the boatman and got into the Land Rover just as dark was falling, as it does so hurriedly in the tropics. Now I cannot remember for certain if there ever was a resolution to Justice’s request for his school’s powdered milk, but I believe there was such an effort. But that wasn’t quite the end of More Tomorrow in my first Belizean sojourn. One of the Peace Corps Volunteers that I knew particularly well, Lon, got keenly interested in my tale of visiting More Tomorrow during one of our frequent chats. He hoped to go there and I was game for another adventure by a different route. We made a contingency rich plan based on some hints by Justice of a second route, also not by car. There was a large ranch owned by an American settler about five miles upstream from More Tomorrow, and we might be able to borrow horses there. The owner agreed to this, but he warned us that, as far as he knew, the horse track starting at the edge of his ranch was very narrow and bordered by lush invasive tropical growth, and we must have the horses back by dark. Finding the ranch owner had taken us about two hours so it was almost noon before Lon and I set off at the hardly noticeable trailhead which one of the farm hands had to point out for us. The horses were naturally reluctant to head away from home with strange riders, so they plodded accordingly. The trail was very narrow and almost disappeared at times. The bordering dense foliage was mostly cohune palm, and along several stretches their branching fronds reached across to form low covering arches which caused Lon and I to hunch over in order to duck the heavy boughs. On we plodded, nearly stopping at times at the horses whim. We began to worry that our pace was so slow that we would have little time in More Tomorrow before having to head back. We never did reach More Tomorrow. After what must have been no more than three or four miles (which seemed like ten) on the trail, our watches told us we had better head back. Disappointed and worried that we might not even get the horses back to the ranch before dark, we reversed course. Now as the horses moved much more swiftly, danger came from the overhanging heavy palm fronds. which came at us almost too soon to duck. But this did get us back at the end of the trail and the ranch edge just at impatient dusk At what was probably the formal edge of the ranch, we faced a steep banked muddy gully. (We must have headed out over an easier crossing.) Here our hoses seemed uneasy about crossing. My horse could be prodded across, but Lon’s balked. He got off and holding the reins, tried to lead his hose across the gully. With considerable struggle, he managed to get his horse down and out on the lower, less steep far side. But one of his probably costly loafers had been sucked off by the mud and he couldn’t both hold the horse reins and search for his shoe. So knowing it would head home, he let it go and tried to find his loafer in the darkening. Lon’s search was desperate and dirty; he had taken off his other loafer so as not to loose it too in the muck. It was clearly a painful loss and in the end had to be accepted. With his horse gone, and a several hundred yards further to the ranch buildings, barefoot Lon had to ride behind me, which was not at all easy to manage. But we got him up, and the horse I had had trouble holding back took us briskly to the corral. The ranch owner wasn‘t very interested in our tale of woes, laced with our not so jolly thanks for his and his horses “help”. He barely shrugged with disinterest. Mohammad Ali (Cassius Clay) Visited Belize!!! Several days later, in the old Custom's shed office, I was visited by a middle-aged white American who owned and operated a large cattle spread in the western part of the country. He was upset that I had had commerce with, and needed instruction about, the local character who was widely known a “Justice.” More instruction held that this scoundrel had once bounced around the USA, styled himself a Muslim and had started a school in the hard to reach riverside village of More Tomorrow. Of course, Zee and I had already visited his patch. Norris, my visitor, described Justice as some sort of miscreant and was instructing my innocence. The worst charge he laid, which he obviously considered crushing, was that Justice had brought then Cassius Clay to Belize at some point before I got there. What could be more damning? I didn’t challenge that substance, but gave my stump speech about being in Belize to help the people, particularly the poor. Norris left shaking his head, hardly mollified. Meeting the Guatemalan President Belizeans had been greatly concerned for many years because Guatemala claimed that the territory of British Honduras belonged to them despite British "trickery". The matter still remains unsettled and periodically becomes the center of attention. At the time of the events in question, the autumn of 1967, I was in Punta Gorda, the administrative center of the southernmost Toledo District; the most remote and considered least developed. This District borders Guatemala at the latter's narrow coastal opening to the Caribbean Sea. . Belize was then still 13 years away from its full independence. Some 30 miles off the coast from Punta Gorda lie the Sapodilla Cayes, part of Belize but almost as close to coastal Guatemala. I had arrived a day or so earlier in Punta Gorda on my general rounds to pursue existing or possibly new CARE projects of community assistance in the hinterland of Toledo District. That morning in November I presented myself at the unprepossessing office space of the Ministry of Social Services where I understood I had an appointment with the District Social Services Officer, with whom I expected to work out a round of local project visits for the day. From the two or three people lounging about the office I learned that this was an official holiday and that the officer in charge had gone off somewhere. Somehow I managed to learn that he might be found at the waterfront, to which I promptly repaired and found the officer about to board a small Customs launch. He and the District Agricultural Officer were headed for Hunting Caye, one of the Sapodillas, ostensibly to check out the rainfall measuring instruments on that island in the sun, considered to be one of the most attractive of the numerous cayes lying along and within the magnificent barrier reef fringing the whole length of Belize's Caribbean coast. These officers, who were already acquaintances of mine, and the master of the small, open-sided craft invited me to come along. I quickly agreed, parked my vehicle and jumped into the boat for what was said to be a one day out and back excursion, really for relaxation. The weather was beautiful and the trip out was delightful. We lolled about the boat and threw out two fishing lines. A barracuda was hooked, which later provided a tasty lunch. As we approached Hunting Caye we noticed a trim yacht, some 50 or 60 feet in length, anchored close to the sandy beach. We pulled in and anchored nearly alongside it. It was immediately clear that some unusual activity was going on at the caye. We went ashore in our dinghy and sought out the Belizean lighthouse keeper. From him and our own observation we learned that a party of Guatemalan military was actively setting up some sort of encampment. From the brisk and polite Guatemalan army captain in charge, we further learned that the yacht standing just off-shore had brought his army advance party to set up a three or four day outing by the Guatemalan President who would be arriving in a larger vessel later in the day. This was a matter of great concern to our Belizean officers, who asked the lighthouse keeper to contact their Belize City principals on his radio-telephone at this island outpost. It was not working because the battery that powered it was dead. But it turned out that there was an adequate radio setup on the yacht, apparently a private vessel chartered for the occasion. The ship's captain quite politely agreed to allow the Belizeans to use his radio to contact the Controller of Customs. Major Johnson, the Controller responded to their message with an order for our Customs vessel to stay put until further instructions. Not much later, perhaps an hour, a light aircraft appeared over Hunting Caye, circling several times and then flew off. We learned later that, as we suspected, it carried Major Johnson, to have a look, at least from the air, at the situation. Our group subsequently received another radio directive to stay at Hunting Caye overnight, until high Belizean officials could arrive by boat the following day. This was something of a setback for me, because I had planned to leave Punta Gorda at dawn the next day for an appointment back in Belize City. But I was hardly in a position to effect my own will in the circumstances. So we hung about during the dull middle part of the hot day, devouring our delicious barracuda, occasionally chatting with the lighthouse keeper and the pleasant Guatemalan captain who spoke excellent English, and the captain of the yacht. We occupied some of our time by diving off our boat into the warm Caribbean. I wandered about the idyllic caye, and because of its modest size could in a short time amble around its whole circumference. We had learned from the army captain that his president would be arriving sometime in the late afternoon, so then we began watching the sea in the direction of Guatemala. Sure enough, a speck on the horizon began enlarging and eventually became identifiable as a vessel of some size. At the same time that its outline became clear a helicopter was seen overtaking the vessel and it proceeded on the same line to come and hover over the beach at our caye. Without turning off its rotors and not quite touching the ground, with all of us gathered in its vicinity, someone on the craft handed out a piece of paper to the army captain and promptly lifted off. The captain handed the paper around for each of us from Belize to read. It was a cable from the British Consulate in, as best I could make out, "Bananeria" (perhaps a code) The cable was directed to the Governor General of British Honduras, then of course a British official, requesting permission for President Mendez Montenegro to visit Hunting Caye for four days, on a recreational outing. The Belizean officers immediately asked to use the yacht's radio and passed this information to Belize City. In the meantime the President's boat was drawing near and it turned out to be some sort of small naval vessel, with a single gun mounted on its forward deck. Once anchored somewhat further off shore than our craft, a single open skiff began ferrying happily excited merry-makers ashore, some 30 to 40 in number, mostly matronly ladies and noisy children. By this time the Guatemalan advance party had set up a quite proper vacation facility, with large open-sided military tents and an inevitably noisy generator, which with the coming of darkness powered a string of lights along the beach. The soldiers were bustling about, catering to the elite party; and the military kitchen went into operation as darkness fell. During all this genteel merry-making our Belizean group observed it somewhat sullenly from our tiny, bobbing vessel. Hilarity on the Caye was quite loud and made our efforts to sleep, in what would have been some discomfort in any case, all the more difficult because of the late hours observed by the Guatemalans. The following morning we still had nothing much to do except watch the desultory movements on shore. In the late morning the pride of the British Honduras Customs fleet, the over-age "Patricia" arrived with Major Johnson. He promptly consulted with our two officers. Then in impeccable white ducks Major Johnson landed and asked to meet with President Mendez who presented himself quite smartly, if in casual attire. As several of us stood by within earshot, Johnson read from a government statement asserting British Honduras sovereignty over the Sapodilla Cayes, and in diplomatic language requested that the President's party depart Hunting Caye. President Mendez seemed to receive this in good humor, as if it were some sort of not surprising protocol which did not disturb him in the slightest. Shortly after this Major Johnson and company returned to the Patricia and shoved off. Our own smaller craft soon upped anchor and proceeded back to Punta Gorda. It was early afternoon when we landed. I spent the night at Mr. Foster's simplest of simple Guest Houses and left very early the next morning since it was a long day's drive to Belize City, accompanied by another government officer who asked for a ride from this poorly linked outpost. Once removed from the scene, and with less direct news access, I learned that during the day of my return travel the top Belizean police officer had arrived in Punta Gorda and proceeded to Hunting Caye where a much more stern directive to "promptly depart" was reportedly delivered to President Mendez Montenegro. This, and the whole event, occasioned considerable excitement in the British Honduras press (Belize had two daily and one weekly – Zee’s Reporter - papers then.) and radio (only government's at the time) as if this was a shocking new event. But while I was at Hunting Caye our group was casually informed by the Guatemalan army captain that such visits by Guatemalans were fairly common occurrences, apparently quite unnoticed by the generality of Belizeans except for the lighthouse keeper who confirmed that Guatemalans were frequently his guests. In spite of the stern warnings by official British Hondurans, the President and his holiday-making entourage did not leave Hunting Caye until four days later, which the helicoptered message had announced as their plan; and British Honduras had taken no further overt steps to evict the presidential party. In the years following it seems that Belizeans came to accept, or ignore, the fact that Hunting Caye remained a favorite Guatemalan recreation spot. Whatever one may say of Guatemalans, it must be acknowledged that their taste in such matters is excellent. Under Cover of Darkness On one my few remaining days -- make that nights -- of bachelorhood in Belize, at about 2:30 AM, some heavy knocking sounded on the door of my rooms above a tienda operated by a resident late night boozer and his adolescent son. At the door two Creole gentlemen faced me wearing expressions of great pain, Joseph Young and George Gentle, whom I knew well from regular working relations; their jobs at the top of the government's Social Services Department and my job with CARE. They knew that I had the use of a CARE vehicle, a l967 Jeep Wagoneer, that had a winch, and that was what they needed. Joseph and George had been driving a small British sedan back from some ceremonial event in Stann Creek (now Dangriga). This involved a final 15 miles or so along the "Western Highway," then barely 2 lane, somewhat eccentrically black-topped, and for much of the route bounded by large stretches of seasonal lagoons and mangrove swamps. On a relatively straight stretch of the road, at about mile 5, the car had veered to the right and became half immersed in the brackish water beside the road which was more like a causeway at this point. So much was obvious and easily deduced when I, having responded to the fervent plea for help, arrived at the scene of the disaster with my colleagues in the CARE vehicle. Since no one else seemed to have use of the highway at this hour we were able to use the full width of the road, trying variously angled approaches to the challenge of extricating their vehicle with the winch, and we finally hauled their car back onto the road. The trip back was slow and herky-jerky since the winch cable was run under the full length of my car from the front winch spindle to the front of the trailing invalid. George rode with me in the Wagoneer and Joseph steered the drenched vehicle behind. My passenger on this trip to the sleeping city was reluctant to discuss the why and how of their recent contretemps. But it seemed to emerge that they had had two lady passengers, presumably fellow Social Service professionals on the homeward bound journey. When their car wound up in the mangroves, the women promptly abandoned the scene and started to walk home, hoping, probably hopelessly, to catch a ride to their fair city. Whatever the construction that might be put on this misfortune, for them, any broadly spread report would carry ineluctable embarrassment, and the women quickly disconnected. Since Joseph had a reputation as a womanizer, the arrangements within their homing chariot could be easily imagined as leading to a disastrous distraction. I never learned, and felt it best not to pursue, the names of the female passengers, which I probably would have recognized through my work if they truly were from the Social Services Dept. The two males themselves must have walked five miles, or maybe they caught an unlikely ride, to my shared house on the near edge of town. My colleagues had me pull their car to a side spot on a little used street in the city, and sheepishly passed on my offer to drive them to their doorstep. They both lived nearby their muddy, parked car. A few years later when Zee and I and our new daughter were elsewhere, Nigeria, in my CARE career travels, a few numbers of the Belize weeklies caught up with is. One of them had a news item to the effect that Joseph Young had driven a government vehicle into one of the canals that were then odoriferous, human waste-accepting 'landmarks' and are still prominent, if now more sanitized, features of Belize City. We were left to imagine other details. The Ill-fated CARE Jeep This same Jeep Wagoneer eventually met a rather dramatic end. On a Sunday many months later, my bride and I were sitting at home reading, when the secretary from our office called at our rented house. As soon as she saw me, she let an appearance of great tension turn to relative ease. She was afraid I, or we, had been in a terrible accident. She and her husband had been driving along the Western Highway. At about seven miles from Belize City the road crosses a short bridge over the Burden Canal. There, impaled in one of the steel girders that railed the bridge, she saw our CARE Wagoneer, suspended completely free from the bridge’s roadway, hanging over the water. At the end of the previous work week, Anthony , one of our two Belizean field monitors for CARE’s countrywide food distribution program, had been allowed to take the Wagoneer for parking near his home since there was no parking space yet at our brand-new CARE office. Anthony’s younger brother, who had a distinguished record of delinquency, had somehow found where Anthony had hidden the car keys and had recruited two of his male friends for a wild ride. An unheeded bump, where knowing drivers slowed down, at the beginning of the Burden bridge must have been too much for whomever, probably speeding, was at the wheel, and he lost control, with the results described. The car must have careened about a bit before the impaling near the bridge’s center, and it was totally wrecked. The best to be made of it was sale to a local wreckage dealer. I understood that one of the three miscreant boys had a broken arm as the only injury of any consequence. The criminal trial for Anthony’s brother was long delayed, and was not settled before I left the country, even though I made a deposition. . Gales Point and Back Much has changed since this fiasco. After independence from Britain in l981 Belize has become something of an "IN" place, with "adventure tourism" as the money tree for some. But this caper can still be repeated -- if not in every droll detail. An invitation came to attend a youth sports day at the village of Gales Point, interestingly sited on a veritable finger of land jutting straight out into a large lagoon, just inland from the mangrove fringed coast. A working colleague of mine, John Tucker (renamed here) of the Government's Social Development Department suggested that we go there -- to the south -- via the inland waterway of canal, streams, and lagoons from our base in coastal Belize City. The start was not overly promising. John was to arrange for an appropriate craft. We waited behind the Shell gas station on Haulover Creek for over an hour beyond the appointed sailing time before our craft and crew appeared. Neither was encouraging. The boat seemed of backyard, plywood construction, anything but sleek. To this day, Laurel and Hardy come to mind whenever I think of our crew although the thin helmsman seemed more a physical twin of the Mexican comedian, Cantinflas, of Around the World in 80 Days fame. His `manager-critic' resembled an inept 'heavy' from an old western movie. Neither gave the impression of mastery of the craft or of our undertaking. Right off, we were told that the single outboard motor would not be sufficient for the rigors of the voyage. Hardy thought he knew where we could borrow another. And so we hove into one of the then foul-smelling sanitary drainage canals that still transect Belize City -- but now in a more sanitary state. There we tied up while a seemingly random search began for someone from whom another motor could be inveigled. That and additional fuel finally provided, we set off. It was now mid-afternoon, and we had planned to start off right after lunch. So I began to worry about timing. I had a heavy date for 8 PM that evening and had been assured by John that there would be no problem making it. But no reliable estimate for the time of the trip could be coaxed from our serio-comic boatmen. So I tried to put out of my mind the fretful prospects of a missed assignation. The trip of some 30 miles took us up the Haulover Creek, a tributary of the Belize River, through the center of Belize City, to where the Burden Canal takes off to the south in a straight line. After about half an hour we debouched into Jones Lagoon which we soon crossed and found its south end opening to Boom Creek. Although things seemed to be going well enough, it was becoming clear that Laurel and Hardy weren't in much agreement as to the precise route or how the boat should be handled, and we were advancing much more slowly than I had hoped. The Boom Creek leg wasn't long but it was winding, and at one sharp curve,. going a bit too fast, Laurel caromed us off the fortunately soft bank. This of course gave Hardy an opening to step up his running criticism of helmsman Laurel's seamanship. But no damage to the boast seemed to have resulted. We soon came to the Sibun River (along which much of the movie Mosquito Coast was later filmed). After a short jog along the Sibun we turned into a `channel' through an expanse of tall reed marsh, with our boatmen disturbingly unsure of their decision. Almost by chance it seemed we had struck it right, and after some time found ourselves in the hoped-for Northern Lagoon. On this leg we had disturbed a small alligator and some sort of large water snake, and were passed going in the opposite direction by an ancient looking dugout poled slowly along by a classic tableau of Mayan father and son. We were hardly half way to Gales Point. Even now, safely in the Northern Lagoon, Hardy wasn't sure that we were in the right place. But Laurel, with his continual mix of diffidence and resentment, grunted that we were OK. Now their discussion centered for almost an hour on how to steer through this languid lagoon with its shallows and submerged snares. When we had run the length of this lagoon we uncertainly entered Main Creek, a short passage that connected us with the Southern Lagoon. Once in this wide water, we could see Gales Point's finger pointing toward us. Now we cruised along with Hardy resting from his running warnings on how to steer away from real or imagined dangers. The sun was about to set as we pulled up at a pier on the elongated finger of land. The day's youth sporting event was long over. I was near frantic to salvage something of my courtship evening back in Belize City. Since it had taken us over three hours to make the downward journey in daylight, in desperation I urged that we return by the open sea, relatively calm at this time of year. It is separated from the Southern Lagoon by only a mile or two of channels in thick mangrove. But first the bemused Gales Pointers who greeted us insisted that we take some refreshment, and our crew couldn't be denied such succor. John Tucker now announced, probably wisely, that he saw fit to spend the night in Gales Point. So after much head scratching and mutual criticism about not having done this before, my shaky crew took me as their sole passenger on our search to strike the channel that would lead us to the Manatee Bar entrance to the Caribbean. Our first strike was a clear miss. After cruising along dense green walls in fading light, we found ourselves back in Southern Lagoon, looking at Gales Point again. After taking advice from a local worthy, we set off again, and this time did cross the Manatee Bar. Now we headed north, keeping the mangrove coast to our left. But it was now well dark, even though a young moon was in the sky, and it became difficult and often impossible to keep the shoreline in view since we also wanted to stay well clear of dangerous shallows. In a straight line the seaward route should have been much shorter. But we seemed to be zigzagging as the trepid boatmen interminably argued over which way to steer; one imagining that they had sighted the light house at Belize City, the other claiming it was Robinsons Point, a light on one of the cayes inside the barrier reef that girdles the coast. Although the sea was calm enough, light rain sprinkled on us from time to time, and in our open boat this threat of drenching was not welcome. After at least two hours on the open sea, the boatmen seemed quite sure that a distant light under a pale orange aura represented Belize City, and we homed in on it There had been some muttering about our low gas supply. Now the sudden sputtering out of one of our two outboard motors sent shivers at least through me. How would the other motor sustain us? We had no lights or even oars. But we were now close enough to make out the shapes of one or two freighters that then had to anchor miles off the city for lack of a deep-water port. I had brought along a few large ordinance survey map sheets covering the area we had intended to traverse. Hardy, with singular agreement from Laurel, asked me to get ready to light up one of these rolled up maps as a signal to the freighters standing off the City. I rather prized these maps and wasn’t eager for this measure of desperation. But I saw the possible wisdom and readied myself for the sacrifice. But our straining single motor held on and finally inched us along side a Norwegian freighter that was discharging cargo onto a lighter-barge. Now resigned to a dreadful setback to my courtly pursuit, I fitfully waited for the lighter to be loaded, and I set out on it for shore. By the time I was on dry land it was almost eleven PM. I walked to where I had left the CARE vehicle behind the Shell station, and drove by the family home of my inamorata, to see if any sort of light shone forth. Since all was dark, I ruefully headed for my digs over the shop on Cemetery Road. Although thoroughly exhausted by the day’s tensions, I slept little, disturbed by the suspicion that I had completely destroyed my amorous prospects. On the Bay of Corozal Another not so jolly boat ride was survived at the distant north end of Belize. Corozal is the seat of government for the District of the same name, and it has a rather pleasant waterfront with its own bay and access to the Caribbean. While in that District I searched out and met with the local Social Development Officer. We agreed on visiting the village of Chunox, a byword in Belize City (then still the capital) for remoteness and isolation. Our interest was to see how CARE might help the needful village. Chunox could only be reached by water, out into the Bay, around a promontory later explored for Maya ruins, and into the Bay of Chetumal (named for the nearby Mexican city). Rounding the promontory one then entered a smaller bay at the land end of which is a creek leading into a lagoon. At some three miles to its end lies poor Chunox. We hired an open outboard powered boat and pilot and set off in mid afternoon. The route described went well enough. We were shown around by the village schoolteacher, a man assigned there from the larger Belizean world. So almost all of the needs cited had to with the school building and its supplies. It had taken us an hour and a half to reach Chunox in fair weather. But the start of our return voyage in late afternoon was suddenly rushed because the sky began threatening rain and worse. And storms thereabout were notoriously severe according to the school master. By the time we had reached the open water, rain came in sheets, and the sea became very choppy. We were of course immediately soaked in the open boat. In the darkness with no light from land visible, we seemed barely moving though constantly bouncing on the chops. The regular wind driven sheets of rain seemed to directly assault our already chilled bones. Once around the promontory, the greatest display of lightening I think I have ever seen opened up. It seemed to be almost constantly striking on one side or the other, often so near with immediate thunder that it was easy to fearfully imagine getting struck. There was one benefit from these fireworks. Lightening was so constant it did illuminate the portside nearby promontory and the sea ahead. Eventually it lit up the shore of Corozal town otherwise completely dark because its power had been knocked out by the storm. Time seems to stand still under such rigors, and I am sure that we lurched along in these circumstances for over two hours. It was amazing that I didn’t get seasick to which I had been prone. Corozal had no hotel, only a private home where the owner provided the simplest of bed and breakfast. I had planned to spend the night there, and no Hilton ever provided me with more welcome shelter. In the end I did get some school supplies to Chunox, but not by my own hand and a similar boat ride. Wounded in the Line of Duty In one of my early familiarization rambles I visited the relatively large Mayan village of San Antonio in the interior of the southern Toledo District. In sun-battered mid-day it was a torpid scene. I found where a Peace Corps couple were staying, taking an afternoon rest like the rest of the village After our chat on village activities and possibilities for CARE help, I was directed to the priest who was based here, as the most likely party with lively interest in village uplift. I had been warned that the padre was a bit eccentric, and so he seemed, with ill-connected speech and a rather wild-eyed look. I managed to communicate that the husband of the PC couple had told me that he could teach the village boys simple carpentry if he had a few tools. As part of my be-ready-for-anything approach in my travels, I had a standard CARE kit of just such tools in my Jeep. What did the priest think about such a project? On that we had a clear positive agreement. Father suggested that the village leader be brought out to have a “presentation” of the kit, with the Volunteer also present. (The village tempo seemed to make this something of an out of the ordinary “event.”) To open the large cardboard container, one had to first get rid of the two straps of tight banding metal. My method, of previous usage , was to insert the shaft of a screwdriver under the taut band and, like tightening a tourniquet, twisted until it snapped loose. This time the very tight band explosively flared free and slashed to the bone my left forefinger’s knuckle, with resulting flow of blood. We all considered this unfortunate and in need of attention. San Antonio village and outliers did have a minimally trained but experienced village health nurse visiting there a few days a week and luckily she was reported to be here. After over an hour’s search, she was finally found socializing with a village family. She gave the wound a thoughtful examination and then cleaned it. Rather ruefully, she observed that stitches were required. But all she could find was some plastic fishing line that seemed of inappropriate thickness. That had to do, and she began stitches, only about two or three could fit in the narrow incision. But it was done, with me making macho. That treatment seemed to work, with the scar only slightly visible these 40 years later. The worst effect in my view was that the recent operation kept me from playing on the following Sunday in Belize City with my local baseball team. They Got My Moho Workin’ Recently, while skimming though the Book Review section of the Sunday New York Times (8/8/99), my attention was caught by a newsprint-hazy photo with Belize in the caption. I proceeded to read the review of "Life in the Treetops," Margaret Lowman's memoir on her work as a tropical forest canopy ecologist. The picture shows Lowman and her daughter walking on a cable bridge in Belize, their hands holding onto two upper cables, their feet on narrow planking supported by two lower cables. Gazing at the photo, it hit me that this could be my Moho River bridge, refitted as long ago intended! Everything else was consistent with my memory and photos I had taken and now reviewed. I could be wrong, but even as ordinarily a non-gambler, I would put a small wager on it -- and maybe I'll find out some day! In any case, this triggered another memory of Belize days. In our old CARE office in a section of the rickety British Honduras Customs Shed at the broad mouth of Haulover Creek where it empties into the Caribbean, I was doing some paper work when a government social worker, with whom I had made a number of field trips, came in to set me a proposition that he knew from experience I couldn't refuse. He somehow had received a request from the remote inland Maya village of Santa Teresa in the southernmost District of Toledo, with its 200 inches of rainfall a year and abundant rain forest. Could we go and take a look? The villagers wanted assistance on rebuilding a bridge over the deep and swift Moho River which flows athwart their path to the market town of coastal Punta Gorda. That market took their small plot crops and pigs when they could get them there. Flood water in the last rainy season had crashed a huge floating tree trunk against their ‘bridge’ and knocked it askew. The villagers considered it dangerous to use. Well, that enticing story was all it took to get me, next day, into appropriate clothes and the driver’s seat of the CARE Land Rover. My colleague and I drove to the village of San Lucas at the end of a very rough road. From there we would hike six miles over low but rugged hills and through deep forest to the Moho bridge site. At San Lucas we picked up a Mayan guide. We were joined a short distance along the way by a unique character, one Owen Lewis, an "Englishman," more likely a Welshman, who was built to the scale of a jockey for thoroughbreds. He had been an Indian Agent of the colonial government in this region during the days of more intense British colonialism. Belize was still a colony in l968, but, with internal self-government, had fended off some of the heavier patronage. Lewis wasn't quite sure, but he believed that the bridge in question was one he had helped build some years ago, we would see. I was later to discover that Lewis was something of a Belizean legend. Acquiring some land in remote Toledo District, he had stayed in, or returned to, Belize after his colonialist tour, married a local Mayan woman and started a family in the "bush." Lewis built his own house in a modified Mayan style (separate cookhouse structure, etc.). Out of touch most of the time with the outside world, he made his way by farming on a slightly more scientific Mayan pattern in dense forest surroundings. (Some months later, I walked about 14 miles down an infrequently traveled road and then on trails to Lewis's actual home, after getting stuck overnight on a lonely quagmire on the only road to Punta Gorda. I hoped that he had a tractor, and he did. After taking some time to let me rest and get himself ready, we set off with me riding precariously -- and uncomfortably -- on his Massey-Ferguson 35's fender. Just as Lewis was hauling my Jeep Wagoneer onto tractionable ground, who came bumping along in his Land Rover but the Premier, George Price (seen by some as unpleasantly ‘saintly’). After his driver stopped their car, Price hopped out and, rather impersonally, offered both Lewis and I each an orange, just peeled. Then he was off, no doubt assured of our votes; of course, I was a non-voting non-citizen of Belize. I cannot resist throwing in here a delicious Pricean anecdote. When, with Price still Head of Government, Belize was going through the independence ceremony, bagpipes and all that, on September 21 1981, the senior British bureaucrat present, one Nicholas Ridley, in the peroration of his big handover speech, listed the many blessings that the UK had bestowed on Belize, culminating in a declamatory, ". . . And, Democracy, which is beyond price" (my italics). No one, including Ridley, seemed to get it! That evening on the lawn of Government House, from which Prince Michael and Princess Michael (sic) regally descended, there was a brief shower before the British flag lowering and Belizean raising, done in the momentary dark. As the temporarily tented guests returned to their folding metal chairs, Mr. Price, in character, rushed to the row and chair immediately in front of Zee and me to wipe the moisture from the seat of Grenada's Prime Minister Maurice Bishop as he was about to sit down among his small entourage. (Again my private chuckle.) But back to the Moho escapade: The hike to the Moho was embarrassingly tiring for me, especially the ups and downs through the stony hills, then into stretches through densely canopied rain forest, where the bright sun of that and other days must never reach the shadowed forest floor. That route was so mucky that we often had to try to walk on the surface-running roots of the towering trees. Lewis and the guide were positively balletic at this. Suddenly -- but not quickly enough for me -- we were at the bank of the Moho. I was quite unprepared for the "bridge" we found, while Lewis calmly recognized it as one of his. Anchored, now embedded, around two huge trees, cottonwood on our bank and rosewood on the far side, both with huge flying buttress growths at their base, were three bare, ordinary 3/4 to 1" braided steel cables, each the corner of an airy triangle running the length of the 'trapeze', as it seemed to me. Lewis explained that the original intention was to provide a single cable for the feet of travelers and two upper cables for hand-holds. But now the bridge was sagging a bit and was skewed off the intended perpendicular, both allegedly the result of the encounter with a flood tossed tree. Lewis was the first to test it, and trotted to the far bank and back. I had to have a go, and more slowly imitated him, stopping in the middle to gaze at the fast moving Moho, now some 30 feet below the bridge. (I've got pictures to prove this!) As we surveyed the scene, our guide informed us that the biggest complaint of Santa Teresans was the difficulty that the men had carrying pigs, small children and some women on their shoulders and backs with only a single cable for their feet, while engaging their hands on upper cables. (Try this some time!) This problem must have been there from the bridge’s start, if much worse now. The guide relayed the villagers’ wish for at least a fourth cable to provide a square rigging, on the bottom of which some planking could be fixed. Lewis said that he might be willing to help if the villagers could get the materials. My colleague the government worker wasn't sure what government could do. I said I would see what CARE could do if the villagers would do the work on the refitting with Lewis’s help. Then we had to hurry back before darkness hit the trail, especially through the forest. Back at my Belize City base I scouted for some surplus cable, and found an abundance at the site of the Government broadcasting station. They had recently put up a new tower, and the old guy-wire cables were just lying about, helter-skelter on the ground. I got a knowledgeable Belizean friend to confirm that these had not dangerously deteriorated. Then I asked, and it was given. My government colleague and I loaded the cable in the bed of my Land Rover and drove it to San Lucas where we left it. The villagers there said that they could get word to Santa Teresa, whose people would be responsible for moving it to the site of the bridge. Since my CARE program was labeled "Self-Help", and I strongly believed in local possession of such projects, I didn't want to do more than facilitate, not over- or micro-manage -- so tempting. I became busy with other matters, and I must admit to not following up before I left Belize. Crooked Tree Lagoon At our Customs shed CARE office, one day I was visited by a village school teacher, Mr. Burns, who enthusiastically described a list of community projects for his Crooked Tree village. But these would need essential help from the outside for materials and technical advice. I expressed interest though his vision sounded utopian. He invited my visit. A few arranged days later I put some overnight stuff in my Land Rover truck and headed off. Crooked Tree lies alongside an elongated lagoon, near the middle of its several miles length. I had been directed by Burns to take a last stretch of primitive road that would bring me to the side of Crooked Tree Lagoon opposite the village. My appearance there would be awaited by persons watching on the village bank, and someone would come for me across the lagoon, about 300 yards wide at this point. Around noon I reached the bank where the road ended and waited for the promised signal of conveyance. I dozed here for about an hour, in the still, hot shade of the Land Rover, having become acclimated to Belize Time. Then I began to get worried that I had been forgotten. I understood that the 300 yards of lagoon to be crossed was shallow and in fact could be waded across. A lot of reedy vegetation appeared to me to make this possible So I gave that a try at a point where a straight line of phone or electricity poles crossed and these marked my intended route. About 100 yards in I began to sink deeper in mucky bottom. Another few difficult steps and I was in up to my waist, with the mud up to my thighs. I wasn't quite panicked, but I did feel I couldn't go any further. In some desperation, with my last effort, I desucked my legs, one by one back to the last pole I had passed, shinnied up and began to shout HALOOOO! across the distance to Crooked Tree. where for what seemed an eternity, and to my rising anxiety, there seemed to be no sign of life or movement. Finally, a boy about 10 started wading toward me. When he reached a short distance from my pole, he directed me back several yards and then together we headed off in a new direction and route which never got deeper than my knees. On the sheltering farther bank there was teacher Burns, who found some humor in my escapade while welcoming me warmly. It was now late afternoon. A few village men gathered around us and strongly urged that it was unsafe to leave the Land Rover alone on the far side. One suggestion was to have a village lad cross and stay with the car. But the winning suggestion was to wade back across and then drive a long way around that only the villagers knew and could find. So back across the lagoon went four or five of us, by the experts' route that had the advantage of washing some more of the heavy mud from my trousers. With the acknowledged navigator at my side, and others in the truck bed, I drove for miles through rain forest and savannah on a track only a local expert could possibly have found and followed to arrive at the village side of the lagoon well after dark. My overnight preparations had not allowed for a change of trousers. After a self-splashing 'shower,' Burns found me some pants that gave me a clown-like fit, and that was welcome enough. I shared his bachelor's supper and had a sound sleep in his quarters. Next morning I followed Burns through the village on a route designed to view village project sites. Most of his ideas were of doubtful practicality, but at least partly out of empathy, I asked him to draw up and send me more details for CARE's consideration . Later in the day, with good light, in my truck I followed a local driver for the route out of Cooked Tree without crossing the lagoon. A few weeks later, I learned that Burns had been transferred to a school in another village far from Crooked Tree. Since no one remaining in Crooked Tree seemed inclined to pursue Burns' questionable projects, I could forget about them with some relief. I did run into Burns on other occasions during later stays in Belize. With his high energy and ambitious ideas, he always was bursting with schemes that seemed to rarely suit reality Quite early on in Belize I had met a local kindred spirit. This was Vernon Leslie, the chief “Tutor” at the Belize branch of the University of the West Indies, which position gave him some importance in local society. Our ideas on problems and possible solutions for the development quandaries of this small, poor country seemed to coincide., once he had filled me in on local realities, as he saw them He, in fact, seemed delighted to find someone with whom to discuss such ideas, and we became close personal friends in the process. His personal clout eased me into a number of other useful contacts. I was saddened to get word hardly a year after leaving Belize that this seemingly healthy, energetic young man had died. Chapter 7 Out of Belize . . and Into Nigeria Hardly a year after our marriage, and Zee well advanced in pregnancy, I was informed by CARE headquarters that they wanted me to join a new project in Nigeria. Some months earlier in a short visit to New York, I had been lobbied by a friend, Henry, from Turkey days, who had been designated to head the project, to accompany him to Nigeria when the planning and preparations were ready for implementation on the ground. I expressed interest but heard nothing more until the headquarters call came, asking me with some urgency to prepare to head to Nigeria. Though ignorant of what would actually be faced, I was rather keen for the adventure. In spite of the imminence of our first child, Zee was favorably inclined though preoccupied with early accouchement. The Nigeria job would have me in the once Eastern Region which had gone to war in 1967 to separate itself and had taken the name of Biafra. Much of the old Region had been retaken by Federal forces, and I was to work in schemes of "Rehabilitation" outside the immediate war zone, based in the recovered Regional capital of Enugu. Zee's delivery missed the predicted date by a week, then two, then three. And all the while headquarters was urging me to get there for briefing and early departure. Holly was safely delivered, in fact was a very large baby, which made Zee's part especially difficult. When Zee was suddenly to be taken to the delivery room, I quickly went for her mother who, according to plan, would join with me in the delivery room. But when I got back with Mrs. Tucker the room's door was sealed and we had to sit outside, waiting anxiously. Because of the difficult delivery, Zee was in great discomfort for several days once she left she hospital. I now look back with some feelings of guilt because I left Belize for New York only two weeks after Holly's birth, rationalizing that Zee would be surrounded by her family and in good hands. To my disgust, once in NY, there seemed less urgency and some time was wasted which could have been better spent in Belize. Erstwhile Biafra After fretfully hanging around the CARE headquarters in New York for about two weeks, I headed for Nigeria on my own. Holly had been born just two weeks before I left Belize, and I was angry that the bosses had torn me from my new family without the urgency they implied. Nigeria was at civil war in September 1969. The rebellious once Eastern Region had rechristened itself Biafra, at the end of the 1960s and hung on until the beginning of the 70s. I would work in the large part of the rebellious state that the Federal Government had retaken. Zee and Holly would follow me after a prudent two months delay. The Project In the course of our Project my small American team, among other things, reconstructed destroyed bridges over 25 of the many small streams, damaged rural health centers, and distributed critically needed yam (with some ritual significance) seedlings I was designated Program Officer for the East Central State (ECS), the rebelling Igbo heartland, which was by now largely retaken by Federal forces. In agreement with the Federal authorities, my team was to operate, for starters, in the then "liberated areas," and later more broadly. We were to assist in various rehabilitation projects to be spelled out on the ground. Since it was, of course, war time, soldiers were running the country, even to dominating, at their whim and gun, life in the streets and countryside. It was late in the civil war; Biafra would surrender after four more months. I had arrived in Nigeria about six weeks and had been in my ESC post, Enugu, for about one month before returning to the capital, Lagos, to meet Zee and Holly upon their arrival. None of the other American members of my team, two engineers and an agriculturalist, were yet on hand or imminent. CARE had a central office in Lagos . It operated as a channel for ordering, receiving, through a maddeningly Byzantine customs system, and dispatching materials for our ECS project, and for another of smaller scale in the Southeast State, based in Calibar. Our Lagos office also maintained contact with the National Rehabilitation Council and other central organs, and more regular contact with USAID-Nigeria which was the major funder of our two CARE Nigerian projects. Our office in Lagos was pleasantly situated in part of a neatly old, still operating, Methodist boys school compound, overlooking the Marina Drive and the lagoon, on the far side of which was Apapa, the port of Lagos . Housing, including good hotels, was short and very expensive in Lagos. So our CARE Mission Chief, Henry Sjaardema, had wisely taken these quarters with a second floor where two large rooms with baths could be used as temporary housing when Enugu and Calibar field staff and their families -- eventually to number six altogether -- were en route to their posts or in for provisioning and consultation visits. In Lagos, Sjaardema, whom I had known in Turkey, was assisted by Phil James, a brisk, pleasant looking, short young man with some of the Napoleonic tendencies of that stature.. Around these two were gathered a small local supporting staff and a part-time British secretary. After an initial two weeks in Lagos, for introductions, program discussions, shots, and minimum provisioning, I set off, accompanied by Phil. Before I arrived in Lagos, Phil had spent a few weeks in the ECS for a preliminary survey of potential rehabilitation projects in the "war affected areas." After winding our way across western Nigeria, we arrived on the Niger River at Lokoja, the only ferry point reported to be operating at the time. The only bridge to the east, at Onitsha on the far side, had been blown by the Biafrans fairly early in the war. We arrived at Lokoja in the evening and spent the night at the Government Rest House. In the early morning, we joined at the waterside a startlingly large, disorderly 'queue,' largely of trucks, with the drivers maneuvering frenziedly for inches of advantage and 'negotiating' vigorously, sometimes furiously, with the meandering soldiers who seemed to be in charge. All was animation, with small boys, many of them drivers' helpers, scurrying about, and market women strolling languorously through the throng hawking "fine bread," balanced in trays on their heads. This was a flood season on the Niger and the water at its highest level in years. This meant that the regular ferry landings could not be used. One of two battered, off-shore ferries was apparently to make the crossing and was resting across some thirty feet of water from the bank. I watched in wonder as the first trucks made mad splashing dashes across this gap and climbed, roaring, up the steep mounting ramp to the ferry's deck. In our smallest model Peugeot we somehow got into position to try it next. After watching the spectacle of the bigger trucks, it seemed madly impossible even to try it with our little vehicle. But Phil got a good running start and we somehow slithered up onto the deck with the intermittent help of the gang of wading laborers who seemed there just for this purpose. No doubt Phil's palaver with one or more of the swaggering soldiers had a good deal to do with our even having a chance to board. While gratefully resting after passing this trial, we began to hear rumors that in fact this ferry was not able to operate. We sat around for some two hours while rumors around this theme ebbed and flowed. Finally, about mid-day we were lashed to the other ferry and set off across what appeared to be a very wide lake. The Niger is joined at Lokoja by Nigeria's other large river, the Benue. On the other side, again, the normal landing could not be used. Some one hundred feet of shallow, but rocky-bottomed water had to be crossed. I had the wheel this time and with another miracle we somehow got through after the attending gang of laborers pulled us off a submerged rock on which we were temporarily hung. After showing our military passes at several check points and suffering a few irritatingly conducted inspections of our bursting luggage cargo, we arrived at the Enugu Government Rest House in early evening. I should admit here that I gawked at the bare breasted women occasionally seen walking along certain stretches of the roads on this far side of the Niger. There were a number of other relief and aid organizations working around Enugu and this resulted in one or two vehicles usually traveling to Lagos every week. Soon a consortium of these agencies began regular weekly shuttles between Lagos and Enugu. To avoid the outrageous and uncertain ferry situation for vehicles, one vehicle would come to the riverside, with only the passengers and light luggage crossing on the ferry, a much easier matter, and on the far side they would be met by an arranged vehicle from Lagos. Mail was also moved by this route. Although the Enugu airfield was not open to regular flights, on most days there would be a few landings by Nigerian Air Force DC-3s on which it was not too difficult to wheedle a ride out. Shortly after Phil and I arrived in Enugu, he with near manic impatience, sought out an acquaintance of his previous visit, one Chudi Odenigbo, who was officially the Public Relations Officer of the ECS Rehabilitation Commission. Odenigbo had thrust himself forward as the key activist on several fronts, no doubt, as he disgustedly hinted, because he felt the nominal Chairman, Mr. Graham, was a chair borne do-nothing. With Phil working through Odenigbo and myself with Graham, we somehow put together a trip out through some of the war affected and, as it later turned out, still guerilla-war touched areas to the west of Enugu in the Awka-Achalla areas and to the once and future market center of Umuleri-Aguleri. But the latter's market place was completely under water at the time of our visit since the local Anambra River is a tributary of the then backed up Niger. At a later visit the market was several yards above the Anambra.. I remember the whole trip being very harrowing . We set off in our own little CARE Peugeot. After driving a considerable distance, at an Army field headquarters we joined a sergeant and an officer and rode in their Land Rover over a variety of badly deteriorated roads. At regular intervals we pulled into other commandeered military posts; there must have been on the order of ten visited that day. At each we either had to share a meal that was in course or consume large, bloating amounts of Star Beer, never in short supply. Our military vehicle and soldiers made our check-point passages entirely easy. Our Rehabilitation Commission group hoped to be off the road before darkness because we had been in a still somewhat active military area where the checkpoints, or rather their manning soldiers, tended to have hair triggers and were often rowdily drunk on palm wine. We didn't clear the last officer's ‘club,’ situated in a rural school compound near a huge out of commission electricity generating plant until well after dark. Here we picked up our Peugeot, and since Phil had driven it out, I drove us back. This stretch of the road was of comparatively good asphalt and I moved at a brisk pace. Odenigbo, a rather forceful, boisterous man, complained that I was going too fast and no matter how I slowed down, he kept up this complaint. I couldn't see exactly why, but it wasn't long before I discovered his reasoning. While we were moving along in pitch darkness, still somewhat briskly, a soldier suddenly leaped out onto the road well in front of us and braced himself menacingly with his AK-47. There were a few other soldiers alongside the road manning what appeared to be a machine gun or anti-tank weapon. Odenigbo began a stream of orders to me with such rapidity that I couldn't keep up. When I turned on the lights inside the car so that we could be seen as 'innocent' he screamed for me to turn them off. It seemed that it was also important to stop at a certain respectable distance from the soldiers, to allow them to advance toward us for exploration. I didn't seem to do that exactly to Odenigbo's taste either. Since the soldiers typically had no literacy skills, our passes and papers meant nothing to them. Odenigbo took charge of this rite of passage and, apparently by uttering some slogans in the Hausa language got us through the first and then each check point thereafter. But each of these 4 or 5 was about as scary as the first. The soldiers all seemed ready to shoot in an instant and were in a sort of panic themselves as our headlights suddenly flicked on the road they were to guard at the cost of their lives. I came to understand that discipline in the Nigerian Army was often enforced in a singularly immediate and uncompassionate fashion. When we got back to Enugu, I was vastly relieved, and with my nerves at full stretch, I reflected on how easily I could be cut down, as had happened to two other relief workers, in the prime of my life by any one of the checkpoint soldiers. I also came to learn later that at that late stage of the war, travel at night was in fact forbidden. So we must have been as much of a challenging surprise to these soldiers as their appearance and manners were to me. The army officers' posts that we visited on this early trip were full of bustling, boisterous types, seemingly full of beans and of themselves. They said that they faced no organized opposition in these areas. Although there were occasional Biafran forays and guerilla ventures, they claimed to handle these easily. At two of these posts I was aware of some bound men, probably Biafran soldiers, being dragged behind the buildings in a singularly unkind manner, gagged as well as bound. I didn't think my keen interest in these matters would be appreciated by our hosts, so I tended to avert my attention to the extent possible. Not much later than this, around the very end of the war, on my trip with Engineer Ariwode to assess damage at the Abakaliki Rest House, in the east of the State, we stopped for obligatory visits at a few military posts. At one there on the burning hot clay of the yard were four or five nearly naked men, trussed ankles to wrists at their backs, writhing about, with an occasional kick administered by the Federal soldiers casually meandering in the area. I was told that they were Biafran guerillas. I was later told by people who should know that it was hard to distinguish between genuine guerillas who were part of some military purpose and the numerous men of the area who simply took the occasion to take to the bush as self-serving Robbing Hoods. Phil seemed in no hurry to return to Lagos although Sjaardema had urged him to do so promptly. Phil was a prickly person and sharing quarters with him for three weeks was beginning to wear. He also tended to be overly assertive and impatient with local officials, clouding their view of my authority at times. So I was happy enough when he decided to leave for Lagos by car with the Enugu representative of the Nigerian/American Tobacco Company. Colonel Mohammed’s Convoy In my early days in the East, on the main road between Awka and Onitsha was a rather startling sight. There was for at least 1/8th of a mile in length beside the road a line of mangled, uniformly rust colored, nose to rear end military vehicles. I learned the story of “Mohammed’s convoy” sometime later, after it was cleared away, from Prof. Okigbo who before the war was the dean of the Agricultural School at Nsukka University. During the Biafra civil war, Okigbo had been made the chief procurer of food supplies for the very irregular but clever Biafra fighters who kept the war going for over two years with very little in the way of an ‘army.’ The most spectacular, and at the time media-riveting source of supplies, came through the night flights, spiraling down to a widened stretch of road called, Landing strip Annabelle and one or two less used similarly improvised strips. These flights, at least the food provisions—alleged by the Federals as also covers for arms shipments -- had had been mounted by an ad hoc Joint Provision Service, largely a coalition of protestant churches, but behaving as a quite secular operation from islands with stockpiles out in the nearby Atlantic. Okigbo’s story: The main road west of Awka was a sort of ‘understood’ dividing line between the rebel and Federal forces’ areas of control. The Federal, the northern, side was one of abundant agricultural production, especially the favored yams and cassava. So Okigbo and his providers occasionally made nighttime ‘raids’ across the road to collect provender from no doubt sympathetic villagers. On the way back to the south side, moving stealthily, the food raiders spotted a long Federal military convoy, with the vehicles unwisely bunched close together. Once on their side of the road, the Biafran raiders set up the home-made mortar that they had carried or just acquired. They shot off all but one round and all had misfired. But the very last mortar shot hit a fuel tanker in the middle of the convoy, causing a huge explosion that set off rolling expulsions of ammunition and other fuel vehicles all along the bunched convoy, igniting it from end to end. Okigbo and his corps were jubilant and were welcomed home as heroes of the Biafans who even after the losing cause treasured such tales and others of their self-made munitions and paraphernalia of war, such as tractors covered with metal plates and a bomb carried in buckets, the” Ojukwu Bucket.” after the Igbo general and leader The end of the war saw a remarkably Lincolnesque, forgiving regime. On occasion I found my self among a group of reinstated once Biafran officials. They hugely enjoyed retelling, to responsive chuckles, of the many resourceful self-made devices and conjured subterfuges that had befuddled the Federal side and drawn out the war. Radio Biafra had not been off the air for a single day till the end of the war. Zee & Holly Arrive At 10 AM on October 25, l969 I was yelling my wife's name, Zee, with all my might across some 75 yards of noisy tarmac at Lagos' Ikeja International Airport. I was outside the wire fence when she got off the Pan Am flight and onto the terminal-bound bus. She was carrying our two-month-old daughter, Holly, whom I had known for only two weeks before surrendering to headquarters' importunities to hurry to my new CARE post. Zee could not hear me. After much hassling and wheedling, I was finally allowed to join her inside the arrivals terminal, a moiling chaos where one initially always seemed to be found violating some requirement for entry. But a liberal admixture of "security men" in plain casual clothing hung about ready to personally ease one through the hurdles in anticipation of heartfelt gratitude, monetarily expressed. Despite the thief’s carnival at the airport, a contrary experience was related. Once in the CARE quarters Zee realized that she had, not surprisingly given the hubbub and heat at the airport, left her new blue light coat there. Prepared to write off the loss, we despairingly called the airport. Wonder of wonders, it had been found and retained as a lost item by officials. We were invited, and did, collect the coat at our convenience! . Another Lokoja Crossing and Beyond When Zee , two month old Holly and I took our first trip from Lagos to Enugu in late October l969, we crossed the Niger at the same Lokoja point. But now the river was lower and we could get on the ferry from the dry landing. And we disembarked on the far side onto dry land even though it was extremely uneven, and I consider it another miracle chalked up to our small Peugeot that we managed. Perhaps our very full, compact load helped here. But it complicated matters at another point. I had not been very smart and had failed to provide for all contingencies regarding petrol. I had expected to be able to fill up, as I had on my first trip, at Anka, half way between the Niger crossing and Enugu. This time a lone boy at the shabby 'station' said they had "no supply". I knew then that without divine intervention we would run out of fuel before Enugu. By a great good stroke of luck, as I now anxiously drove along the hopelessly long remaining miles, we passed through a village that seemed to be festive with some sort of ceremony, and there we spotted the District Officer (D.O.) who knew me. He gladly wrote out a chit and told us to take it to his official's home in nearby Nsukka, where his staff would give us enough petrol to make the last 40 miles to Enugu. Unfortunately I missed the short turnoff road to Nsukka and on the longer route ran out of petrol on a lonely, barren stretch of road in the very hot late afternoon. More fortunately, a Federal Police lorry came by as I was thinking about hiking down the road, and the kindly officer offered to siphon off enough for us to get to nearby Nsukka. That got us to the D.O.'s compound and the providential petrol supply at one of the outbuildings of the quite bizarre 'gingerbread' main house. The District Officer's wife came and chatted with us in a very friendly fashion, noting that she was a trained and experienced hospital nurse. Now she was staying home partly because she was recovering from a severe auto accident injury but, perhaps more controlling, also to take care of her new baby. Seeing our infant Holly, she announced that she was bottle feeding her child and that her husband had supported her in this. She seemed quite proud of this modern innovation and of her husband's progressive outlook. The D.O., Mr. Eme, had earlier had me inside his house and his successor did so later. The interior was very strangely done. After passing through doors that were cut into the eaves that almost touched the ground, one found interior walls of marvelously thick adobe into which had been worked at every practicable point rather fanciful niches and even a symbolic fireplace. All this of course suggested that the designer had drawn his inspiration from another region and climate. Our Peugeot had passed through a number of Federal checkpoints on the Enugu side of the Niger with what was really about the normal amount of confusion, delay, unsatisfactory communication and arrogance on the part of the soldiers who were frequently showing signs of generous palm wine consumption. As we were pulling off the dog-leg from Nsukka to join the main road, we were stopped at another checkpoint. The soldiers were, as so often, probably of Hausa ethnicity, with limited command of English. The more forceful of two soldiers kept shouting "clear," and in my nerves-stretched confusion I thought he meant for me to empty the hardly restorable compactness of our load. After trying to angrily impart that, in the circumstances I insisted on seeing his commanding officer, to no effect, I made a gesture toward pulling out our cargo, but my wife suggested that we were simply to pull further off the road. Just so. Then while the first soldier was trying to read our papers and sternly implying that they were not correct, the other soldier wandered around the car and suddenly shouted something in great surprise. He had seem Holly perched on top of her cot mattress just inches under the roof of our Peugeot. He called the first soldier and they both ogled Holly in the jolliest of wonder. Their mood changed from threatening to almost friendly, and with chuckles they waved us on our way. Guest House Quarters Our first lodgings, which I had earlier shared with Phil James, were in one of the “chalets” (single large room and bathroom) of the government’s provision. The compound included a restaurant and bar. We took our meals there for a week or two, but ten decided we could be more tastefully and better-nourished using a borrowed two-burner propane camp stove. Our first and only houseboy, seemingly dedicated Denis, did effective shopping for us, as well as the cleaning of the room and seeing to the laundry and then doing the ironing. We had to wait about one month in these circumstances before our permanent housing was available. Before that tiny Holly slept in a carrier meant for mobility until a crib was somehow found. Amazing Coincidence Just as the war was ending, we were invited to a sort of celebration in a meeting room with seats of crude planking, which featured a few speeches and considerable dancing and other talents of local children. Inside the extensive park like Government grounds we had a brief search for the right building. As we drove slowly on the single lane road, another vehicle, a Government labeled Land Rover came from the other direction. We both stopped before managing the awkward passing. The slow maneuvers allowed all parties to get a good look at the others. Just as they pulled away, Zee gave me an amazed look She was almost sure that the official in the car was one Lindsey Barrett, with whom she had worked as a trainee journalist on the Jamaica Gleaner more than ten yeas ago! Only a minute or two passed before the same Land Rover came up behind us and in a slow dance signaled that they wanted to come abreast. In that configuration the Barrett person leaned over to ask if we knew where to find the same building that was our target. This and our answer of uncertainty had a phlegmatic, lingering quality as each waited for the other vehicle to proceed, but they insisted in waiting for our lead. Once in the meeting place, Barrett sat himself just one row behind us but on the other side of the small hall. By now Zee was sure that she had made the right identification, and that his car had turned around and come up to us because Barrett, too, had suspected seeing someone from his past in Zee. During the rather dreary, long drawn-out performances, suffered through on the singularly uncomfortable planks, Zee studiously avoided looking in Barrett’s direction. But I glanced his way every now and then (perhaps at Zee’s wishes) and I usually found Barrett looking our way, with a puzzled look on his face. Zee was almost certain that they had recognized one another. The event broke up with no further communication with Barrett. Latter we learned that he had just then been appointed as the temporary Public Information Officer for our East Central State. Strangely enough he must have been very temporary because we never saw him again. But we did some weeks later see his picture over a now African name in an editorial in one of the occasionally arriving Government newspapers with a Lagos dateline. The Domestic Scene One of the phenomena that persisted throughout our stay in Enugu was the range of tensions among the servants in our government provided house and compound with its nearby "boys quarters." Our first employee was the slightly dimwitted, but good natured, chap named Dennis, who had offered himself and was engaged while we spent our first weeks in one of the "chalets" of the Government Rest House complex. . Because he had been our first and a willing helper, we felt that we should keep him on in the new large, at first filthy and stripped house, dating from colonial days, when it became available. After that move our next establishment move was to hire a cook highly recommended by a departing British family. Benjamin over time proved very competent, not necessarily as a cook, in his own, more than a little headstrong, way. He actually had the style, and I believe competence to have managed a larger, more complex organization. In fact, he may have had some traditional leadership status. Of course he was happy to have this job in this disorganized period approaching the end of the war. But he always seemed about to burst out of his bounds and managed rather more of our establishment than we wanted from him. In any case, when we needed temporary or permanent supplements to our household 'staff', we always sought Benjamin's advice or simply asked him to produce someone who could do the job. He first produced a night watchman. We had the project trucks parked in our yard, which added to the need. Other service people, such as cutter of the grass in our baronial compound were also Benjamin's nominees. Once Benjamin felt secure in his position, he began suggesting that we replace Dennis with one of his choice. Apparently Dennis was not of his family-tribal connection. We were too fond of simple but willing Dennis for this. There were four detached, bare rooms, known as "boys' quarters," about 12 by 12 feet each, built in a row along one edge of our demesne, with shared outside toilet and cooking facilities. As time went by, so gradually that we hardly noticed until it was well advanced, more and more people from Benjamin's family and village came to be living in the boys' quarters. Of course Benjamin's wife would come from their village from time to time to stay with him. We of course had no wish to be oppressive or patronizing masters, quite the contrary. So we paid as little attention or concern to the area of these quarters as possible, realizing Benjamin and his strong personality must be holding sway there, with occasional late night jollity. But upon realizing that the number of people traipsing back and forth across parts of our yard gave it the appearance of a small village square, we talked to some of the people living there, including one of our drivers. We came to find out that something like 29 people were inhabiting these four rooms. Since there weren't nearly enough beds for all of these people, it seemed that every room was being slept in on shifts around the clock by people from Benjamin's village who managed to find some sort of work, usually on a short term rotating basis, in Enugu city. During the time when Benjamin was building up his kindred population on our premises, Zee began getting rather pitiful complaints from Dennis that Benjamin was trying to drive him off the property. When I talked to Benjamin about this and said that this must stop, he vehemently answered that there as no truth to these complaints, except to the extent that Dennis had caused him and others trouble and that he was only getting his own back; certainly nothing unfair or harassing would be done to poor Dennis But the tension never stopped. Dennis complained to me of a few occasions, and I witnessed one, where he was set upon by two or three of Benjamin's clansmen. In one case I personally broke up a fist-fight between Dennis and Benjamin. Benjamin had to be warned again that Dennis was here to stay. Not long after this, and near the end of our tour, Benjamin left our employ, with our patience exhausted over his increasing high-handedness. Dennis was gleeful and fell all over himself, inept chap that he was, trying to fill the serving gap, sometimes bringing in his own friends for particular task needs. We had of course made the classical mistake that all the old hand expatriates, and perhaps common sense, held was an invitation to household chaos if not disaster. We had mixed tribal origins. Benjamin and his kith and kin came from Ngwe, up on the heights above Enugu, and Dennis came from distant, eastern Abakaliki. Bill the Builder
 One of the most colorful personalities to cross my life's meandering path came along as my first new CARE technician colleague in Enugu. Bill arrived as the Biafran civil war was coming to an end at the beginning of l970. He was critical to my CARE team whose mission was to restore, as feasible, basic facilities destroyed or damaged by the war in "liberated" parts of disappearing Biafra, That new entity had been created in l967 from the southeastern region of Nigeria. Blown bridges and ruptured roads became parts of the landscape that Bill was to work on.
 Bill was an uncredentialed but very creative civil engineer, who had previous experience with CARE in other countries. His style was often rather Falstaffian. He was comfortable with the working-men of other cultures who usually found Bill a jolly, ready to share a drink, mate. But his interests also ranged to aspects of aesthetics and the intellectual.
 My wife, Zee, and I and our infant daughter Holly had only recently arrived in Nigeria and more recently settled into our old colonial officers' house in Enugu,. We had been notified by our CARE Lagos base, 550 miles to the west, that Bill had arrived there and would soon join us as my first staff technician, but no exact date was given. One afternoon, no more likely than another, Bill, alone in an open Jeep, drove into our decaying, tarred driveway that arced from, and back into, our still quiet street. This was just as the war was ending and the slow beginning of the massive return of the Igbo (Biafra's ethnic core) to Enugu from which almost everyone had fled two years ago at the approach of the advancing Federal troops. Bill jumped out of his Jeep at our front steps, and his glee at our introductions showed his great relief and delight at having arrived safely. Introductions hardly over, he pulled out a guitar, sat down on the driveway, and sang for our Holly "The Fox He Went on the Town-Oh." All three of our family were as surprised as we were delighted with this serenade. We immediately took Bill to our hearts. And he seemed pleased with us. With the brief recital over he went to the Jeep with a mischievous hint of having a mysterious cargo for us. Out came four burlap sacks, which he put down and asked me to look inside. Two contained bundles of Nigerian pound notes and each of the other two held several small cloth sacks of coins! Total value, Bill said, was 30,000 Nigerian Pounds, each equaling about US$1.50! I had informed our Lagos office of our need for cash to get our project going, hoping in my pre-exploration ignorance that it could be accomplished by some sort of bank transfer, but Lagos found that none of the connected banks were open yet in Enugu, and so entrusted the fortune to Bill for delivery. When Bill arrived there were still no banks in operation, but one was to open "soon." There was no place to safely stash this large hoard. Our first office was only two doorless rooms in a large building housing several other offices making up the Rehabilitation Commission. The only immediate option for hiding the money seemed somewhere in our sparely furnished house. Bill was to occupy a smaller bare house across the street. in this heretofore quiet neighborhood. And this was a time when law and order hardly existed in the empty city to which self-exiled Igbos, with their wartime ethos, were starting to return in numbers, giving those days a feeling of great unpredictability in our situation. We had only mild unarmed Dennis then on our property. Almost the only furniture in our house was a crude wooden wardrobe whose lockless doors didn't completely close. This was the only possible hiding-place out of sight in the whole house once we improvised the doors' closing. Since we didn't know quite when a local bank would open, we were in for a number of uneasy days and nights with our project's treasury. It was in fact about one week before a bank, which we checked on daily, did open, at which time we rushed there with the money. We then spent half a day at the Bank of Nigeria branch counting out the small denomination notes and coins with a bank officer and then getting documents of deposit. But for Bill this was tame stuff. He had a far more dramatic tale; about his journey from Lagos to Enugu. First, he was driving alone in a country unknown to him, at a relatively lawless time when armed soldiers, among others, knew little discipline. Most expatriates always had a local driver on trips of any sort, let alone one of this considerable length, over war-neglected two-lane roads. There had to be a ferry crossing, managed by the Federal military, over the wide Niger river at this time, since the only bridge to the East had been blown early in the war. Bill hoped to arrive at the bridge point on the river early enough to cross before the ferry would be arbitrarily closed by the armed soldiers who were in charge of the general disorder at the busy crossing. Because my whole family later spent some anxious time trying and waiting to get our small Peugeot aboard the military pontoon 'vessel' that provided this crossing, I came to understand the scene he faced at the riverside. Bill arrived too late to get across that evening! In some ways this might have been fortunate because on the far side after dark, which he would have experienced, for several hours before arriving at Enugu, lawlessness increased considerably in the "war-affected" area he would pass through. But here Bill was, with four riches-laden money bags, facing an overnight in the riverside's open area, fairly densely populated by others who missed the day's ferry; practically a thieves’ carnival of rowdy, and often high on beer or palm wine, truck-drivers and their assistants, various hustlers, and of course the unpredictable, uncontrolled soldiers. Since the Jeep was too cramped for Bill's fairly bulky frame to stretch out, and it was hot and humid near the river, he opted to sleep half under the Jeep with the money bags under and around his head as pillows. He never complained of a poor sleep, and knowing Bill's bravura persona, I can imagine that he just might have slept quite soundly. He got across next morning. Traveling in daylight on the remaining reaches of his journey was far safer of passage. And this brings us back to near the beginning of this recount, with Bill safely at our Enugu home. He stayed with us for a few days, but soon got his own smaller house, across the street, basically equipped and he shifted there. Finbar and the Yams Our first major CARE project effort was an emergency distribution of yam seedlings for the growth of the region's most valued, even sacred, subsistence crop. When it seemed well underway with considerable momentum, we had our first big scandal. Shortly after my arrival, while I was searching for a good local chief staff assistant, Chairman Graham of the Rehabilitation Commission put me onto one Finbar Nguabu, whom he had worked with and claimed to be of top ability and energy. Finbar then held some job at a District Officer's headquarters in Okigwe. I traveled the short distance there with this and other business in mind. I was favorably impressed and Finbar was delighted to accept my offer. His seconding was neatly expedited by means obscure to me. Of course Graham had a hand, probably the major one, in bringing this off. I relied, quite naturally, on Finbar for many things which needed to be done in something of a rush. We arrived at the idea of locating a number ( we chose 10) of "well-reputed" contract seedling suppliers, with whom a fixed price would be negotiated. This was the method by which our first procurement of seedlings was accomplished. Our first few weeks at this went off with growing, seemingly effective, momentum. Then I began getting rather sheepish hints from another, younger staff person, who was new but whom I later came to esteem quite highly, of something amiss. Bill, my first arriving US staffer, was initially put directly in charge of the distribution, and he regularly relayed hints of peculation on Finbar's part from our growing local staff, especially our truck drivers and workers. I interviewed all of our yam contractors and only one admitted to any unusual connection with Finbar, and even this was vague and confused, in some part relating to Finbar's importunities for the contractor to supply him with food and drink. However, whatever their protestations of innocence which were of course necessary for the safety of the contractors themselves, I got a distinct sense that something was wrong, at least by formal 'western' notions of ethics and administration, ostensibly recognized in Nigeria. . . To my surprise, light skinned Graham, when I put Finbar’s case before him, seemed rather tickled -- he ordinarily giggled a lot -- and there was an implied, if not actual, “Ah-Ha! He began to make all sorts of reasonably direct and innuendo references to Finbar’s character. Of course I was surprised because Graham had first recommended Finbar highly to me. I then heard from others that Graham and Finbar had been very close in another Federal food and relief operation, and that aspersions had been cast on each of their conducts. I later learned that each had something blackmailable on the other, but neither dared make accusations because of the “pot and the kettle” relationship. I guessed that Graham’s getting Finbar our job was a kind of payoff, making sure that Finbar would be in a position where he owed Graham his continuing employment. The idea that someone else had found flaws in Finbar, and was contemplating some disciplinary action, absolutely delighted Graham. He promised to support whatever action I might take involving the dismissal of Finbar. Any real investigation was out of the question because of the time pressures on the urgent, for planting, yam seedling distribution and the difficulty of getting frank answers from self-protecting parties, sophisticated in these matters. After all reasonable inquiries, I talked to Finbar about the awkward, murky situation, telling him that I felt that I must discharge him to keep the image of our operation as untarnished as possible; that the suspicions raised must be erased. He seemed to understand perfectly, if sadly, and he proceeded to responsibly finish off his work and move on. To my surprise, and to his credit, Finbar sent me an envelope a few weeks later stuffed with 40 Nigerian Pound notes, the amount which I had earlier personally loaned him when he was setting up his Enugu household. Before he had moved his family, there had been another awkward episode involving Finbar. In anticipation of further foreign staff scheduled to join my team, we had been assigned a large house directly across the street from my family’s. Since no occupant was expected soon, Finbar had asked if he could stay there temporarily. suggesting that this would help secure the house for our future use. In this chaotic time at the war’s end, its citizens and others were flocking to Enugu and squatting in, or stripping, any empty structures. So I agreed and Finbar moved in with his string bed. Soon after this, USAID brought in a team of 12 helicopter pilots and service personnel for a spectacular, if of dubious necessity, operation to carry food aid to supposedly hard to reach areas. No housing arrangements had been made for them, and USAID asked if they could use our empty -- except for Finbar -- house. I agreed if they would let Finbar remain in his corner of the ten room two floor house till he found other quarters. He did not manage this very promptly, and he began complaining to me that he was being treated badly by the all-American helicopter lads, reportedly just fresh from Vietnam. And the helicopters’ headman complained to me that they didn’t want to share a house with a “native.” Since we had an unoccupied guest room in our house at the moment, we let Finbar move in with us. Generally mature sport that he was, he pledged to find other quarters as soon as possible, and he left after one undisturbing week, still in our employ at the time. With Finbar to go, and the contractors arrangements for yam seedling distribution crumbling -- and Bill wanting to be shed of the matter -- in the short time remaining for planting, a big decision was quickly required. The result was the prompt response to my request for an experienced CARE man from India to join us for a plan. That was to simply ‘advertise’ that we would buy good quality seedlings on sight if they were to be brought to a vacant, open agriculture dept. facility where price competition would establish the prices paid per grade. This was surprisingly successful. Truck loads came in and were heaped on an open parking area. With local advice we chose the qualifying lots and dispatched them directly to designated villages. I accompanied one truckload to a village where the Chief had the lot piled in his council chamber, more of a spirit lodge, with human skulls and other ritual paraphernalia forming a wall top border. Altogether the general distribution was considered a qualified success. Replacing Finbar Losing the very useful and depended upon Finbar needed a quick remedy. Soon after the time of my family’s arrival, we met Phil Achener and his wife Monika. Phil had been assigned to look after the considerable USAID property placed in and around Enugu for major development work in that Region before he war. We became close friends. Phil, who was very energetic in taking useful initiatives in that time of chaos, helped us in many ways in our household setting up from the properties he controlled, most critically a propane fed American gas range and a kerosene fueled refrigerator. One of Phil’s major responsibilities was to deal with the several former local employees of USAID who were returning to Enugu and seeking reemployment. Phil’s first order from Lagos was to hire them all. That order was almost immediately countermanded, to just keep them waiting for a rehire decision. This left the former chief local administrator for USAID in Enugu, Godson (last name forgotten) in limbo with a large family to sustain. In a conversation with Phil, he volunteered that this former well evaluated manager might be seconded to our project to fill in after Finbar until we found someone else or Godson might be needed by Phil. Godson did yeoman work for us until he was needed. At that point, with some anticipatory thinking and observing, I felt that a bright young man, Nkemdirim Nwigwe, already on my staff could handle the assisting manager job. He turned out to be a gem! The Threat on Godson’s Life Since our project owned two Jeeps, and two trucks, we had a vehicle maintenance problem with no established service yet in Enugu. Bill proposed hiring a mechanic. He had come across Chuks who represented himself as having been the chief mechanic of the large USAID base in Enugu for that part of the country before the war. With no other candidate, I agreed and Bill hired him. About one month later, Bill came to me with a negative report on Chuks’s usefulness. He had also learned from Phil that the real chief mechanic, John, for USAID had just reported to Phil, but could not be immediately hired. Bill wanted to fire Chuks and hire John. Now Chuks was built and looked like a mini-Mike Tyson, and with his rather blank expression could be seen as menacing. Bill said in no way would he want to be the one to confront and fire Chuks. Two days later Godson visited me at our home in a quivering rage. Chucks had just visited him at his home and threatened in front of the family to kill Godson for arranging to get Chuks, as he believed, fired. Godson was informing me, as a courtesy, that he intended to go to the authorities over this extreme criminal threat by Chuks. I was of course shocked and also sympathetic while trying to calm his extreme excitement. I asked him to think about his proposed action for a day while we all, Phil, Bill and Godson got together to discuss how to handle Chuks, as I did at home with Zee. The very next day Godson came to me considerably cooled down and said that he had decided to do nothing in regard the police, implying that he lacked faith in the justice system of the time. He felt that Chuks's threat was unlikely to be carried out even if he were discharged. He further implied that his cultural dignity was adequately served by making me and others aware of Chuks's insulting threat which Godson’s family had seen, to his initial shame. The actual discharge of Chuks would be further salving. After all my consultations, I decided that I would discharge Chuks without any reference to his threat on Godson. I would use the dodging explanation that we were doing away with his mechanic position. When I bought Chuks into my office to discharge him with this dodge, he seemed quite calm and unsurprised and accepted my explanation and decision quite matter of factly. Throughout our short talk he maintained a somewhat deferential pleasantness, as he always had shown me. He left without any effort to draw out the meeting, to my great relief. John was soon hired with good effect on our vehicles. That was the last any of us heard of Chuks for some time. Several months later we saw one another on the street in Enugu. He greeted me in quite friendly fashion and I did the same. Bill Gets Busy One of Bill's first and sustained major achievements concerned the construction of Bailey Bridges over a number, eventually 25, of mostly narrow but seasonally deep, swift streams where bridges had been systematically destroyed during the war. Readers who are familiar with military engineering should recognize Bailey Bridges. They consist of pre-built metal modules that can be quickly and completely bolted together on one side of the stream, and, with a counterweight, pushed across by the manpower usually available in military units. In Bill's case that labor was supplied by local villagers eager to restore a secure route out of their village. Bill's enterprising preliminary steps, once he had reconnoitered, were, first, to get the head of the Federal Army's Engineers for the area, while in a relaxed moment over beers, to permit CARE, via Bill, to collect and use any of the Bailey Bridging materials that could be found unused. At about the same time, in a similar informal milieu, Bill met the leader of the out-of-work Biafran Bailey Bridge-building team. He and his men, some 12, knew where a lot of the Bailey materials lay hidden in various bush sites. Bill 'engaged' the whole team on the spot. Actually, they were only promised, and then provided with, food supplies from the relief foods being given to the numerous displaced persons by UNICEF. These recent Biafrans may also have been motivated to restore facilities for their own Igbo people. But with Bill leading the charge, they also seemed to get a kick out of the swashbuckling way in which they went about their manly, free-wheeling work. In less than a year of this near manic bridge-building, the sources of loose Bailey materials were exhausted, and the team members began drifting away, back to their separate families, as a semblance of peace emerged. As this was seen approaching, Bill found another channel for his creativity. For intended further bridgework that might be taken over by elements of local government, he began designing a wooden model based on Bailey principles. He spent a great deal of time on building and testing experimental units. He even sent his designs and a description of his hardwood (iroko) materials to USA university engineering departments for their review and advice. But these efforts came to very little, as the government bridge people, who were regularly urged by Bill to get involved, paid scant attention. Finally, when Bill was about to be transferred by CARE to wartime Bangladesh, he simply turned over a well tested model of his new iroko bridging, and the local government 'engineers' installed it over a small stream as part of a detour while a major road was being worked on. I drove my Jeep over it several times and observed trucks also on it. But once the highway was restored to service and the detour closed, Bill's bridge was just abandoned. But Bill set up another more successful innovation. In my own ramblings around government facilities one day, I noticed some half-hidden large, two and three feet in diameter, circular double steel casings, which turned out, upon questioning, to be molds for concrete culverts. The absence or destruction of culverts was one of the main problems in restoring rural roads in a region with high rainfall and numerous resulting rivulets. I was told that no one had plans for the molds. I reported my discovery to Bill and asked if he could find a use for these. Of course he did. Bill had the molds brought to our work area and thought about their possibilities. In two weeks time he had set up a modest outdoor culvert manufacturing operation. He laid a thick concrete slab, made a high, wheeled gantry out of scavenged tubular scaffolding, attached a pulley rigging at the top for raising and lowering the heavy molds, and, with a small group of hired hands, began churning out culvert rings that the government road builders couldn't get fast enough. After about two months of this hectic activity, Bill got his change of assignment, and work on the culverts trailed off in his absence. Happily, Bill's substantial contribution to CARE's reconstruction work in a once Biafra had considerable visibility, and with his personality hard to ignore, his earned fame was widely recognized and appreciated. Although Bill, gregarious fellow that he was, gradually developed a wide set of friends and acquaintances and set up his house with basic comforts and a servant, for his early days in Enugu he was practically a part of our family, and he shared a number of our meals. Even after he got himself established, aside from working closely, we had a lot of friendly, informal contact. He dropped over when he felt like it and I joined him whenever I felt the urge for a beer and gossip at his house about the colorful characters in still unsettled Enugu. Office Shift The late and post-Biafra war period [l970-71] in Enugu, the capital, moved on, and the rehabilitation efforts across the "liberated" area gained increasing momentum, with a number of new foreign relief and aid agencies coming to participate. Our own expanding CARE operation got crowded into entirely too small a space in the Rehabilitation Commission building, with its teeming courtyard, from which too many supplicants managed to jam into the building. We searched around and found a group of three empty identical buildings on a far, open edge of Enugu. These were unusually constructed by local standards, more like small homes in a southwestern US suburb, but of course thoroughly cleared out and messed up by looters. They had been built shortly before the war as residences for US Agency for International Development (USAID) staff in the anticipated large aid program for Eastern Nigeria. But who owned the houses now? This was for some time not clear. But we finally did get USAID and local permission to use them as work bases for the rest of my tour; one as office, one as warehouse and the yard of the third as a general work area, especially for vehicle maintenance, and later prefabrications. The War Torn Ogbuete Market After we had been in our new Enugu office for a month or so, my wife Zee, noticed that I didn't have any sort of curtains over my large sun-side windows. I had to admit this was a bother, trying to duck out of the sun as it moved. So at the afternoon end of one workday, along with our Igbo receptionist, Christine Okafor, Zee, of obvious African ancestry herself, our little daughter Holly and I drove to the ruined gate of the Ogbuete Market. I understood that it had been a large flourishing trading bazaar before the war. But now with almost all of the standing structures destroyed, it had been "rebuilt" in the most haphazard, ram-shackle fashion imaginable. Disorderly it was, largely because of the unplanned, slap-dash reestablishing ("reconstruction" hardly suits). Stalls and shanties were jammed every which way. Narrow, twisting walkways were truly labyrinthine. The more or less proper entry to the Market at the ruined gate put one immediately in the jumbled motor park of beat-up lorries, best-attempts-at busses, surviving taxies, and the maintenance support for them; all lorded over by ill-tempered drivers, with small-boy helpers darting nimbly through the turmoil, usually hawking the route of their bonded vehicle. I had driven Zee and Chris to a point near the gate and let them off. The two women were to find the cloth selling area and begin the curtain search. Meanwhile, intending to join them soon, I took eight month old Holly across from the market gate to buy the first shoes for her bare feet at a booming Bata store. We had been there about fifteen or twenty minutes and had found something suitable and were in queue to pay up when Chris came in looking mildly agitated. She seemed to have a great deal of trouble saying what she wanted; her English was usually quite adequate. On the surface she seemed controlled if a bit disturbed. I slowly got the idea that some sort of trouble had happened in the market, but her controlled manner led me to think it wasn't of great urgency, so I proceeded to pay off on the shoes. In spite of her low, controlled voice, I began to get the idea that something quite serious had taken place, and it sounded ever more like something awful. So I put Holly on my shoulders and we moved off briskly for the market entrance. The second, after a demurring first, policeman I asked, at Chris's suggestion, agreed to come with us. Because of the Kasbah-like, life of its own quality of the Market, one almost never saw a uniformed policeman inside. The Police in Nigeria were a Federal force, and it was the policy not to assign a patrol officer to his own tribal area. So the police here were not Igbos. The first officer refused and the second at first made every sort of excuse to stay outside the gate. But this big burly fellow who had been just walking around, finally, reluctantly came with us So with Chris leading the way, the policeman beside me and Holly astride my shoulders, we marched through the rubbish strewn motor park and dived into the market proper. It seemed to me that things were reasonably normal and, if anything, there was less noise about the place than I remembered from past visits. Then at a place deep in the market, Chris steered us into a small covered stall where Zee was sitting at the back, visibly shaken. The shopkeeper stood more or less across the entrance of his stall in a protective manner. When Zee saw me she let loose with unrestrained weeping but was obviously terribly relieved. She expressed great praise and gratitude for the shopkeeper who had sheltered her, and she pointed to the number of gawkers arrayed in a crescent facing the stall. Since things were very unpleasant for Zee there, we left as soon as we could, after heaping more thanks on the shopkeeper. As I learned the details later, the man had been a genuine hero. In our winding walk out through the Market and the motor park, Zee was getting herself under control, but was commenting with astonishment about the great quiet and calm among the crowds we passed through, so different from her inward passage. As Zee told me at a later, calmer time, shortly after she and Chris entered the motor park, hoots, howls and whistles, supposedly appreciative and flattering if not respectful comments and gestures, began from the rough lot in the motorpark. As this area gave way to the market paths, a crowd began to form and follow them, increasingly boisterous and full of excitement to the point where some began pelting the two young women with sucked out oranges, a common effluvium of the Market place's dirt paths. All sorts of noise making, especially beating of tin cans was going on now, and our women became more and more frightened. Zee's instinct was to hurl some rejoining comment at the crowd, but Chris stiffly urged her to say nothing and to act as if they heard nothing. The crowd began to taunt them, threatening to block their way and to press in on them, the noise and pelting increasing all the while. They were getting panicky and wondered if the crowd meant to surround them and cut them off. At this point the kindly, heroic shopkeeper urged the young women to step inside his place while he guarded the opening and shouted down the crowd. Some of the women among the gaggle of onlookers after I got there seemed, surprisingly, to be vigorously shaming Zee for crying, as if no matter what happens one must not weep in public. As Zee later described the conduct of the shopkeeper, it put me in mind of the old "Western" movie cliché, where the honest sheriff is holding at bay a lynch mob vigilantes who want to storm the jail to get at the prisoner. It seemed that Chris had slipped out and come for me only after the crowd had quieted down and thinned out a bit. She herself was obviously dreadfully shaken by the experience and was perhaps ashamed that a foreigner should see this side of her people's character The policeman didn't say a word throughout, but no doubt he had some effect although I suspect that he was as uneasy as anyone. After we got out of the market, we thanked him heartily. (I cannot remember if we gave him a "dash.") Then we drove off to take Chris home. We tried to get some understanding later as to why this event occurred. Zee and I had earlier gone to the Ogbuete together without anything untoward happening. The explanation, more or less confirmed by our Igbo friends, had it that as long as Zee -- or any Nigerian lady -- was with someone clearly an expatriate, she must be treated as one of them. But when she went in with a local girl she would be seen as local herself, and a woman like Zee, with her moderate "Afro" hair-do, sleeveless knee-length warm weather dress, could be seen as out of step with local customs, or a sell-out to the sinful big city ways of the West. I don't believe I ever saw more than one African woman in Nigeria with the then common American Afro do. For lack of a better term, there was a strong thread of Puritanism in post-war Enugu. It was not uncommon for girls who were too stylish in the Western manner to be hassled and even beaten, along with any male escort, on the streets of Enugu in the early months after the war. On the way to Chris's home the normal route took us by the Enugu central police compound. It occurred to me to report the recent event directly to the Commissioner, with whom I had a passing acquaintance. Imposing Commissioner Ebekwe was quite put out by our account of the market disturbance. He saw it as a matter of foreigners being protected from abuse by street locals ignorant of their customs. He called in his second in command, and before my eyes an ears they hatched up a scheme to clearly make their point in the public mind. The idea was to send a number of policewomen, in clothes comparable to Zee's and Chris's (hers were the same as Zee's except for elbow length sleeves). In the area or along the route they would be taking would be stationed a number of plain clothed male police. Should the behavior of the market people again become outrageously harassing, the police would pounce on at least the ringleaders and haul them to jail for their crime and punishment. This would get due public attention and so have good effect on law and order in these chaotic times. Not another word was heard on this scheme's outcome for some time. There was no newspaper printed in Enugu. But two weeks later when a Lagos paper arrived from the then capital, there was a news story which recounted how a trial judge in Enugu had dismissed, on grounds of provocation and entrapment, citing female decoys, the case against some men who were accused as disrupters of public order in the Ogbuete Market It was several months before Zee and I even considered returning to the Ogbuete, but we did want some of the bright pattern cloth sold there for our limited wardrobes, simple shirts and dresses We purposely went on a Sunday when the Market would be almost empty and quiet; and we knew of a new back entrance avoiding the first route. As we were standing in an open area examining the blaze of brightly colored cloths, I felt a few drops of water, and with a clear sky. Zee apparently got a heavier dose than I did and she looked around in annoyance. Near Zee was a scrawny woman with a basket with a container on her head. She raised her hand and then flicked what we took to be water of some sort at Zee. Of course Zee was angry, but the market folks simply chuckled and then drove the woman away. She ran off for about 25 yards then raised her skirt, revealing only nature and let out a stream of what were described to us as taunts and curses. They called her a local madwoman. Thus ended Zee’s interest in the Ogbuete Market Bottom of Form Queen & King of the Dance Bill was a player later in a singular memory of the then capital city, Lagos, which we visited only infrequently during my tour. For one such visit, after we had been in the East for a year, our Enugu field team had been called into Lagos by our national office. Our country chief, Henry Sjaardema, laid on one evening of feasting with a local band in attendance. Contrary to West African traditions, our libations were not poured on the ground! The Sjaardema house, comparatively grand for Lagos, was nevertheless in a neighborhood of modest and poor dwellings, with an admixture of sidewalk markets. After some two hours, quite alcoholic for many of us, the lively music of the small band got several in the party dancing on the lawn. But, after a short time, the unusual gyrations of one pair turned the others into spectators. Our Bill was left with Dixie, the wife of our other engineer, who seemed a non-dancer. Dixie was tall, about the same height as Bill, willowy and dressed in a flowing kaftan with Zebra-like striping. Prematurely balding Bill was a broad-bodied five feet ten in a pied dashiki and working-type shorts. Their terpsichore, as if in an inspired trance, went on for at least a quarter of an hour. Dixie, who must have had considerable modern dance experience, floated and twisted about while Bill pursued with a lewd, anticipatory leer, outstretched arms and a Groucho Marx crouching stride. At times Dixie would seem perilously close to his grasp. Then she would twist away in a graceful, athletic swirl of kaftan. But the faux lascivious pursuit never faltered. Henry's house had a seven foot high wall shielding the house and lawn from the outside world. Once our own party had all become spectators, we realized that the top of the wall and the nearby trees had become packed with citizens of the neighborhood, hugely enjoying this alien spectacle. As the band responded by firing up this remarkable pas de deux, the wall and trees kept up a buzzing collective commentary, which exploded into cheers of joy at each of Dixie's narrow escapes. The party-attired expatriates, too, became entranced, and we joined in the appreciation for the bizarre Terpsichore, with its frissons of near capture. As I recall, it was Bill who gave up first and staggered off in exaggerated exhaustion, while the 'bleachers' roared their verdict. We all experienced a form of exhaustion from the prolonged tension of the dance-drama on the lawn. . . . Oh, well, next morning we were, dull and early, back on the road to Enugu. Rift One day, about one month after the Lagos blow-out, I crossed our street and found Bill sitting in a hot bathtub. It was for a lower back pain that I knew him to be suffering. (But it had been no restraint in Lagos!) I tried to make some joke about the scene I found there. But before I got well-started, he interrupted to let me know he was mad as hell at me. I had recently done a required staff evaluation on Bill and left a copy for him. It praised him quite roundly, but did mention in brief that his Rabelaisian tendencies could offend some Pecksniffian types, as I had actually observed to happen. I did not intend this as a negative comment, since something similar, mutatis mutandi, might be said about myself. But Bill could see it as nothing other than a deep affront and possible career damage. Our relationship never recovered in Nigeria. An undercurrent of his unease about me seemed to permeate our continuing relations, which remained generally civil until Bill shipped out to CARE's program in Bangladesh. As I understood it, Bill's job in Bangladesh was to work on building inexpensive, safer housing for the masses of Bangladeshis who lost homes from the most recent of the periodic great coastal "cyclones"; and from the on-going war for independence from Pakistan. CARE Staffing Misfortunes While Bill’s effectiveness on the job never faltered, I had another more serious matter, in those early days involving two of my other American technicians. A water engineer, Hank, was tirelessly dogmatic in reflexively challenging my style and decisions. Besides, he had a nervous, going-alcoholic wife with a small baby the same age as our Holly. After uncomfortable months on all sides. I sent them back to our Lagos manager, Henry, urging Hank's replacement. Henry apparently thought that he had counseled the family back to health and sent them back to me; only to have Hank and his wife themselves give up and ask to go home a few weeks later. The other thorn was a young agriculturist, Mike. Originally English, he had just graduated from a good US agricultural school. Upon arrival he promptly announced that he intended to find a local farmer, whose operation he would redesign, work with and write up as a Ph.D. thesis. He had trouble understanding why I found that out of the question in this emergency situation with our contracted project's mandate. Mike had a self-advertising, manic quality abut him, as if he were an eager, but unsure of himself, child. His wife, with six year old twin girls, was strikingly beautiful in the early Elizabeth Taylor manner, and this seemed to keep Mike anxiously alert for rivals. After months of unproductive tension I asked for a replacement. In both cases the replacements were excellent, both in attitude and skill. Remember Dixie, who was the wife of Erik, our effective second water engineer? Another, very different, Mike came as our agriculture man. Bill had of course been doing great work all the while. The Grass Cutter In late l969, near the end of the Biafra civil war . Zee, and I and our six-month old daughter, Holly, were ensconced in the shell of the fine old civil servant's house -- probably built for British colonial administrators -- which had been thoroughly vandalized and messed up. Enugu, the erstwhile capital of the Eastern Region (restyled Biafra), had become something of a ghost town, since most of its population had fled some time ago before the rapidly advancing Federal army. Our single-floor, long, narrow concrete manse, well designed for cross ventilation by the prevailing winds -- but with an inaccessible attic that was home for never identified, regularly scampering animal life -- had an appropriately large yard with a lawn of sorts spreading well away from the long front of the house. Along almost the whole length of the front aspect ran a shallow veranda. Zee would often amble along it holding our not yet ambulatory Holly. The singular event I want to describe occurred late in the rainy season. Our veranda's imperfect cant for drainage left shallow puddles here and there. As they evaporated they left slimy patches. It was a pleasant weekend or local holiday morning. I sat in a room that I had appropriated as my study, reading our occasionally received weekly Guardian (of Manchester), and Zee was carrying Holly along the veranda. Just a day or so earlier I had read a disturbing story in one of the spasmodically received newspapers from the distant capital, Lagos, about the case of an expatriate woman who had been slashed to death by the chap who had trimmed by "cutlass" (machete) the expatriate's lawn the day before. The grass cutter had departed this employment complaining over his pay and treatment. It seemed that the more he thought upon it the angrier he became, to the point that he marched back to the expatriate's house with his cutlass, a commonly carried tool, and dispatched his oppressor. The story had made a lingering impression on me. And here I was reading away as Zee, carrying Holly, walked along the veranda. On one of my occasional glances out of the window I saw the man who had trimmed our lawn a day earlier, as he left the quiet street and came walking toward our house. I also saw Zee begin walking along the veranda to a point where she would meet the man across the veranda railing. This scene caused the Lagos story to flicker across my mind. I recalled that our lawn cutter affected to be mildly disappointed by his pay after the job, even though we had agreed on a price suggested by our cook, Benjamin. But the trimmer had seemed gentle enough, even humble. The two adults and infant, as they moved, became lost to my window view. Suddenly Zee chillingly screamed my name, "Al! Al!" two or three quick times. With the old news story on my mind, I dashed against an intervening door but bounced back when my twist of the knob was not in time. Then I was through the door with the most frantic anticipations conceivable! When I got to the veranda I saw Zee writhing on the concrete and the grass cutter standing over her holding Holly. I started to collar the man with an intensity unique in my whole life; but he was holding Holly and simply stood there looking frightened. I had hardly laid hands on him when Zee muttered from the pavement, "Not him -- he didn't do anything!" So I subsided and simply took Holly from the man who eagerly handed her over. Then he just stood there dumbfounded. For a time Zee kept slipping back down as she tried to stand up. As I helped her to her feet, Zee attempted, groggily, to explain. When she saw the cutter approaching she had moved along the veranda to meet him in simple courtesy. She stepped on a slimy spot and began to fall. As she did so, she maneuvered her body so that Holly would not hit the cement floor, and Zee took a bad bang on the back of her head. She had screamed for me to come and pick up Holly who had rolled free but was unscathed. Because the cutter was closer, he had reached Zee before me and picked up Holly just before I arrived. What I saw as Zee writhing on the concrete was simply her trouble in getting up from the slick pavement in her dazed condition. With Zee once on her feet, the grass cutter excused himself and quickly hurried away. We never knew why he had come. With Zee experiencing some confusion and a severe headache, I took her to the improvised emergency room of the once formidable Enugu Government Hospital. While still far from fully restored from the effects of the war, it had begun to provide reasonable attention. An X-ray showed that Zee had not suffered a serious injury, and aspirin was recommended. The thickness of her Afro-do must have helped. Even with Zee's very bruised head and dignity, the incident was far less dramatic than my first imagining. Our Own Mad Woman of Enugu The general chaos of our early time was made concrete to our family by our ’mad woman of Enugu.’ This lady, no older than her mid-twenties, wandered into our yard clinging to a frightened daughter of perhaps six and a babe in arms. Bedraggled would hardly do justice to the squalor of their ragged garments and person. The woman was regularly shouting something about “Zeek.” Our cook, Benjamin, said he couldn’t understand anything beyond her crying to see Zik (Nnamdi Azikwe, an early Igbo hero and leader of Nigeria.) Of course he diagnosed her as a “crazy woman,” and shooed her Laacoon-like ensemble off the property while we watched, feeling sad about our lack of ideas to help. The next morning when Zee and I got up, we were aware of some low shuffling sounds out on the veranda. We found the mad woman, huddled with her two offspring against the wall just outside the open window of the adjunct to our bedroom where our baby Holly slept. Because of the obviously unsanitary state of our unbidden guests, Zee was alarmed for Holly’s well-being. This time we gave them some food, and then again Benjamin chased them away. Two days later, while Finbar was alone in our big house across the street, he found the destitute family huddled in a separate, doorless garage sort of building on that property. We decided to at least not move them. and asked Benjamin to bring them food. The family must have stayed there for a few days, but wandered, distractedly into our yard almost daily, mumbling for Zik. In the meantime, through Finbar, we made some inquiries and discovered that there had been established on the edge of Enugu a hostel of sorts for the deranged whose numbers were believed to have multiplied with the grotesqueries of the brutal war. It was speculated that the mad woman, similar to others, must have lost her husband and perhaps other family protections, and from some such horrible experiences had lost her wits. On one of her visits to our yard, we corralled her, and with some trouble, with her screaming for Zik, we got the family into a jeep and I drove to the hostel, where we found a disappointing, but not surprising, apparently abandoned, wide open building with a minimum of crude furnishings and very few visible staff, of god knows what qualification. Benjamin described our experience with the woman, while she screamed for Zik and resisted removal from the jeep. The male staff person accepted her with out any enthusiasm or sympathy, and we drove off without much hope for the family’s tender care. When we checked back at the hostel a few days later, we were calmly told that our woman had left and not retuned. The hostel was on the farthest point in Enugu from our house, which may be why we never saw her again. Uganda and Idi Amin In the middle of our Nigeria tour we took a vacation to Kenya. We first stayed at a very pleasant seaside hotel that was almost empty since off season. Even the sea at that time of year was not inviting. I just slept and loafed more of the time than Zee approved of. Our Holly, six, had a ball in the hotel pool and slide. From that Mombassa retreat we spent a few days at the Tsavo game park in a chalet like accommodation from whence we could safely watch Elephants, Zebras antelopes and large birds visit a water hole conveniently placed for our excitement. But we still had a few days left and as tentatively planned, we flew to Kampala, Uganda and were put up by a couple we had known briefly in Belize where they had been the Peace Corps Representatives. That’s what they were now dong in Uganda. They had an American style house in a high security suburban area with good sized yards, but with high double cyclone fencing patrolled by two German Shepherds especially trained as watch dogs. Such precautions were understood as de rigueur for foreigners who seemed ready marks for the ‘informal economy.’ In the three days we were in Uganda, two events stick in the memory. The first was the Fourth of (US) July, for which the large American official community was given the run of a large grassy park. We were even entertained by the Ugandan national Army Band, and by stilt walkers. A tickling anomaly followed from the fact that the US Ambassador, one Ferguson, was an African American, and so was the head of the USAID organization and apparently a few of the senior embassy staff., while most of he embassy and USAID staff were whities. So one found the Ambassador, his USAID Director an d a few other black staff luxuriating at the well served lounge-bar, looking out in a rather self satisfied manner at their white minions cavorting about, most oriented on the noisy softball game. So much for that. The next night we joined our hosts at a well laid on cocktail do at the residence of the US Charge de Faire in the choice highlands well above the less satisfactory city. Idi Amin had recently overthrown the unfortunately socialist President Obote, and Amin was welcomed as ‘our’ type of man. One Sikh Cabinet Minister was regaling a hovering audience about some of the fine things that could be expected from Amin. Later, when Amin threw out the Asians who dominated many of the professions, the Sikh’s perspective must have changed. But what most sticks in the memory is the relaying of a chat that Zee had with a young American self styled journalist, well into his cups. He claimed to have special intelligence that Amin was having a tribal element in the west of the country massacred. And our journalist was about to head out there and break the story to the world. Well, that didn’t overexcite us at the time, given the observed toll of alcohol. But back in Enugu when our Newsweek arrived a week or so later, there was a picture of the same young journalist. The accompanying story told of how his chopped up body had been found in the very region of his scoop. That news kicked back the Kampala evening memory with a grab in the gut. Just now watching the Amin story in the movie the Last King of Scotland took us back with a another frisson. School Scouting When our time in Nigeria was coming to an end, I felt the need to do some studying and writing related to my development experience and hoped for growth. I corresponded with the Institute of Development Studies (IDS) at the University of Sussex and the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. On the way back to CARE in NY, We spent a few days in Amsterdam and visited The Hague to explore its school. Then onto Brighton and the nearby U of Sussex with its IDS. The British institution seemed better for me, where I could study and work at my own pace with access to their fine facilities as a "Visitor." We would return to England after an effort to nail down some support in the US for the IDS year, and then to snatch a week in Belize. The Ford Foundation expressed tentative willingness to give support. The CARE management seemed less enthusiastic though quite willing to give me a payless leave of absence, and they said that they would consider some support. I wasn't encouraged by a sort of anti-intellectual air at CARE's top, men of impatience with this sort of distraction from ‘real work.’ I didn't expect much help there. I was even told that CARE could not guarantee my return to work there after the year away." This seemed to imply that I would be less valuable after a year studying my (and CARE's) field in academe. But I felt reasonably confident of Ford help and was even prepared to use my own savings if necessary. So after I lazed around in Belize for a week, we headed back to Brighton on a schedule agreed upon with IDS. Jamaica, Farewell! On the way from Belize we planned to spend two days in Jamaica where Zee had friends from previous work there. The first morning, on request, a rental car was brought to our hotel. On the way to her office for the paper work the young lady driver got into an accident of her making. Zee was holding Holly in the back seat and suffered a gash on her forehead, apparently banged against the seat in front of her while protecting two year old Holly. Sitting next to the driver in the small car, I only collected several abrasions on my forehead and scalp. A taxi took us to the emergency hall of the University of the West Indies teaching hospital. It was about noon when we arrived. There were between 50 and 75 people sitting on benches waiting for attention. We had to join them for our turn, some four hours later. The overworked staff was efficient enough, if a bit edgy, when they got around to us; stitches for Zee and just cleaning up for me. Next morning the car agency came for us and brought us to their office. They must have been very anxious about us making some claim or action against them. The rest of the morning was spent waiting for their chief's decision. Finally, they offered to let us use a car for the rest of the day. We had no wish to act against them and they were no doubt relieved that we would sign a document to that effect. We drove around the eastern part of the island for the few hours before darkness t hen back to the hotel. Next day we were taken to the airport by our generous car provider. , Chapter 8 England, Actually, and CARE Farewell IDS put us up in a Brighton bed-sitter for a week, where we found a convenient classical chamber pot, before we found a flat in Ovingdean closer to Falmer, the site of the U. of Sussex. Our flat was on a hillside with a grand view over low Downs to the Channel, with the precincts of Roedean, the posh girl’s school in between. After two weeks there we got a letter from Ford in NY, saying that they couldn't support us because CARE showed no interest in my study, a sign to which they gave crucial weight in their decision. We decided to stick it out as thriftily as possible. We had our personal effects shipped from Nigeria to England where most of it was stored. To help with some income, Zee found a job as part time secretary for a rather dotty grand dame, widow of a top general in the RAF, who lived on one of Brighton's Regency Crescents. The double-decker bus that stopped on our street got Zee there. Lady Salmon had Zee write letter after letter to her solicitors over some imagined claim. We had a few charming teas at her invitation, hearing disjointed reminiscences, sometimes involving "Dear Winnie." We were put onto a fine, but inexpensive pre-school for Holly in Rottingdean, just down the hill from Ovingdean, run by squiress Woodard, mainly, it seemed, for her to be able to apply her strong views on how to educate the very young. Zee worked most mornings for Lady Salmen. I would take Holly to Mrs. Woodard's in the morning and pick her up just after noon. With Zee back by then I would be off to Falmer, about four miles distant over the pleasant South Downs. In good weather one could walk the short distance between Rottingdean and Ovingdean. For the longer trips, to Brighton and IDS, an aging Morris Minor was acquired. Once, for a conference in Swansea, I had to pass right through the main streets of Abergavenny, unsure of just what I would do if by chance I should see Mary. The possibility made me especially alert - but no sighting! (Disappointed - or - relieved?) At IDS I worked almost entirely on my, own -- everyone there seemed so impressively busy on their own important work -- usually from mid-day till evening. Then after our family meal, often take-out Chinese, I would return to work until 11 PM or so in a compartment of a shed-like temporary building ("terrapin"). I did appear occasionally in the IDS Common room and sit in on several Fellows' presentations. After an awkward, drawn out, uneasy start, I settled down to work on a description and analysis of my work in Nigeria, thought to be especially rich with instruction. (Only a resultant journal article ever got published.) This year at IDS was one of my most difficult periods. I formed no close friends at the Institute, and felt very much an outsider, with many extended bouts of depressed self-esteem, often feeling unable to face people or stay put for more than short periods. . I dictated parts of my manuscript on a tape recorder, which Zee then heroically transcribed for me. But I sometimes could not work in any indoor, 'confined' quarters and so would take the recorder on walks into pleasant countryside near IDS, and when I felt calm and alone, would find a place to sit down and dictate. The same anxiety would sometimes take me at the flat, later, after return from work in the terrapin. I would tiptoe out of the building and walk to the end of our street where another turned sharply down and away from our ridge. At that point our ridge continued on as more or less open country for some quarter mile before descending to the edge of the Channel at Rottingdean. A few turf -bordered shallow pits along the ridge path were alleged to have been Roman signal fire beacons. Another walk route around tiny Ovingdean took me past a VIIth century Saxon stone church and other aged dwellings in the lower part. All was not misery of course. Brighton and other family rambles had their pleasures. We visited a friend of Zee’s who had taught school, as a volunteer, in Belize. She and her new husband had bought an initially unlivable XIIIth century stone house in the Cotswolds, built around a large Inglenook, and they had got it into minimally livable condition. With Holly, we were quartered in a loose plank-floored loft just under the new thatch, where the end of the room, and building, had only a wall substitute of heavy duty transparent plastic; nice for viewing the cattle as they grazed, just outside, upon our waking. While there we took a side trip to nearby Stratford-on-Avon for a play at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre. Grace and Earl Bergendahl visited us for few days, and we put them up a nearby, newly refurbished old inn facing the millpond in quaint Rottingdean. An image I well never forget followed a delightful meal at the inn. Earlier, I had mentioned, offhandedly, to the wonderfully attentive innkeeper (Grace and Earl may have been the only tenants at the time) that Earl was a splendid jazz pianist. Just as we were satisfied and wiping our chins after dessert, our hotelier and a helper were pushing an upright piano to immediately behind Earl’s chair. To my pleased wonder, without the slightest sign of surprise or unease, he calmly switched his seat around and immediately launched into My Old Flame, in the Earl (Fatha) Hines manner; next Body and Soul and one or two other jazz standards. The innkeeper who leaned on the piano throughout seemed thrilled with the proceedings and would probably himself taken a bow had there been more diners present. Earl simply said how grateful and happy he was at the thoughtful provision of the instrument. The next night we took our visitors to another, more grand oldie, the White Hart in Lewes. Zee and I had visited earlier, and had been tickled by a mid-formally attired, middle-aging waiter who affected the grand style and seemed to be having fun, with us, in hanging on Zee’s every wish, as if she were some grand celebrity. After being put off a bit by the strangeness, Zee entered into the fun and gave, in the same style; as good as she got. This pleasant experience led us to take Grace and Earl there. Or waiter spotted us again and provided a more modest reprise of his gallantry -- he seemed to be busier this outing -- and a jolly time was had by all, toped off by a charming lady with guitar who later serenaded our foursome with folk jazz in the lounge where drinks were issued. I have recently learned that Tom Paine, before coming to stoke up the American revolutionary fires, hung out with fellow dissidents at the same White Hart in Lewes. The Acheners, who were so helpful to us in Nigeria and now lived in France near Bordeaux, also dropped by for a briefer visit and opened up much laughed-at reminiscences of the wild days and characters in ’Biafra.’ Another event, from my Sussex days needs reporting. As mentioned, I had drafted an article on my Nigerian experience, which later got published. Before that I had sent the draft to headquarters for critique. I never got a clear organizational response. Two personal friends at headquarters did write to suggest substantive changes to which I adjusted. But while in Ovingdean, one day long after sending the draft, I got a surprise call from Henry, the old Lagos boss of my Nigerian project who was in London and hoped to see me. I drove up to London to bring him down. He spent the night and had to be driven to Heathrow airport early the next day. While he was with us, Zee joined our chats about common friends and past experiences, etc., But at one point, I believe it was on the drive back to Heathrow airport, Henry, almost as a bye-the-way afterthought, brought up my draft article, in a way that suggested that was his real mission in visiting. He suggested that I not use a specific country, locations, institutions or officers. He tried to make this advice seem casual and friendly, but it was almost certainly a reflection of headquarters view of the paper although Henry denied any intent to censor my work. But overall This English year was a bad time for me. I felt out of place all too often, with resultant escape anxieties. This was so unlike my first sojourn in Britain. Back to Work? Back at CARE headquarters in NY, the kindly Personnel officer, Bert, told me that there was no opening right then, but that something should open up in a few weeks. The active CARE board member who had visited the Nigerian project and stayed with us in Enugu, invited our family to spend a week or so at their fine home in Scarsdale, while I used the CARE office as a base for some job probes in the NY area. I didn't get a good a feel, somehow, about the CARE prospects "opening up." After our sojourn in Scarsdale we settled in for the winter at my now widowed mother's home in Menominee, mildly disappointed and still mildly hopeful. Mom seemed to enjoy our being there, and was especially delighted with three year old Holly. I called Bert at CARE about once a week, as he had encouraged me to do. Nothing yet, was the answer, and it never changed. When I had joined CARE, it was with the facilitation of a personal friend, Gordon, who had been an active leader of the New York chapter of the Society for International Development, and a senior member of management at CARE. He had left CARE while I was in Turkey as so I lost a ’protector’ on high. In those days at CARE personal friendships at headquarters counted for lot, and Gordon had been my only association of that sort. Although no one would be frank with me -- most disappointingly, too gentle Bert -- it became clear to me that the fix was in on my non-return to CARE. And CARE in those days usually did keep finding a place for the old boys, no matter what their job performance. But the idea of a warts-and-all publication, even though generally favorable, rather than a puff piece, was just not understandable to guys at the top with the almost anti-intellectual characteristics I have described earlier. A few years later, I had a NY lunch with Mike, my second agriculturist in Nigeria, a remarkably decent, friendly guy. He was still with CARE. When I asked him if he had any understanding about why CARE had lost interest in me, he answered that the general understanding was that I had published something that had not been submitted for headquarters approval; about what I had expected. It was a year before I reconnected. Much of that year has, uniquely, been lost to memory. Zee took a part time clerical job at the nearby Community branch of the U of Wisconsin. I did some repair work around the family home and drove Mom on some of her rounds, especially as the flower lady for her Methodist church. I took Holly to playgrounds and all three of us, and sometimes added Mom when she felt up to it, to local eateries or any event that held promise of interest. I am sure that I must have felt the stigma of 'unemployment' with some degree of depression during most of that year, but the memory, for the most part, just won't speak. I did apply to the Peace Corps by mid year for a field staff position. No answer came for months. By August I was experiencing the worst sort of depression and anxiety. I had to do something. All I could think of with promise of relief was a long trip to a remote point. Maps suggested the Porcupine Mountain at the western edge of the Upper Peninsula bordering Lake Superior. I took off in Mom’s car, which she generously let me take away. The drive took about four hours, and at the end I found a set of basic cabins where I lodged for what turned out to be a week, though I had no planned time of departure at the start. Everyday for hours I hiked up and over the crude paths of the Porcupines. I took a hand tape recorder, and when tired -- or ‘inspired’ -- would set down on a rock or stump and dictate memories, some of which appear in this text. I would have a quick lunch at a nearby diner and then head back to the hills. The anxiety moderated but seldom left me, and passing hikers sometimes gave me agoraphobia during this interlude of intended escape. Over the counter Sominex helped me sleep. Although still less than healed, I decided that I might handle life back in Menominee, and so repaired there in Michigan’s early autumn. I had kept in loose touch with John Gomes, my old friend from Armonk and Spanish Harlem baseball and jazz group days. He now worked in Washington with the Small Business Administration. When telling him my troubles by phone, he came up strong! His office was now in he same building as the Peace Corps. If I would send him a new application, he would see that it got into the right hands for prompt action. In short, this did lead to my assignment to the PC staff in Afghanistan. While in DC for the Peace Corps orientation and training, we stayed with John, Barbara and their two adopted children in their large old house in the Mt. Pleasant area. There we had a jolly Xmas designed for the three children. John must have been a conspirator in another surprising event that was ostensibly hung on the date of my birthday Chapter 9 On to Afghanistan Preliminaries A happy party was to send us off. The whole thing was a delightful surprise regarding some of disparate characters from my life, and I’m not yet sure just who organized the event. There were Grace and Earl from Yonkers days, John – who may have been the culprit since he had husbanded my application through the PC bureaucracy – Mert Cregger an old CARE colleague and Lael and Ron! The venue was the posh suburban home of a friend of Mert’s and John’s. I was even invited to sit as the drum set of the host’s scion - as a rocker’s, the kit had no brushes - to support Earl and John at their instruments. But before that when my assorted friends were greeting me, in her turn, Lael almost leaped forward for a prolonged kiss that Ron saw fit to jocularly break up. The Real Thing In January of 1974, we were off to Kabul, where I would be the Peace Corps’s agricultural and health projects officer, part of a staff supporting 160 PC Volunteers. Less than a year earlier, King Zahir Shah had been advised to stay on an Italian vacation, while his cousin and former Prime Minister, Mohammad Daoud Khan took over as President for life (not very long as it turned out) in a near bloodless coup. I would leave Afghanistan before it began falling apart in l978 with a series of left-wing coups, followed by the Soviet invasion. Since the early 1960, there had been a sizeable contingent of PCVs in the country.. It was said that then Vice –President Johnson had twisted official arms to get the legally required ’invitation’ to host our Volunteers. At that time of Cold War, Afghanistan was perhaps the most determinedly non-aligned of 3rd World nations. With the Soviets on the northern border, there were large embassies and aid missions from both he US and the Soviet Union. The British had a large wedding-cake embassy building and extensive gardens on the edge of Kabul, guarded by prudently respected Gurkhas. And of course other nations were also represented. Chicken St. Our threesome family was provided with temporary quarters at one end of what must have been one of the world’s most picturesque streets, Chicken St.; no more than a few hundred yards long, which an automobile could hardly squirm through. Most shops had no daytime fronts and food purveyors sat in recesses surrounded by pyramids of attractively displayed fruits and vegetables. The chicken shops were actually few, but shops selling all sorts of oddments, with heavy tilt towards antique swords and other19th century military paraphernalia. Among the offerings were knick-knacks of Czarist (“White“) Russians who had fled into central Asia, and somehow these ‘luxuries’ filtered into Afghanistan. These things were more or less genuine, not kitsched-up for tourists. Such as there were of the latter were mostly “world travelers.” hippie types who wandered the globe in search of the ‘baddest’ drugs, for which Afghanistan seemed to have a reputation. There were also a few carpet shops, but that wasn’t the street’s specialty. The carpets were found elsewhere, upon (sic) a wide major street. When I first drove that way, I was startled to see large, rich looking carpets scattered on the street’s surface for perhaps an eighth of a mile; scattered so that trying to drive around them required attention and skill analogous to that of a broken field runner in our football. I was even tempted to turn back, but tea drinkers in the open store fronts ran out to urge passage over their wares! These sumptuous Turkmen -- the dominant ethnic group in the northwest -- carpets, perhaps the newest, needed this mellowing, accelerated aging, as I soon learned. I got used to seeing this nation of tea drinking men casually toss their cups’ residues on nearby carpets. Along with hippies, a large number of expatriate, mostly official, foreigners in Kabul were well represented among Chicken Street’s browsers. These rarely included Afghans, and certainly not their women. Most of the latter that one might see on the city streets were in small groups, completely shrouded and looking out at the world through a coarse mesh making then seem faceless. Even the good Muslim taxi drivers complained that the chadri’s limitation on peripheral vision created a high risk of street accidents. One evening, when we were still on Chicken Street, we wandered into the nearby large building of the US Information Service (USIS), we found, among Americans, a rehearsal going on for the “The Music Man.” It happened that the small pit band’s drummer -- who happened to be the USAID Mission Director -- had not shown up, and so I volunteered to fill in. Not much was expected of me and I just improvised as seemed fit. It was serendipitous fun, and I was smugly pleased later at a party when the show’s leading man, a professional theater person, there to teach drama in the Kabul University faculty, commented that on that particular rehearsal night he sensed that a real drummer was at the kit. Settling Down & Getting to Work With the help of the PC’s ‘fixer,’ Mr. Mohamed, a member of the minority Hazaras, we found a very satisfactory “Bulgarian” (concrete) house, with the standard seven foot high surrounding, wall, near the edge of Kabul’s Shari Nau (New City). Mr. Mohamed had also found an excellent cook, Moeb, for us and an ostensibly alert guard, Hasan , both Hazaras. Later after the birth of Randy, Mr. Mohammad found an excellent Hazara nanny, Nana, for us. Though far from free from local tradition, Shari Nau was the one part of Kabul where a barefaced young woman might appear in the open with a variation of “western” dress, typically slacks and sweater that still concealed arms and legs. Needless to say, this regime, very strict in the rest of Kabul, and the rest of Afghanistan, made life for our female PCVs often unpleasant. Eager to explore the neighborhood, I spotted a fortress-like structure on a hill behind neighboring shops and houses. It looked ancient and I assumed that it was an abandoned ruin. I walked over and clambered to the top and examined the empty hulk. But when I rounded a corner I saw on a level below me two Afghan soldiers seriously pacing on apparent guard duty, suggesting the hill-top structure was a working fort, as I later learned it was. They hadn’t seen me. Unaware that I had already been there, I was warned by friends that it was so sensitive a station that I must not even take a photo of it even from afar. I didn’t admit my trespass. About three months after we arrived, the incumbent PC Representative finished his tour and was replaced by Dick H. After some early feeling-out atmospherics, we became very close and cooperating friends. Thank heavens, because Afghanistan became an increasingly difficult working environment through Dick’s tour and for most of my last year when I succeeded to his position. Most difficult because PCV’s stresses were mounting as will be seen. Abandoned Throne On an early get acquainted Chevy Carryall tour with another PC staffer and his wife, Zee and Holly all of us overnighted with Volunteers in Kandahar and then with Volunteers in western Heart. Just west of Kandahar there are a number of rather stark stony extrusions out of the immediate, otherwise flat arid land which prefaces higher elevations visible to the north toward the country's center. One of these solitaries seemed right out of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Alongside the road. on the face of one rough cone, 40 or 50 feet high, near no sign of habitation, a series of steps had been carved into its prow-like face that culminated in a throne like platform with a carved out bench.. I just had to stop and climb up. Since the carving of the quite uniform steps in the solid stone must have been laborious, some important regal or religious ceremonies must have been the purpose. So one couldn’t help imagining around such ancient constructs, some colorful ritual involving the steps and throne now standing unattended and in wind swept isolation. Sadly, no one took my picture. Our House and The Wine of Kabul After a few weeks on Chicken St., we got into our “Bulgarian” house, a fairly modest middle class domicile by US standards. with a dwarf peach tree, a line of lovely red roses along our back veranda, and a new grape sapling which overtime became a substantial arbor on the overhead trellis we constructed. And the large yellow green grapes tasted fine. Our watchman, Hasan, shared the garden work with me. All this was behind the standard seven foot high, stuccoed in our case, wall. Having introduced the subject of grapes, its seems appropriate to describe our wine making ventures, which came much later in our tour. A Yugoslav doctor who had been in Afghanistan for several years had an antidote for the official prohibition of wine in the country -- actually some could be found on the clandestine market. He acquired a simple old manual press, proper screening fabric, and some multi- gallon glass carboys for fermenting. Every year in the fall the doctor gathered a select small number of interested expatriates in one of the wall-concealed yards to process a modest portion of the year’s grape crop. We joined up and one autumn hosted a jolly day of wine making in our own yard, with several PCVs in attendance. Of course, proper bottles for “laying the wines” were not available on the market. So everyone in the cabal had to scrounge for used whisky and wine bottles, usually found at the American or UN recreation clubs --where we (Peace Corps types) weren’t supposed to go. Our house grapes wouldn’t do because they had seeds. But the Kabul area produced ideal seedless if rather small “white” grapes, abundant on the market. The squeezing and straining were funneled into the carboys which were rationed out in some sense of proportion to likely home use and party throwing. We got our decent share. Checking the carboys in our half- basement regularly for readiness, after several months -- probably too soon for best results -- we began bottling and corking. Corks of all sizes were in the market. Our stash lasted most of the rest of a year, diminished in lurches at our occasional parties. The bottled stuff had substantial dregs, carefully avoided, and as the bottled period rolled on the drink became ever stronger. The last stuff was drinkable only for those not connoisseurs. Dick came to the larky processing scene wearing a “hair shirt” made of very coarse burlap sacking . This was given him by a sympathetic PCV, who attached a note relating the shirt to his Job-like job. Some detail on this will be explored later. The PCVs at least understood the symbolism. Daughter Holly was soon attending an International (American run) school covering everything from kindergarten through high school, with door to door bus delivery. Since Holly requested a baby brother, we provided one after about a year in Kabul. Randy was born Randall Clive Edgell in a thoroughly up to date mini-hospital for the large (ca. 400) American, and for favored internationals, community in the country. It was my job to put Randy to bed at night, with back pats and riffs from The Peanut Vender and soulful versions of Gershwin’s Summertime Once Upon a Cold War One of the entertainments well attended by the foreign enclave, and a very few Afghans, was the performances of the Kabul Amateur Dramatic Society (KADS) which had apparently survived as an institution over several years despite the shifting membership of the expatriate community. At one such performance during an intermission, I felt a tap on my shoulder from the row just behind Zee and me, which was followed by the hearty voice of a fellow spectator who introduced himself as Valentin Nijelski. Our wives quickly entered the colloquy of introductions, and Nijelski, who asked me to call him "Vahl" (Val hereafter) urged that we exchange telephone numbers, with the hope of some future social meeting. It will be remembered that the mid-70s was a time when the term detente was much in the air as a result of President Nixon's Kissingerian diplomacy. My curiosity was piqued over Nijelski's proposal by the intriguing possibilities this introduction offered. I had been a close student of Russia and the Soviet Union through my studies at the University of Chicago and, shortly after, through my specialized work on the Soviet system during my job in the Psychological Warfare Research Division of the Human Resources Research Office at The George Washington University. A few weeks later, Val called me. He'd given me his card, identifying him in English as the Second Secretary, Political, at the Soviet Embassy in Kabul. Now he was inviting us to have dinner at his home in another section of the city. Accepting his invitation, I asked where his home might be since by this time I had been in Kabul for more than a year and thought that I knew my way around most parts of the city. Despite my urging that he identify his home's location, so that we could drive our Beetle to it, Val evaded any such specific details and proposed that we meet at an agreed upon point from where he could lead us to his residence. Having read a few LaCarre novels, I was quite curiously excited about what seemed to be in the offing At the appointed hour my wife and I arrived at the rendezvous point in front of Germany's Goethe Cultural Institute, not far from our house in Shari Nau We had waited perhaps five minutes when, rather over-speedily, a red Volga pulled up, braking dustily, across the street. Out jumped Val who crossed hurriedly to our car and hastily said that we were to follow him. His rather excited mannerisms further elevated my curiosity, and we followed. We wound up in a section of Kabul, Karte Seh, where I could have easily found the house had I been directed. The rather simple, but non-traditional, fairly common concrete "Bulgarian" house had the typical seven-foot high solid wall around it. At the wooden gate Nijelski seemed to have some trouble with the key in the lock, but eventually the door creaked open. An immediate impression inside was that the yard was atypically seedy and overgrown, rather rare in housing of this pretension where yards were usually carefully tended. Just as there had been some awkwardness with entering the compound, Val again seemed to struggle to get the house entrance open. All of this fitted a pattern of strangeness for the early part of the evening. Inside the house we looked down an oddly barren, long open space consisting, first upon entering, of a semi-divided-off, rather narrow dining area. This opened to a long living room with the near part somewhat separated from the larger rest by the hint of an arch. The only section beyond the spare dining area that had any furniture was the modest space next to it. Here we sat down in dark, stiffly leathered overstuffed furniture and had a round of drinks, Georgian wine, I believe. I should note that Val's quite handsome, in the sturdy manner, wife -- both seemed in their mid-thirties -- was quietly charming and of course also spoke quite good, if accented, English. We learned that they had earlier served together in the Soviet Embassy in Washington for three years. Mrs. Nijelski had once been an editor at the Progress Press in Moscow, the main English language publisher, and both had spent some time at an institute of American Studies in, I believe, then Leningrad. The main rationalization for my interest in this kind of encounter was a curiosity about how Russians such as Val and his wife viewed their system. I wanted, not so much naively as hopefully, to see if a reasonably frank exchange with such intelligent, sophisticated and educated persons could now come from all this. In anticipation, I tried to be discreetly frank about what I was doing in Kabul with the Peace Corps staff, and I was willing to make some general, what I considered well balanced, observations on the American political system, in the hope of enticing Val into the same pattern. But despite his gentle and promising beginning, Val words tended more and more to become boastful propaganda about the superiority of the Soviet system and its achievements in several fundamental areas such as world's best health services, nutrition, etc. Somewhat to his credit he did not indulge in any crude attacks on the United States's shortcomings, sticking instead to the excellence of the Soviet system. As noted earlier, the only furniture in the long 'living room' was clustered in the semi-partitioned space just off the dining area. The rest of the long room, including the walls, was utterly bare except for a collage of popular music LP album covers stuck in the plainest possible fashion on the farthest wall -- at our first meeting we had registered a common interest in jazz -- and a rather old fashioned, squat, sepia-colored, art-deco piece, suggesting a radio-phonograph within, set all alone against another, longer wall. With my chronically delicate lower back, after about a half-hour in the uncomfortable furniture I was increasingly in some pain. With that and some incipient anxiety feelings, I excused myself to stand up to stretch and walk about. I walked away from the seats toward the distant wall with the collage, where I stopped and looked over the LP covers. Then I walked around to the presumed music machine. When I merely stood before it, with perhaps some appearance that I might explore it more carefully, Val, with inordinate concern, got up and began effusively apologizing for the machine as not working and needing repair, and so forth and so on. With that I withdrew my attention from the apparatus and drifted back to where we had been sitting. Not long after this we were told that the meal was ready and the four of us sat down all near one end at a long, narrow mess-hall type of table, where the near center held a cluster of bottled wines and other alcoholic drinks, as I understand is the Russian table setting custom. We were served promptly but no particular aspect of the meal sticks in my mind as noteworthy. After we had been at the table for over half an hour, with the main body of the meal finished, I asked if I might use the bathroom. Val seemed agitated at this and, while saying, "Of course, Ahl (for Al)," as he was now calling me, he hurriedly rose and said that I should wait a minute while he checked to see if the bathroom was "OK." This triggered speculative possibilities in my head about his hurrying out the eavesdropping KGB agent or his high-tech electronic apparatus before I could be given access to the WC. After some five to ten minutes Vahl returned and, a bit over solicitously, directed me to the lavatory doorway. Once inside I did not find anything exceptional, just typical fixtures for this type of 'modern' house in Kabul. I 'refreshed' myself and returned to the dining table. During the meal and after Val regularly urged us to partake of the various wines and liquors that were displayed on the table. Zee and I did so only to the requirements of minimal politeness. As we were getting up from the table, Val said he would like us to meet their sons. Two boys about ten and twelve were summoned and emerged in pajamas, looking uneasy, from a door in one of the bare walls. They politely said hello and were promptly dismissed. Not long after this, Zee and I made our excuses, with hearty thanks for the hospitality, and left for our own residence, no more than 10 minutes drive away. Some weeks later, still unconvinced, this time perhaps naively, that Val was incapable of any frank discussion about our respective political systems, we invited the Nijelskis to our house one evening along with a few Peace Corps Volunteers and some of the expatriate Americans in Kabul. I remember that a former Peace Corps Director, still working then in Kabul on contract, tried having “fun” by gently baiting Val, who remained unruffled. Val remained determinedly smiling, polite and socially engaged throughout the evening ( My only other lingering memory of that evening was that later on, a group of Peace Corps Volunteers gathered around Mrs. Nijelski and were pressing her for explanations on the abuses of human rights in the Soviet Union and stories of Stalinist killings. Mrs. Nijelski seemed to be getting a bit flustered and despite her good English was unable to cope calmly with this hectoring. Val noticed the situation and quickly, in his hearty basso-baritone style, intervened to bring his wife into another more decorous social cluster. After that evening I had a series of discreetly spaced calls form Nijelski, inviting us again to be his guests. But by this time I had decided, perhaps belatedly, that there would be little prospect of my curiosity being satisfied, let alone pleasure, from further such encounters with Val and his wife. So at first I made polite excuses, perhaps still hesitating to cut off connection with any finality. But after the third or fourth call with an invitation, I made a decision that on his next call I would terminate any such relationship. So when that call came, I politely said I felt that there was no point in our continuing to see one another socially since my hopes for frank discussions seemed unrealizable. He expressed great astonishment at this view, as if it were somehow completely wrong-headed, based on false perceptions; and he pleaded that we should get together at least once more. Contrary to my usually compliant nature, I insisted that there was no point in meeting and so closed off that entire episode – almost. Not long after that first encounter at the strange house in Karte Seh, I was on a rare visit to the United Nations Club where our six-year-old daughter was playing with her chums. Beside the swimming pool I came upon the quite genial, and for his position uniquely unstuffy, senior Political Officer of the US Embassy. Previously friendly relations with Phil led me to describe the theater meeting and the evening at the Nijelski's 'home,' as having an intriguing and even ironic quality. After all, weren't we into detente? To his credit, Phil didn't give me an avuncular lecture on the impropriety of such adventures. As the person then responsible for the Afghanistan Peace Corps program, I met privately each week with the Ambassador or his Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM), sometimes both together. I half expected that Phil had told someone at the Embassy of my Nijelski story, so at my next meeting with the Ambassador and the DCM I volunteered a summary. This led to a quite starchy instruction by the DCM, the consensus hatchet man at the Embassy, on the indubitably evil and unfathomably clever tactics of the likes of Nijelski, probably of the KGB. To my inner satisfaction, as I listened, I could feel that I understood these matters quite well and in some respects better than my simplifying instructor. The intelligent Ambassador sat quite calmly through this, just nodding at some of the DCM's strictures. Still, one had to be wary of the perceptions and judgments of the tin gods that senior American diplomatic officials sometimes became. In such circumstances perhaps a sense of unwisdom in courting their frowns had something to do with my excuses and final decision on Val's invitations. In any case, my little foray into the world of LaCarre came to end. To assure that things went well, several middle level members of the sizeable American community were mobilized to perform the service of ushers. According to the seating plan, I was to be in charge of the section where the Soviet Ambassador and his coterie were to be seated in the elite balcony. When the formidable appearing Soviet team of 10 or 12 approached, I muttered my very few woods of Russian greeting and indicated the row reserved for them. As the Ambassador lumbered up the few stairs, one and then another of his squad brushed past me and led their group into the next row in a manner indicating they would seat where they damn well pleased. Perhaps they would suspect the place we wanted them to sit. Of course I could hardly complain and didn't, just swallowing my rising gorge over my disrespected presence. . . . And Badminton Around the same time - I can’t remember the sequence - I somehow learned of a badminton tournament sponsored by the Soviets, to be held on the large campus they had built, perhaps in the 50s or 60s, for the Afghans, centered on a large, brightly blue tiled mosque. I had been able to play a few times before at a gym on the campus of the University of Kabul and was e eager to get in the game. In my one singles match I was beaten by an Afghan whom I should have trounced, but somehow didn't. For the doubles I teamed up with an Indian player who was also looking for a partner. Prakash was at least as good as I was. Three teams, including ours, survived earlier eliminations; a pair of Indonesians; and a team of an elegant Indian in white trousers and tennis sweater and a good Afghan youth, both of whom I had played with at the University gym. Among these three teams there was a sort of stalemate. Prakash and I beat the Indonesians; the Indonesians beat the well dressed Indian and his partner; and the latter beat us. We went through this cycle twice, each time with the same result. To end this seemingly immutable pattern, it was finally decided to calculate total points by which each team had won over their losers. This resulted in the Indian-Afghan team getting the simple cup. This was followed by the singles championship between the elegant Indian and a Russian. The Indian was clearly the better player, but there was a certain doggedness in the Russian's play. Most startling were the line calls by a Russian referee. I was up close and saw the referee call every even close in-or out in favor of the Russian. Some were so blatantly wrong that it seemed to dispirit the Indian who seem to progressively play with less intensity and eventually lost to the Russian ‘champion.’ Perhaps because of the delicate diplomacy of the time, there was barely a peep out of the modest number of mixed national spectators seated on tiered bleachers on one end of the three parallel courts, and certainly no raucous cheers or boo’s in response to events on the courts. But I have little doubt that every knowing person present knew what was going on in that singles event The “Country Team” & the Review for State What seems a common event at each US Embassy abroad is the Country Team meeting. Ours was weekly, with the core of ten to twelve of the senior-most Embassy officers, chaired by the Ambassador, and usually including the CIA Station Chief, the AID Director, the Narcotics Suppression Officer, the Peace Corps Representative and a half dozen other embassy staff. Even during his nearly two years in the country, Dick often took me along; I believe out of respect-- and maybe for support. Then for my last year, after Dick left me in charge, I attended the meetings on my own. The Ambassador, Ted Eliot, was in my eyes a model at his job if not always stating positions with which I could agree. Of course, I rarely, if ever, took him up, as was the case with all the Embassy Officers. His was a firm hand on the tiller! A fundamental message was that we official Americans “speak with one voice “ He seemed a genuine Boston Brahmin with no hint of roughness in his civilized management style. Only on two occasions, described elsewhere did we rub a little unpleasantly, even then rather impersonally, professionally. On the whole we had pleasant, easy relations. He would later admire my “integrity“ in an evaluation letter. While Dick was still in charge of the PC, I was invited to join a group of junior Embassy people in writing an alternative report from our ‘junior’ level to be sent to Washington along with the big annual report by the top echelons, which Ambassadors must submit. Only one of the junior officers, at our team of seven meetings had much if anything to say beyond seconding the official report. This clearly ambitious chap became quite upset and resisted using the, to me, common expression of “socio--economic” when dealing with US aid for development policy for Afghanistan; it was, to him, simply an economic matter. Inclusion of the socio- or social concept in development aid was inconceivable because to him that meant advocacy for socialism, which was of course the “enemy.” The fact that this otherwise well informed young man was ignorant of my expression‘s common use by those in the aided development field seemed incredible to me, but there it was. I was in effect shouted down since all the other juniors nodded or grunted agreement with my opposer. When our junior report went in the diplomatic pouch along with the official report, I was assured that it contained some of my dissenting arguments on the need for social concerns as well as economic in our policy and operations in Afghanistan. At a subsequent Country Team meeting, where the USAID Director for Afghanistan always sat next to the Ambassador, that worthy reported on his agency’s headquarter’s radical new policy, which was now to emphasize the social aspects of future aid. This led to almost courtly nods to me from one or two of the juniors present at that meeting. At another time Dick humbly suggested, at my instigation, to a Team meeting that the USAID local Mission and the Peace Corps work more cooperatively since we were both trying to help development in Afghanistan. This seemed to make the USAID Director apoplectic. In no way was he prepared to link as equals his mighty organization with the lowly Peace Corps. Only embarrassed silence around the meeting table followed. As described elsewhere, when intercourse with the USAID Mission was unavoidable, their style was very much at a superior’s arms-length and condescending. At least one of the freer American spirits in Kabul referred to the USAID Director as “the Marshmallow” because of his ever ready obeisance to the Ambassador. Kabul to Kandahar One of my frequent monitoring routes took me, sometimes alone, down the three hundred kilometer Kabul-Kandahar highway, now, as I write in August 2008, a highway of danger and death as the insurgency that we label as Taliban was intensifying. That stretch of road was built by the Soviets sometime in the 1960s as part of a still incomplete road ringing the country, the next link of which the US had built through the south and southwest of Afghanistan. In my time the road to Kandahar was a simple two lane of asphalt in decent repair. It became a ruin after the Soviet invasion, the devastating many sided civil war before the Taliban took over and then further during the fight to remove the Taliban. After their removal from power, with insurgency continuing, this major route was rather heroically rebuilt while “under fire,” as intense as ever. In my memory of a trip alone, I had pulled along side the road, at about half way, in a rather open area with a dun colored village in the middle distance, but without a soul, in sight, to eat a sandwich I had packed for lunch. Surprisingly suddenly a pack of young boys, probably between the ages of 8 to 12 appeared alongside my open window. In response to their chattering, as I ate, I tried to banter with them in my very limited Farsi. Suddenly one boy reached in and yanked a ball point pen from my shirt pocket. As I opened the door and caught his flying shirt tail he threw the pen back. In the few seconds for this to happen, another boy who had rounded my car had snatched from the car seat my valued open map of the country and made off with it. Since the number of boys was becoming a horde, I decided to escape back to the highway and finish my sandwich along my way. By a Dam Site PCVs Gerry and Tim were assigned to the remote work site for a major earthen dam at Kajakai in Helmand Province (the site of major NATO-Taliban fighting in the summer of 2007) over the largest river in southern Afghanistan, the Helmand, which eventually disappears in the marshes and sands on the Iran-Afghan border. {A New York Times story of November eighth 2008, tells of a renewed effort to get the dam producing electricity for Kandahar and the region by eventual installation of a newly arrived at the site huge hydroelectric turbines made in China, and of restarting construction of power distribution lines that had been halted by surrounding insurgency, now being held at bay by NATO forces and informal negotiations. An accompanying picture shows the view downstream from the top of the dam. The picture shows the overflow channel discharging a foaming torrent which suggests that the dam reservoir is brimming full. But the power station where the waterpower discharges should take place. (On one of my visits to the PCVs, we were given a tour of the then merely hollow power flow tunnel.) seems inactive allowing the water immediately below the dam to appear stagnant.} To reach our Volunteers I had to first take the road to Kandahar, then at the junction where turning left led to the ancient city of Lashkargah, turn right onto the dusty road of some 30 kilometers to the dam. This dam, and the related electrification project for south-central Afghanistan, must have been – and still is, again -- the Kabul office of USAID’s largest project in the country. At east one major US engineering firm, I believe it was Morrison-Knudson (MK), was on the ground at the PCV’s time. (Another American firm seems to be at work there now.) Work had already been going on for several years when Tim and Gerry arrived. The dam itself had been built and the reservoir was well filled, and the distribution lines and pylons were getting started. The major job at the dam site now was to install the generating equipment and to train the young Afghan engineers and other staff who would inherit most, if not all, of the operating responsibilities of the completed installation. Tim and Gerry were to teach English to the Afghans so that they could read US manuals and be trained in English by one of the MK engineers. On a bluff overlooking the Helmand River below the dam, local stone had been used to build five cottages, a mess hall and a small medical room. Two cottages were reserved for the usually short term visits by MK personnel, and two housed multiples of the young engineer-trainees. One bare cottage was home for Gerry and Tim. A number of MK men lived in Lashkargah, some with families, and regularly commuted the 30 kilometers to the dam site. Lash ( to the Yanks) was something else, an old town that had been in part redesigned and re-built to the foreigners’ taste. The right angled streets, neat cottages, had been occupied for some years now by rotating MK families. Efforts at lawns and landscaping, largely futile in this water scarce semi-desert, suggested an effort to reproduce a mini-Phoenix, Arizona. On one of my visits to Tim and Gerry, I spent the night with an Afghan friend in Lashkargah. (On another occasion I brought my family -- wife and young daughter -- and we spent the night with Gerry and Tim in their cottage.) Wandering off in the evening, just at the edge of Lash, I entered a large complex of ruins that suggested a major regal compound. At the time I didn’t have any idea of what I had “discovered.” I never learned much about it other that that it was a potentate’s alternate palace from around 1100 CE. Wandering around the largely crumbled but extensive ruins all alone at twilight gave me a sense of fairyland wonder among the remaining towering, roofless walls and monumental arches, all of a mud-brown brick, with a remaining colorful tile here and there. On one of those visits with the PCVs, Tim struggled to tell me something; he seemed to be groping for the right words, with Gerry nudging him on. Finally, almost apologetically, he described a troubling work situation as if he wasn’t sure that he had the right to do so. It came out that the solitary MK engineer who was living in one of the dam site cottages and was supposed to train the Afghan engineers and other staff for the finished installation was ’ill’ a lot and often didn’t leave his cottage to work with his charges. Tim thought that he was drinking a lot. In the upshot, the MK man asked Tim to actually teach the Afghans from the technical manuals, a task uncomfortably beyond Tim’s competence although he was willing to try to help out. Back in the PC office in Kabul, I discussed with my supervisor, Dick, just how to handle this awkward situation. Our ruling concern was that the USAID types considered the PC as, at best, a harmless sideshow compared to their professional importance, and in this case might be prickly about our “interference.” Sure enough, when we quietly, informally brought up the subject, it was brusquely dismissed as none of our business. We didn’t get beyond mentioning that the MK man seemed too chronically ill to work, when they refused to listen further. We were afraid to persist about Tim’s being asked to take over the engineer’s training work, suspecting that USAID would accuse Tim of improperly pushing onto the turf of the engineer, and hence -- god forbid -- that of mighty USAID -- imagine a mere PCVolunteer! Gerry and Tim normally took several months between visits to Kabul via Kandahar. But in the next six weeks they came in about every two weeks, and this was no easy, brief journey. They were increasingly worried about their site situation, which was getting steadily worse, with the MK man obviously hitting the bottle and almost never leaving his cottage; he had a servant to do his biding. Gerry, who seemed the brighter, or at least the quicker, now gave us the most vivid descriptions, including how the Afghans made fun of their supposed trainer , and how painful it was for Tim to try to fill in. After each of these visits with our Volunteers, we tried to break through USAID’s resistance to discuss the matter, always to no avail. Each effort just increased their irritation. Even our suggestion that someone should visit the site to check our reports got laughed off. Without the accuracy of our reports ever being acknowledged, about two months after Tim’s first reluctant toot of the whistle, we learned from the Volunteers that the trainer-engineer had disappeared from the site and any pretence of technical training for the Afghans was suspended until MK could replace the departed. Tim and Gerry could now continue just their English instruction in much more comfortable circumstances. It is hard to imagine how an important organization such as USAID could be so arrogant, toward others trying to help, as to perpetuate harm to their own work. But in some remote overseas -- and not unknown at home -- situations, a sense of unchallengable power seems all too seductive. Our only appeal could have been to the Ambassador, who might also have been edgy over the unpleasantness. But in the circumstances of the whole, large American community in Kabul, that step could have caused a great blow-up among our extremely tense countrymen in disturbingly xenophobic Afghanistan. Lucy Lucy arrived as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Afghanistan in the summer of l975. When she arrived, I was the Program and Training Officer, and soon after became the Acting Representative (Director) of Peace Corps in Afghanistan. After an initial training period in the partially abandoned summer resort hill town of Paghman, Lucy was assigned to teach English at the Faculty of Agriculture at Kabul University. Among the close-knit, self-consciously hip group of fifteen with whom she came from Buffalo University into the Peace Corps/Afghanistan, Lucy played something of an only half-willing clown. Otherwise she presented herself as a no-nonsense tomboyish figure who didn't take shit from anybody. Her opinions and comments on just about anything were given with an amusing certitude, implying stupidity in anything or anybody to the contrary. While Lucy was of at least average intelligence, she seemed inordinately insensitive to the ways and views of others. The notion of "cultural sensitivity," so much in the atmosphere and vocabulary of Peace Corps training and beyond, seemed incomprehensible or just plain nonsense to her, not worth paying attention to. As I got to know her over the early months of her presence, we developed a rather easy, friendly relationship. Her bizarre opinions seemed to me then to have a tongue-in-cheek quality, and I could hardly believe they would be reflected in practice. Frankly, I got a kick out of Lucy, of a sort she probably would not have understood. She was a pretty fair softball player. When not enough Peace Corps men showed up for a game in the American community softball league, we got the reluctant opposing Embassy team to let us have Lucy play in the outfield. She gave us a competent game and helped us to a precious one-run victory. When my senior Afghan staffer, Matin, who monitored Lucy's work relationships, first began diffidently reporting some difficulties at her University work site, I tended not to take them very seriously. I simply encouraged Matin to try working with Lucy and her supervisor on the matter. As the months went by, Matin, in the then common Afghan manner, gradually, from the most indirect hints, began to increase references and emphasis on the University problems that Lucy was having, particularly with her faculty officials. Episodes being reported were simultaneously being played down and yet given a somewhat ominous overtones in Matin's verbal accounts As we got into the summer of l976 it became obvious that something quite serious was afoot, basically that Lucy behaved just as she "felt like" with her students, her faculty supervisors and with Matin, in whose hands I had left Lucy's case for as long as I felt prudent. When I spoke to Lucy she took the line that they had a lot of stupid rules, that she knew how to teach and was doing so quite properly. Since she had come to help them, they should adjust to her! Whose side was I on, anyhow? It was unavoidably clear that admonitions about cultural sensitivity made not the slightest impression on Lucy. She was not going to change because there was no reason to. Soon Matin was coming to me almost daily, wringing his hands over Lucy's worsening relations with her faculty. I asked if he could get Lucy's supervisors to put in writing their specific complaints. Matin said that he would try, but at first came back with reports that they were unwilling to set anything down -- presumably because of the Afghan's special sense of hospitality-politeness toward foreigners (along with a simultaneous arms-length xenophobia). Finally, Matin did get a written list of some 13 specific complaints when he made it clear that I would be reluctant to take action on Lucy without something in writing. The complaints included the following: Lucy changed faculty-fixed class schedules at will, without consultation. She discussed "improper subjects" in her classes. She did not come to faculty meetings and avoided contact with her supervisor She ignored faculty advice and regulations on teaching methods Several specific examples of hurtful disrespect toward her supervisors were cited. When presented with the complaints, Lucy just scoffed at them, as if they proved that something was wrong with the "heads" of the Afghan supervisors. Now I of course had no choice but to remove Lucy from her position at the University, to the great gratitude of the Agriculture Faculty officials. The issue now became: What to do with Lucy? She of course felt that she had done no wrong and wanted another assignment in Afghanistan, where she had this role as a sort of mascot among her Buffalo U. sub-group of Volunteers. Although she demanded another job, she could not be brought to any hint of understanding of her recent problems. She asserted that she would in no way alter her professional behavior since she saw nothing wrong with it. At that impasse I decided that I had no choice but to send Lucy home. She denounced the idea and began with a few PCV supporters to organize a challenge to my decision. Alongside this she developed another interesting base of support. Contrary to the world-wide Peace Corps policy (and spirit), under which PCVs were to live in the local communities at levels related to that of their work colleagues, Lucy did not have her own such place for some time. I now learned that she actually lived in a series of comparatively posh homes rented for the officials and staffers of the comparatively large official American community; living as their -- usually baby-sitting -- guest or house-sitting for them while the occupants were away on their usually lengthy home leaves. In short, Lucy had been living in a quite unAfghan and unPeace Corps style for a considerable length of time. The family that she was living with at the time of her job crisis was that of Godfrey Fletcher (name altered). Fletcher was the commercial attaché at the Embassy and also, of particular interest for the present case, its Equal Employment Opportunity Officer. Fletcher enthusiastically and aggressively took up and pursued Lucy's complaint of unfair treatment, with implications of gender discrimination. Some background may be important for understanding at this point. Afghanistan at this time presented some particular problems for the Peace Corps, and generally for official Americans who found the xenophobic culture and non-aligned official posture, with its attenuated official contacts, very unsettling. The Embassy found it necessary to have a psychologist assigned for the edgy US personnel and dependents. The Afghan Government had recently instructed the Peace Corps to begin assigning all of our now 60-odd Volunteers to the capitol, Kabul. Anyone at all familiar with the Peace Corps 'culture' at the time will recognize that this ran quite contrary to the Peace Corps and its Volunteers' expectations. And for the Volunteers the city culture was as difficult to penetrate and as disappointingly off-putting as it was for the more clearly official Americans. On top of that, there was among the rank and file of the numerous official Americans a negative view toward the Peace Corps administration in Afghanistan, because it was inexplicably putting its Volunteers through such unpleasant experiences at the hands of their Afghan officials and work supervisors, without demanding -- and somehow enforcing -- satisfactory accommodation by the Afghans to Peace Corps wishes. Because the Volunteers with their dissatisfactions were so thick on the ground in Kabul, and had little access to off-duty Afghan associations, most tended to gravitate toward the recreational facilities for official Americans and, over time, to their homes. (Lucy was not the only one to offer house-sitting services.) In the then strange, in-bred world of the American community, including the Volunteers in Kabul, Lucy's case became something of a cause célèbre, largely because she and her supporters had set about lobbying far and wide at every opportunity about the mistreatment in prospect. The reaction was made easy by the boredom and dyspepsia among many Americans who looked to the Peace Corps, through their domesticated Volunteers, for entertainment of a Schadenfreude sort. In this difficult atmosphere, the Peace Corps staff and some Volunteer leaders had earlier worked out procedures for a Grievance Committee to have hearings on troubling issues. Lucy demanded that such a hearing be convened, after initially hesitating when the offer was made. The grievance hearing at the Peace Corps office was packed with Volunteers, many of whom seemed, on reflex, sympathetic to Lucy. Lucy herself did not have much to say, certainly nothing that helped her cause. But she had a few quite verbal advocates who kept pressing the staff with tendentious questions, often not related to Lucy's situation. The most poignant passage, and for him an apparently extremely painful moment, came when Matin finally, reluctantly, almost chokingly, had to recite the complaints of the Faculty of Agriculture as they had been written to the Peace Corps office. Aside from the wild charge that Matin had maliciously coached the Faculty into making these complaints, not much was then said in Lucy's defense. As the meeting came to a end, I announced that I expected to have Lucy sent to Washington where there was a well-established appeal process at headquarters. To go back to the matter of Fletcher's intervention: After letting it be widely known that he was vigorously supporting Lucy, who was of course living with his family at the time, Fletcher was advised by the Ambassador to get off the case, as inappropriate for his attention. The matter had arisen at one or two of the weekly meetings that I had with the Ambassador in my role, by now, of responsibility for the Peace Corps in Afghanistan. He agreed that since the Peace Corps had its own well established appeal procedures for dealing with these matters, both in Kabul and at Washington headquarters, Fletcher's role as Equal Employment Opportunity Officer did not extend to Lucy's case. In the normal Peace Corps procedure once a country Representative had decided on the departure of a Volunteer, the Volunteer was to leave as soon as possible, carrying with them to Washington the required documentation prepared by the Representative to justify the decision. (A back-up copy was sent by mail.) Such departing Volunteers were also given their own copy, with the aid of which they could develop their counterarguments. As we were arranging Lucy's air departure, she came to ask me for a special favor. For some time, she claimed, she had been corresponding with friends in the USA about their coming to visit her in Afghanistan. They had just written to say that they would be coming to visit her in the next week or ten days. So she asked to be allowed that extra time in Afghanistan, and I, perhaps foolishly, agreed to honor her request. I cannot remember now if any friends actually visited, but this did give her extra time to propagate among the American community her view of her mistreatment. During this time I met with Fletcher to try to explain events and my decision. He listened without making any particular comment other than to say how charming and sympathetic his family found Lucy. As an avid traveler through Afghanistan's intriguing regions, the Ambassador had earlier suggested to Zee, and I -- and I'm sure to others -- a trip on the not quite completed circular road route around Afghanistan. At this late summertime, the only period when the route's difficult stretches were passable, we saw a holiday and work opening of nearly one week in which to try it. We were to take off on the same day as Lucy's rescheduled departure, for which she had already been given the accompanying documentation described. At the beginning of a normal work day for the rest of my staff, I stopped of at my office for some last minute reason and there got a phone call from the Ambassador, asking me to come at once to see him. With a packed-for-travel Toyota Land Cruiser, holding wife, young daughter and infant son, I drove directly to the Embassy. Leaving my family waiting in the vehicle, I presented myself to the Ambassador's secretary in my road togs. The Ambassador came out to see me and we remained standing in the waiting room. The Ambassador was now waving in front of me a copy of my outgoing cable which announced to Washington my decision on Lucy's departure and her arrival schedule. The cable had little detail and had not itself disturbed the Ambassador. What had was the supposedly confidential documentation which I had given to Lucy the day before, for delivery to Washington. She had immediately shown it to Fletcher who, noting that it included an account of his intervention, in turn communicated his disturbance to the Ambassador as soon as possible. The Ambassador let me know most emphatically that he considered it inappropriate for any mention of Embassy involvement in such outbound conflictual documents, and that it was particularly "unfair" for the career-conscious Fletcher to have his unfortunate role included. The Ambassador asked why I had written such a document. I replied that I understood that it was required of me by Peace Corps regulations in such a case. What he very earnestly, almost pleadingly said next completely surprised me. It went something like this: "Alright, alright -- but why did you have to write all that in an official document that might touch on people's reputation?" I could only stammer back that I simply believed that what I had written was true and necessary for Washington's understanding of Lucy's intended appeal. While the Ambassador left me with no doubt about his disapproval of how I had written Lucy's documentation, he was able to dismiss me with a quite correct wish for a pleasant journey, about which he would like to hear upon our return. I went outside with a very disturbed mind and climbed into the Toyota for our trip around Afghanistan. I expect that the reader can imagine the pall that this eve of departure interview cast on the otherwise fascinating adventure through the Spartan, scenically dramatic regions of Afghanistan. Later: At the Peace Corps headquarters back in Washington, a feminist, apparently on reflex, vigorously intervened on Lucy's behalf. However, the woman actually responsible for reviewing such appeal cases later told me that Lucy almost laughably condemned herself by the brash, insensitive manner in which she made her case. The Great Circuit of Afghanistan Although emotionally clouded by the Ambassador’s reprimand, the trip around Afghanistan had its pleasures and interests. Infant Randy and six year old Holly were of course in tow. To feed Randy we had a stack of Sterno canned-fire tins and a pot in order to boil water for preparing powdered milk. We spent the first night with PCVs in Kandahar. This stretch or road from Kabul had been asphalted by the Soviets. From Lashkargah, a bit further on, the connecting road was made by Americans through some sort of coordination. All the way to Herat the American road was good, if not perfectly maintained. Just before we arrived there we passed near enough to see the Soviet supplied MIG aircraft on the airfield at Shindand. In Heart he had a meeting with the very pleasant governor of the Province, who happened to be the father of the very modern wife of our Peace Corps Accountant in Kabul. I had sent him a book with my experience in Nigeria which he claimed to have read with interest. Since roads and accommodations would not be promising beyond Heart, the governor radioed ahead to government ‘rest houses’, apparently little used, farther along to receive us warmly. Although these accommodations were extremely modest, especially for ablutions, we managed well enough, especially with a decent egg breakfast supplied by the caretakers. The hills around and after Heart are the tail end of the Hindu Kush. They were liberally forested with trees that produced wild pistachio nuts, the harvesting of which the government sought to control but apparently without much luck. After the pistachio hills the land flattened and the ‘roads’ became raised sandy ridges, often almost disappearing, except for evidence of past travelers. At one point near Daulatabad, the sand was deeply rutted and we got stuck, at first seemingly well away from any habitation. Then we spotted a school and children on the horizon.. A teacher and several boys came to check us out. They soon got to work with shovels and had us on our way. Although we had brought a few food items, we subsisted mainly on the kebabs readily available along the way. At ancient Balkh we just had to stop and wander around trying to imagine its heyday as a hub on the Silk Road and earlier Alexandrine adventures. Mazar e Sherif had a somewhat touristy hotel and the better accommodations were welcome by this point on our tour. The city’s tiled mosque is beautifully monumental. We had time to visit the workshop to the rear of the mosque where tiles are repaired and the famous blue glass is blown. Now we were back on the Soviet asphalted road to Kabul. Among the marvels of Afghanistan’s spectacular landscapes encountered on this and my other travels was the miles long Salang tunnel through the Hindu Kush, understood, then at least, to be the longest in the world at that 12,000 foot altitude. The Russians had built it in happier times as the vital link to the lower lands north of the towering mountains. It was not properly ventilated and had to be often closed when the pollution became so thick and opaque as to be dangerous to health and vision. It never smelled good and was to be traversed as quickly as possible. Because of the altitude it was often approached and exited in snow. Once the Salang was exited it was literally down hill all the way back to Kabul and home base. Bamyan A “non-Islamic” marvel, that the Taliban later destroyed, was still there during our time and was a must see for expatriates, the giant Buddhas carved into the sandstone cliffs above the green valley of Bamyan. The trip west from Kabul of about 100 miles took almost five hours since on the way we stopped at a more natural wonder, the Band-e-Amir, three or four large linked descending lakes each bounded down stream by massive calcium formations, as terracing, which overflowed in season to the next and lower level. For whatever chemical reason, the lakes had a preternatural, vivid blue color On a height opposite the Buddhas we spent the night in a yurt upgraded for tourists. The Buddhas were of course great wonders, the largest, I believe, was almost 200 feet tall carved almost entirely free out of the surrounding cliff face. This had been a major Buddhist center before Islam claimed the country, and the cliffs were carved full of nooks and passages. One could climb through these to come out on top of the Buddha’s flat head. Surprisingly, I seemed to have a touch of vertigo there with the thought of falling or floating free flicking cross my mind. Chopin A new, but smaller, replacement cohort of PCVs arrived in Kabul in the winter if 1975-76 and were put into temporary rented housing, pending some final training and job assignments. There was some doubling up because of limited space. In one of the rented Afghan houses, we had placed a young couple and a single young woman. The couple were a Chinese-American male, whose parents had fled the Indonesian massacres in the mid-60s and named him Chopin after the Polish great, and a lovely, seemingly idealistic and innocent Anglo-white, Jackie. The single girl, Alcie, was a strong, highly intelligent, sensible, not unattractive person. I decided to drop in on the new arrivals for a welcome and to see how they were doing. They were in turmoil! Chopin was raging about, denouncing Alcie. He had kicked in her room’s door and kicked over the sheet metal, wood-burning stove in the main room. As best I could discover from Alcie and Jackie, amidst Chopin’s raving, in earlier discussion among the three, Alcie had typically responded to his dogmatic statements, with, in Chopin’s words, “Yes, but . .” This set Chopin , who appeared to have taken some alcohol, into a towering rage, as if failure to fulsomely agree with him was an insult of the deepest cut. After observing this volatile situation, I left, urging peace and saying I would be right back. By bizarre good luck, out on the road I met Paul, a familiar young American psychologist doing some sort of research in Afghanistan. I mobilized him and he came with me to my nearby house where I phoned Dick -- I was still his deputy. The three of us agreed that Paul and I would go back to the troubled house, and Dick would drive to and park outside the house. It was understood that Chopin had already expressed vehement hostility toward Dick, who prudently would wait outside to possibly be called in. Paul and I reentered and spent over an hour, in Paul’s phrase, “ talking down” Chopin. Although he slowed down somewhat, his irrational talk didn’t disappear. Even his wife Jackie, who was of course very worried, expressed puzzlement. While unable to contradict Alcie, Jackie was obviously anxious not to pile on Chopin. She did reluctantly affirm that Chopin had had some drinks and had taken some possibly affecting medication, to which he barked, YES! With no clear improvement in the very tense situation, we finally took Alcie with us and placed her in other housing. After some staff discussion about sending him home, Chopin did continue in the program and settled down just adequately. However, he remained ready to join in any of the challenges to our staff noted above and to be noted later. He became particularly silly at it at Lucy’s grievance hearing. I believe that Chopin did have some sort of intelligence, and no questions ever arose over his teaching English in an Afghan high school for boys. A few years after the Afghan PC experience, I learned that Jackie and Chopin had parted. Hard Softball Living and working overseas not only exposes one to the "exotic behavior of the quaint natives" in such lands as Afghanistan. Events and relationships among US citizens in these foreign settings can also at times take strange twists unlikely to be experienced by Americans who work in their homeland. The personality types may not be strange to the domestic scene, but they often work themselves out in a different, peculiarly ‘overseas’ manner. Back in the spring of l976, now Acting Representative of the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, I was surrounded, quite literally, by some 50-odd Peace Corps Volunteers in the capitol city of Kabul. Following recent Afghan Government instructions, no Volunteers were stationed outside of Kabul -- except for one Volunteer who managed to hide out in his beloved village. This government -- it was still well before the l978 start of a series of 'communist' coups and governments and subsequent chaos leading to the Soviet invasion-- was attempting to be "non-aligned," doing the Peace Corps no favors, but claiming that the site restrictions were for the Volunteers' safety, in spite of a long, generally unalarming history of Volunteers serving in quite remote parts of the country. None of us understood, or believed, that the Government “excuse” may have been sincere concern for the PCVs, which now actually seems likely in the light of subsequent events. Such a confinement to the capitol was not comfortable for the Peace Corps and certainly not for its Volunteers. That, along with the general erosion of the Afghan Government's interest in maintaining the already declining numbers of our Volunteers, was the ostensible reason for an announced visit by a Peace Corps official, one Jerry Ryan (name altered), in May l976, as part of a swing through several Asian countries. It later became understood that Jerry was within days of the end of his Peace Corps employment, and had been accorded a final junket, not unmindful of chances for one last sweep for souvenirs. A Peace Corps cable arrived giving the dates for Ryan's brief visit to Afghanistan. The Peace Corps, being an arm of the US Government, had all its cable traffic pass through the US Embassy's Communications Unit, with the Ambassador or a trusted deputy reading all the "incoming." Catching the Ryan cable, the Ambassador decided that the announced schedule should be changed since he wanted to be in on Peace Corps discussions, and he found these dates, for some reason, inconvenient. Before I even knew of Ryan's cable on his schedule, the Ambassador had drafted his own reply, informing Ryan that the timing was inappropriate. He then informed me that he had initiated this reply on his own and asked if I had any reason to disagree. I answered that I had no strong feelings one way or the other. The dates given in Ryan's cable suggested that he must have departed on his travel almost immediately after it was dispatched. Although recognizing this, the next day I reflected that the cable had in fact been addressed to me, and some sort of acknowledgement to the Peace Corps was expected from me, not just from the Ambassador. My cabled message in effect was: "It would be best if Ryan rescheduled later dates for his visit, but if plans could not be altered, I would be pleased to meet with him on the original schedule." The day after I had sent my cable was a Thursday, the beginning of the Islamized American community weekend in Kabul, since Friday became the equivalent of our Sunday. It was softball season and the Peace Corps had a team in the league made up almost entirely of Americans, which played on these weekends in the spacious playground -- named after a previous Ambassador -- adjoining the impressive, purpose-built Embassy building. It happened that I had a case of the flu or a very bad cold on that day, but by default I was the pitcher for our Peace Corps team. (I might note that the level of play in this league was not of the highest.) We were being soundly thrashed by our opponents, with my feeble deliveries being pounded all over the ballpark by the middle innings. At this low point, while dispiritedly slumped against the sagging cyclone fence which paralleled the baselines, during our turn at bat, I was gruffly summoned to come outside the fence by the Deputy Chief of Mission. He all but took me by the ear to where the Ambassador was standing in an open space behind the backstop. The Ambassador who always made use of his towering presence, about 6'5'' to my 6'3', seemed to be standing almost on tip-toe as I was ushered into his al fresco presence. My wife, Zee, who was sitting in the temporary bleachers less than one hundred yards away, later observed that I seemed to be having a pleasant, businesslike chat with the Ambassador. Actually, he was chewing my ass out in no uncertain terms because he felt my last cable had softened if not conflicted with his own earlier message on Ryan's schedule. Aside from this immediate issue, it was even more important that "the Mission speaks with one voice." (This imperative was rechisled regularly during my three years in Kabul with this Ambassador.) After my standing reprimand -- really too soft a word since the Ambassador seemed to me to be just short of quivering with a barely controlled Jovian rage -- I was handed back to his hovering Deputy who, as noted, was widely considered the Ambassador's "hatchet man." By this time I was in quite a state, cascading perspiration from the combination of futile softball exertions, my feverish flu, and now the 'front office' predicament. Taking me aside the Deputy Chief sternly directed me to cable to my headquarters, recanting my last message and supporting unequivocally the Ambassador's on changing the Ryan visit schedule. Now I was still in charge, again by default, as 'captain' of our flagging softball team which needed some shifts in the lineup because of my forced withdrawal. For the moment I felt that I simply could not put two words together toward such a cable, whose other-determined purpose I wasn't sure I understood anyhow. So I asked the Deputy Chief to set down the words he thought were required for my signature, and he seemed willing enough. Once he had the message down, and I had made the lineup changes, he indicated that I must rush over to the Embassy building and have the Communications Unit send the cable at once. At some point in this process I mumbled that it was too late to affect Ryan's schedule since he had already departed Washington. But this could not even be acknowledged, as the stern retribution must proceed ineluctably. The walk of a few hundred yards over pavement to the Embassy was most uncomfortable on my ancient, clanking baseball cleats. Inside, after taking my shoes off for this holy of holies, I had to trace and summon by phone one of the "on-call" but absent -- since it was the weekend -- Communicators with the aid of the on-duty Marine Guard. This was finally accomplished after a few exploratory calls. After the message got sent I returned to the ball field where the dismal game was just ending. Perhaps because of my lightheadedness from the debilitating illness, the whole crazy episode left me with a vaguely bemused feeling: What was this I had just been through! ? A giddy laugh seemed somehow appropriate, or unstoppable. It may have just been my coping device. Ryan arrived a day or so later on his originally announced schedule. The only one of the tea-cup-storm-tossed cables that he knew of, and that on the very verge of his departure, was the Ambassador's first. But Ryan's plans had been so tight that he could not adjust to the Ambassador's request. The Ambassador now seemed not to mind and found time to meet, quite amicably, with Ryan and myself. One characteristic of the Ambassador, professionally admirable in a way, I suppose, was that, once past, an event such as that on the ball field seemed to make no mark on continuing relationships. On the eve of Ryan's departure from Kabul, we arranged a reception at our house to which the Ambassador and the Deputy Chief of Mission were invited, along with a scattering of middle and upper level Afghan officials with whom the Peace Corp dealt and some Volunteers. Ryan, the guest of honor for all this, had asked earlier that afternoon if one of my staff could accompany him so that he could have a last chance for some sightseeing and souvenir collecting. My very savvy deputy Matin was unresistingly assigned. At the reception Ryan arrived unshaven and slightly disheveled, with carpets and other paraphernalia draped over himself and Matin, about one hour after most of the other guests. His apologies were perfunctory and his conversation for a time could not be diverted from his bargain-hammering achievements, which must really have been those of Matin, who later begged me to understand that he had been helpless to tear the bargain-besotted Ryan away on time for the start of the reception. Because of the generally informal tone that had evolved for the evening, Ryan's initial absence and late arrival were swallowed up and forgotten as the party was swinging well along when he, a natural charmer, arrived and plunged into the swirl. The Ambassador and his elbow-present Deputy were quite pleasant with me, and the Ambassador seemed to be enjoying the occasion. At one point he or his Deputy came up to me in ol' buddy fashion to ask how we managed to get so many Afghan officials to accept our invitation. They, the Embassy, were having the devil's own time getting Afghan officials to come to their formal receptions. (As mentioned earlier, Afghanistan at the time seemed to be striking a very "non-aligned" posture.) The whole evening went off pleasantly enough, and we all separated on a friendly note. Even the Deputy Chief's usual job at receptions of sidling up to Americans locked in overlong conversations with one another and charging them to "MINGLE!" was apparently unnecessary -- almost as if he had the night off. Kissinger in Kabul During the days of my tour, Kabul was relatively peaceful, at least on the surface. But we had hardly left when a Communist coup, killing President Daoud, took over. The new American Ambassador was kidnapped, and then killed when the Soviet advised police blew up everyone at the captors’ lair. But during the still happier days, in 1976, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, then in this part of the world, dropped by as a favor to our Ambassador Eliot, who was a friend of Kissinger from their days together at State in Washington. Kissinger’s strikingly tall wife was the center of a lunch with some of the American community women , including Zee, in Paghman, the cool hilltop retreat with moldering homes for the one time local elite. The American community, totaling perhaps 400, was invited to “meet” the Secretary on the embassy grounds, where he gave a short, rather jocular, non-policy speech on the hot summer afternoon. Somewhat dampening was the heat related collapse of Jackie, one of our Peace Corps Volunteers who fainted and ‘soiled her linen.’ This brought an ambulance from the clinic at the large American services compound. Jackie seemed OK after a few days. But this contretemps was topped by one directly involving Kissinger. As part of his panoply, two large armored cars traveled with him by separate plane. After his appearance at the embassy, he set out to pay his respects to President Daoud. The second car, it was understood, was for tailgating close security. Shortly after the two cars left the Embassy grounds in that order, the follower car broke down and stopped, leaving Kissinger’s car to spread the gap before the problem was recognized and Kissinger’s car also stopped amidst some confusion. Nothing moved on the broad avenue while the embassy’s Marines were roused to form a security guard around Kissinger and an embassy car was provided to carry Kissinger’s security team. This got the convoy moving again, while the down security vehicle was towed off. The period of frozen vehicle movement lasted between 20 minutes to a half hour. But the whole episode excited the embassy compliment to a flurry of activity that hinted of the Keystone Kops. A Very Dark Moment My most horrifying, profoundly embarrassing memory of Afghanistan was sited in the same USIS building as was the rehearsal of “The Music Man.” The occasion was a slide lecture on the storied but disastrous great British Retreat from Kabul to the Khyber Pass in 1842, presented by anthropologist Louis Dupree, a bona fide expert and a friend. The building was packed on this occasion with many Afghans as well as the usual expatriates I had squeezed in at the end of a row in the upper rear tier. At one point all the lights suddenly went out, but an emergency backup light kicked on. After several minutes, this, too, began to fade and went out. To his credit, Dupree seamlessly spoke on although only his mini-pointer stayed lighted. Suddenly sweaty, in the pitch darkness I felt an unstoppable, generalized anxiety and compulsion to flee. The only path to exit was severely narrowed by the crowd, and of course I couldn’t see anything. Some part of my mind told me that my wild rush might create a mob panic, but that couldn’t overcome my seizure. Somehow my mind did retain a clear memory of how the limited path out was shaped, and clutching my bulky parka as tightly as possible, I managed to slowly, perhaps calmed adequately by the motion, move to the exit, only lightly brushing a few people on the way. Once free of the crowd, although relieved of the compulsion anxiety, that was instantly replaced by a monstrous guilt over risking a dreadful mob panic by my flight. I hardly felt any better! A Horseman’s Game An entirely unique experience was watching the superb horsemen of the Tajik north at the game of Buzkashi from a perch on the eroded wall of the ancient city of Balkh. As I understand it, the game involves any number of horsemen, heavily clothed, wearing a helmet of sorts and equipped with a thick whip. The focus is a goat or calf skin filed with sand and weighing almost 80 lbs. Points, or the winners, are determined by one of the two teams possessing the goat and trying to race with it to a designated far point, turning it and bringing to and depositing the skin in the spot where the game began. But anything is allowed to stop this accomplishment by the opponents, from charging into the fighting horse of the holder who may be beaten by the hard whip; any means to take away the heavy skin and advance for the goals. The goat often gets knocked to the ground and a feat of horsemanship, sliding to the belly of the horse, to reach down and pull up the burden, often held under one leg. On the cold blustery day when I watched, there were hundreds of horsemen on the field. Only about 25 on a side seemed in the middle of the endless struggle. The number of others idled on horseback on the edge of the field till some of them replaced those on the field for their turn in the fray. My game seemed to last for hours. Conference in the Philippines Came the summons for regional countries’ leadership to a four-day conference on how to handle common issues for the Volunteers in stressful circumstances. En route I had a several hours stay over in Dehli, where I took up my taxi drivers offer of a guided tour. Rather comically, at each of the great sites, such as the Grand Mosque, and an ancient tower, he suggested that I get out of the taxi and climb up and explore on my own, first as a Hindu he could not go onto the mosque property and at the tower he just said that he was tired and had seen enough of it., and the famous Red Fort could only be seen at a distance from the taxi window. In no case did my ‘guide’ give any information of what I was exploring. The conference setting would be rural Tagatay , not far from Manila, strikingly overlooking a dormant volcanic crater filled with a small lake with another cratered volcanic cone poking up through its center. In a recreational period I got into a kind of open sided racquet ball game. For some foolish reason I played barefoot. Sticking at it too long, I tore the large calluses completely off the balls of my feet, a singularly inconvenient injury if one hopes to do any sort of walking. Next day I sneaked off, by regular camp transport, to Manila where I visited the well set up American Mission dispensary for a medical painting and bandaging. But that wasn't my only medical purpose in the Philippines. I had decided to see if I could get a vasectomy while there. Two fine children were enough and freedom from risk of further reproduction seemed desirable. A Filipina at the Peace Corps office referred me to a willing local doctor and the deed was done after the conference closed. There was a covert element to the surgery. Since the hospital where the doctor worked was run by some Catholic order where this work was verboten, I was admitted with some forgotten fraudulent diagnosis. The deed was done and after two days of bed rest I was on my way back to Kabul. But one other Manila episode is worthy of note. While in Manila for my foot patching I had learned of a concert by the jazz guitarist, Charlie Byrd, one of my genuine heroes whom I had seen long ago when he was an unknown in Washington DC and whose recordings I treasured. Byrd’s concert would be on the evening of the last day of the conference and so I got a ticket and hoped to attend. This was just before the vasectomy. With the end of the conference, we were all bundled with our bags into an overage bus to return to our world class hotel in Manila. The bus puffed and snorted our way to the edge of Manila where we joined a massive crawling and halting traffic jam. I was worried about being late for the concert as this tie up seemed to be getting ever more torpid as time passed. Finally, our old bus stalled and wouldn’t start, and a push was the only hope. We all got out and formed up at the bus’s rear and started to heave. My position, innocently, or stupidly, was directly behind the bus’s tail exhaust pipe and proved most unstrategic. As we got the bus rolling it sputtered a few time and then with a roar blew a huge black cloud from the menacing exhaust. When that cleared and I dared breathe, I discovered a new coloration on my whole front aspect. My pale slipover African shirt was now shades of black and gray, and my companions told me that my face wasn’t much different. But the bus was still dead in the tide. A few of us hailed one of Manila’s fabled Jeepneys – whose windshields are so decorated that it is miraculous how the drivers see out -- and we were, for a wonder, squirmed through the traffic and to our posh hotel. In a mad rush for the concert I threw my bag in the hotel lobby and in the retained cab flew to the grand Philharmonic Hall, said to be designed by and for Imelda Marcos, then still regnant. The concert was underway when I arrived and I had to stand on the fringe until the intermission for my assigned seat. This wait gave me a chance to survey the clientele. Those near the excellent seat awaiting me seemed to be dressed “to the nines” and the whole event rather toney. At intermission time, I felt I had to affect a distingue, cool manner as I threaded my way past the tuxes and evening wraps to my central seat. My neighbors may have been in fear that my inappropriate attire might shed some of my dingy covering on their togs. The acoustics of the elaborate hall were superb and Charlie Byrd was just great, making my exertions worthwhile. When leaving the hall I again sought to be seen as paying not the slightest attention to any glares from my betters. Adventures with the Beetle After some time in Kabul, and after Dick had been recalled to Washington and I was left in charge, we acquired a VW Beetle for our family use. One of our first ventures was an attempt to visit Peshawar over the border in Pakistan. But my office fixer, a Hindu, Gautam, had failed to get us a permit to take our vehicle over the border at Torkham, not far past Jelalabad, down from the dramatic descent through the Kabul River Gorge. So we wearily wound our way back home to try 1another day. This time we had the necessary papers and proceeded through the Khyber Pass, with its carvings into rock faces of memorials to units of the Raj, such as “22nd Somerset Rifles, September 1862” etc., that fought there in Kipling days. Beyond the Pass the land doesn’t descend markedly and we passed, on one rise of ground, a vast crenellated, beige colored fortress, apparently still active with flags flying that reminded me of a pre-World War II movie featuring “Gunga Din” and just such fortresses. This country between the Khyber Pass and Peshawar is, as I write, the locus of insurgent violence and control and so far (as of November 2008) failing Pakistani government efforts to suppress it, as well as an over the border base for Taliban and al Qa’ida jihadists for their attacks in Afghanistan. Near the end of our time in Afghanistan, while driving home after work from the office in the Beetle, as I tooled along on a major road near our house in drizzly weather, an aging Volga taxi suddenly appeared out of a side street to my right and punched into my car just forward of the rear wheel. This sent me spinning on the damp road, and I wound up facing in the opposite direction, tilted into the deep drainage ditch typical of many Kabul street sides. A few shops back from the intersection was the office of a veterinarian who had splayed our Holly’s cat. As I came climbing out of my car, he came running up with a look of great concern on his face. Without feeling a thing, my forehead, to his alarm, had become speckled with bloody spots where the shattered windshield has sprayed me. Quite a crowd was soon attracted; the crash must have made quite a noise. Among them was a PCV, Tom, who lived nearby, whose Farsi was better that mine and helped in the communication with the police who somehow were soon on the scene. The taxi driver seemed a barely citified rustic and his taxi was knocked out of commission. Surprisingly, when my car was heaved out of the ditch and despite a huge gash, it was still in working order. The police, not surprisingly, wanted us all to come to their station. Since the taxi couldn’t move on kits own, ironically, I was to tow it in, now well after dark. At the station there was an English speaker and it was determined the cab driver’s vehicle didn’t have working bakes and he had been descending a hill before the intersection. The taxi’s actual owner was identified and he was to pay me to have my Beetle repaired. This actually took some negotiating with the aid of fixer Gautam; this resulted in an alternative solution whereby he would see to the repairs himself. Although quite a bit of time expired, repairs were made though hardly a complete return to mint condition. Because our country departure was on the horizon, I set about seeking a buyer with Gautam’s aid. Two local brothers, hardly better kempt that the taxi driver , offered a reasonable sum of Afghanis, half paid before I would finally surrendered the vehicle which I would have use of until departure, and then the rest of the money.. But not long after the deal was ‘sealed’, one of the brothers came to say they had a family emergency back in their home village in nearby Wardak Province, and could they use the car for a few days and then to return it. Softy that I was and am, I agreed, and almost certainly got out snookered by these clever peasants. When the date of return came, the story was that they had had a bad accident and the Beetle was a ruin way back in their village. Since it seemed unlikely to be productive to demand to see the distant ruins, and they did produce the balance of the payment, I simply resigned myself to existential reality. Reflections on Afghanistan Since Afghanistan might have appeared calm on the surface, it was hard to understand what lay behind the official attitude toward our PCVs. Dick and I regularly characterized the ambience as “murky.’ One of our bright Afghan staffers, Yassir, aware of Dick’s and my puzzlement, on a few occasions off handedly, half chuckling, would vaguely refer to two conflicting communist ‘parties,’ the Khalk (People) and the Parcham (Flag)’ implying that no one knew what they were excitedly up to. We might have tried to dig further into this activity. But, then to, we wanted to avoid any appearance of poking into local politics. We now know that the leadership of the day was already feeling threatened, and that the menace was real. This was leading to the increasingly arms-length behavior toward all Americans. Whatever the insights of the bright CIA Station chief, at the time, most official Americans just saw this as damnable Afghan pride, non-cooperation, or even stubborn obstruction on once agreed upon projects and other accepted arrangements. This acutely affected the job satisfaction of the Yanks and their whole attitude toward Afghans. Any social life with Afghans ceased completely. The psychologist had been added to help Mission personnel cope with many disturbed psyches, especially among married folks. A recently reencountered Foreign Service Officer friend from those days tells me that this busy psychologist was of great help to him. Given the news about Afghanistan in immediately subsequent years, the expression, “overtaken by events” seems quite an understatement regarding these little dramas of my time. My tour in Afghanistan had not been altogether brilliant. On the whole, I felt that I had done a respectable job under difficult circumstances. The Ambassador later affirmed that I had exhibited “great integrity,“ though he condemned some of my generous policies toward local Afghan staff. But it all evolved to a painful ending. For me. With the PCVs restricted to Kabul, where Afghans were not at all sociable, all sorts of complaints arose: demands for access to official American recreation facilities (with booze), higher cost-of-living allowances, expressions of outrage -- and dodging from staff -- by some over Dick’s prohibition of beards, since Afghans complained that these were symbols of Islamic piety, offensive on young PCVs -- and forgotten other complaints. One of our American staff wives was quite meanly baited by a few Volunteers at a party, and I made a point of denouncing this behavior to their further irritation. I have already given the Lucy story. Right at this time the appointed head of what had been (sic) the Peace Corps (Nixon had restyled it as “International Operations of Action,” a new umbrella organization. I have used Peace Corps throughout since it came back later.), a defeated Republican Congressman, paid a visit to Afghanistan. I made no effort at a Potemkin Village, and the boss heard a storm of Volunteer complaints about our management. A particularly strong impression was made by one of the more articulate, but unstable males, who later, at my farewell, affected to be my best buddy. My own and other staff members’ attempts to put this malaise in the context of an arms-length posture by government in an unclear, worrisome political climate, shared by American officialdom, seemed to make no impression on our Director. From my observation, he was completely unqualified by experience and nature for his job. He saw Afghanistan as no different from other International Operations countries, and so, our problems with Volunteers must be the fault of the local manager. Of course other Country Representatives gave glowing reports on their stations at PC conferences. My own reports there of problems in Afghanistan seemed to be viewed as bad taste or unwise, and so dismissible. Another blot on my copy book, no doubt, was my urging at such conclave opportunities that PC envision itself as an explicit Third World socio-economic development activity, along with the acknowledged value in mutual enlightenment from exposure between different cultures. This was also regularly turned aside as just not on. In the upshot, the Director returned to Washington and with the Director of the wider Region that embraced Afghanistan, who had not visited us, produced an Evaluation of damnation with barely even faint praise. That punctured my expressed wish to be retained as Representative in Afghanistan. Before he left, almost one year earlier, Dick had given me an “excellent” Evaluation, explaining that the only other, and imminently departing US staffer, who needed a job back in Washington, had been given the “outstanding,” the actual top rating, and he, Dick, didn’t want to appear over generous, or uncritical, by rating me the same, even though he felt I deserved it even more than my departing colleague. His reasoning, which I didn’t quibble about at the time, was that he would be evaluating me again the following year, and would certainly rate me Outstanding then. But Dick didn’t last that long! Someone in Washington had questioned his Afghan performance, and he was brought back to DC for my final year, which left me in charge in Afghanistan Dick’s fall from grace was a case of my losing an organizational protector, as was made clear to me later when I asked that his judgment on my performance be consulted. That request was dismissed out of hand since, as I was told, that Dick’s standing was low, or his credibility was shot around headquarters even though he still worked there. At the beginning of 1977 I was back in Washington at PC headquarters. They gave me some unspecified weeks of office work, actually till early March, since I had announced my intention to appeal the last Evaluation and my imminent dismissal. I got an extended run-around, including a “too busy” from the woman in charge of staff changes for the incoming Carter Administration (which returned “Peace Corps“) from which I hoped for sympathy. Just as I was getting tired of this bootless situation, I got on the track of an “Administrative Judge” who would deal with my appeal. By phone (we never met) I was instructed that the first step would be for me to prepare a detailed affidavit on the relevant facts for him. This promised to take some time and careful preparation. Since I didn’t feel comfortable in that Washington, and could get no estimate on time required for resolution there, I decided to take the work back to Menominee, to rejoin Zee and the children and my mother at her home. I labored for a week or more over the affidavit, calling the Judge a few times for guidelines, which he described only vaguely, and I produced what I considered a winning case if given proper attention. After a week of the mailing, I called for a decision. My brief had been dismissed and would not change anything. My only shred of hope would be to come back to Washington, and that was not presented as encouraging. My affidavit had been my best shot. So I gave up. In spite of the bad times, looking back at my Afghanistan experience a few years later, I judged that I had usually been at my personal, overall best --mind and body -- through that time. I was still physically vigorous and had become a bit more thoughtful and acute in my decisions, and that I had performed adequately in almost all the real life working and social engagements I encountered. Admittedly, on a few occasions when in groups I felt a free floating anxiety, usually associated with feelings of having been left out or underrated, I had the compulsion to say something which provided temporary relief, and sometimes got me into further relieving conversation. But what was said may have been out of place (gauche) and hardly helped my image for good sense. Chapter 10 Next Stop: Bangladesh - After the Menominee Bolt Hole That spring of ‘77 it was back to my mother’s home where Zee and the children had preceded me immediately after leaving Afghanistan, while I wrapped-up in Washington. Not long after I joined the gang, we learned of a house for sale by a woman I had known of as a girl, but not well, in high school. Since we wanted to be off on our own and the price was right, we bought it with the help of a down payment loan from Mom. While I was still in Washington, Zee, with the help of a friend she had made, bought a cheap, but serviceable second-hand Plymouth. And with a crib we had had made in Afghanistan for baby Randy, we had our own establishment in the US for the first time. My big physical activity for the summer was to paint the newly acquired house, almost entirely by myself, with a couple of days of hired hands for difficult parts. But the house was quite large; two stories, with all sorts of odd angles and additions. The main part had been built before the turn of the old century and had been moved a few years later to the pleasant, upper middle class street where it still stands. Much of the siding was of scalloped shingles and so not given to rapid administration of paint. With a nice touch of nostalgia, I was using my Dad’s old heavy wooden extension ladders. Since I typically worked only half a hot summer day at a time, the job took me several weeks; but what a sense of accomplishment! A declining, leaky double garage also got some attention. Other quotidian chores included doing errands for Mom, taking her for outings, taking Holly to playgrounds and parks, reading her stories and singing Randy to sleep. My Mom and Holly seemed close, and for a spell Holly sat on her Grandma’s lap for a daily reading from Huckleberry Finn. At times I couldn’t push back the felt-humiliation of being “out of work,” a dread image of some sort of ‘being a failure.’ I even applied for, and gratefully accepted, state unemployment compensation, since our modest bank account grew ever thinner. An elderly gentleman, who had helped Mom, with chores while we were overseas, and I also did some flea market selling off of expendable items. Holly and the Horses An ad in the Herald Leader intrigued us and we went to a meeting where a rather unpolished couple was offering instruction on horseback riding for young folks on their spread just outside of town. Holly at eight was eager and we enrolled her. On the first outing, I saw her riding on gentle ponies and being enthusiastic for more. Next time she started riding a larger but still gentle mount. The trainer himself rode about on a large brown horse and demonstrated that his mount as more spirited than the rest. In what I believe now and worried about then, was an act of unexplainable stupidity. Since Holly looked comfortable on horseback by now, the trainer somehow sat Holly on his spirited horse and let her go. After a few stately steps, with Holly smiling confidently, the hose started ‘running’ and kept going faster and faster and Holly was obviously frightened. The trainer did little except shout uselessly at the uncontrollable speeding horse. I could see Holly was headed or trouble as I watched from behind a railed fence about 100 yards from where Holly finally fell.. I had started to climb over the fence feeling almost certain she was going to fall off. In a mean looking landing she fell full length in the mud, with one side of her head hitting the mud. I ran Iran quickly to pick her up. With the muddy face it was hard to tell if she were hurt badly or not. The sight of her fall, and the wild fear I felt still flickers in my memory. The helpless feeling while anticipating and watching her fall gave me a shock and panic as great as any in my generally adventurous life. After a quick eyeball exam, I rushed Holly home, not far, to clean her up and examine more closely for cuts and bruises or other damage. Her right side had several bruises and her cheek had a wide surface abrasion. Holly kept weeping for a few hours, and finally settled down under non-stop hugs and kisses, and assurance that no scars would last. And Then Bangladesh In the fall I was tracked down by kind old Bert at CARE, who put me in touch with another former CARE employee, who now had his own NGO with a US-AID contract to work on constraining population growth in Bangladesh. This led to interviews in New York, and a check with Zee to see if she was willing. I really had few doubts about her assent since she always delighted in our world travels, wherever. After a few weeks the new connection was cemented, and we were in Bangladesh just before the end of l977 Population Services International (PSI) had developed a then unique approach to attacking this problem of population in 3rd World counties with high growth rates. Bangladesh is the size of Wisconsin, but then hosted over 80 million citizens (as of this writing, 28 years later, it approaches 150 million). To indicate the military government’s concern, it had named the relevant Ministry the Ministry of Health and Population Control. The fresh approach of PSI was to sell contraceptives, first condoms and pills, through traditional Bangladesh markets throughout the country. Nothing so original about that, but: The products were supplied free to PSI by US-AID. We repackaged them with locally recognized symbols and instructions and distributed them through wholesale jobbers, with a final, highly subsidized price equivalent of about one US penny per condom, a cost believed to make them affordable to everyone, and a comparable price for birth control pills. I was succeeding the first manager of the PSI project in Dacca (now Dhaka), an intelligent, proudly cunning, abstractly idealistic, but demonstrably, unremittingly cynical character. Bob would be going to the New York headquarters and take over from the founding president of PSI who was focusing on another business interest; that is, Bob would be my new boss, not the man who had comfortably hired me. Bob and I never hit it off although other friends of mine had worked with him and respected him. My more naive seeming personality seemed to put him off. We communicated very little during our brief overlap before he left, and from our then distance apart, we never exchanged frank, extended correspondence and only one or two equally limited phone calls over two years time. His one brief, late visit had him scoffing at just about everything we had done since his departure although the Project was in generally good shape, with some of my modest modifications that seemed to work. I had certainly worked hard at it. It appeared that Bob felt our Project was his baby and I was an inevitably flawed foster parent. Shortly before he left us, while riding alone with me in the office Chevy Nova, Bob calmly announced that he was replacing me with his ex-CARE friend, Bill, who had been working with him in the New York office; I would come back to the NY office, which to me almost certainly meant en route to dismissal. I tried to respond with equal calm, but with stomach churning. For explanation Bob claimed he was not satisfied with the project’s progress and that my approach didn’t fit his. But at another time he had said that Bill, a recent addition, didn’t have enough to do in NY since he was hired on the expectation of more contract business which had not been realized. I felt that Bob blatantly lied to me when I asked if my displacement was to find a place for his buddy Bill, who could not be kept on the payroll in NY. He answered with a curt, “no.” I now believe that both were operative, and his solution had a kind of serendipity from his perspective. It was late in l979 when Bob dropped his personnel shift bomb. Zee was more angry than I and she gave Bob a lecture on concern for one’s employees, specifically the painful timing for interrupting our two children’s schooling. With that guilt trip laid on, Bob agreed to our continuation until the end of the school term in June. Another difficulty which did not make my work life a bed of roses arose from a step that Bob had taken well before I came on the scene. He had met and hired, on an ostensibly contingent basis, a Bangladeshi with fairly senior marketing experience with a British based consumer goods company operating in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Bangladesh had been part of (East) Pakistan until it became separated in a civil war where India entered late as deus ex machina to clamp down on the Pakistanis, because the reported ten million Bangla refugees coming over the border were straining Indian resources. Bob’s idea, which I was to live with, was to engage a senior Bangladeshi who could handle more of the liaison with senior government officials and perhaps at some future time become the nominal Director (my title) of the Project, with an American Advisor. Here again was a man more to Bob’s taste. Anwar had an almost comical Colonel Blimp, plumy British accent. He was clearly intelligent with an acute marketeer’s sense and many good ideas. We never really clashed, even though politely disagreeing at times. We just didn’t match very well. He seemed to be generally puzzled by, and doubtful of, my outlook and mode of analyzing issues. Of course I would have hired someone else; there were other local professionals more to my taste that I came across over time. But Anwar was competent and my new situation seemed to require acceptance. Some time before I left, I agreed and proposed to the key government official, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Health and Population Control, Dr. Sattar, a most confrontational type, who kept pressing for a decision on Anwar’s elevation, that he was ready to be made Director and I would recede to Advisor. Our family life went fairly pleasantly. Holly went to a better than satisfactory International (American run) primary school. Zee drafted her first novel, Beka Lamb in a spacious, pleasant work room of her own. I had another room all to myself for my stuff and whatever little projects I wasted time on. We took our meals on a large, screened in patio. We had taken over the house that Bob’s family had occupied. With it came two alternating watchmen and a fierce looking dog, somehow named Wilbur, who stayed outside the house, but was very friendly with all our family. A massive mango tree provided, in addition to fine fruit, a sturdy upper branch from which to hang a sculpted old rubber tire for Randy to swing in. One of my recurring memories of faint-heartedness went back to when I was pushing three year old Randy ever higher, as he demanded, on the mango tree swing. Suddenly one of the two rope fastenings to the tire came loose and the tire tilted frighteningly at a high point of its arc. Fortunately, Randy was not flung out from the height of about 20 feet, and the play was ended when he came back within my reach. Although Randy was happy enough running around the large house and yard, he just didn’t seem to enjoy the play school some expatriate wives had set up; a bit of a worry for us. Holly had a few feverish illnesses, when Zee and I would spend hours just reading to her in bed.. She came out of these in fine shape and benefited greatly from a school teacher who seemed to bring out the best in Holly. A excellently managed and equipped American Recreation Club was within a short peddled-rickshaw ride from our house in Gulshan. The pool there attracted our kids and Zee often took them during the day. I sometimes joined them at the end of the work day. But my most valued recreation came from year-around (Islamic) weekend softball, sometimes Americans vs. a Japanese team, at a park within a walk from home. Another joy came from my discovery of a small expatriate group playing more or less traditional jazz that I joined on the drums. We met in a member’s home and played mostly for our own amusement, but also did an occasional outside event. Afloat in the Sunderbans An early adventure was proposed by one of my inherited five PSI regional managers. I should have recognized it as borderline improper since the manager used company budget, but I was brand new and going with the flow. All four of my family were invited to Bangladesh’s most southwestern region, a large part of which is made up by the wild Sunderbans, where numerous distributaries of the Ganges have split off, subdivided and run to the Bay of Bengal, penetrating a lushly vegetated, low lying, no mans ‘land‘, at least half water. We traveled overnight from Dacca (now Dhaka) to a southwestern river port near Khulna on “The Rocket,” a large -- hardly rocket-like -- vessel that seemed to have been left over from the days of the Raj; faded elegance and all that. While we were in First Class, hordes of ’deshis camped on open lower decks. The main event after that arrival was a trip on a cabined small powerboat festooned with PSI banners, posters, etc., no doubt to qualify as a promotional trip -- where no one was likely to see us -- through steamy, muddy, hardly stirring labyrinthine channels. These Sunderbans are supposed to be the hangout of the fabled Bengal Tigers, but none were seen, only a few huge, sunning crocodiles slid into the water as we past. The most “adventurous” part came when our boatmen got lost as dusk was settling. There was an anxious half hour for all of us before the right exit channel was found. What a place to spend the night! On another evening while in that Khulna District we were taken to a market town on its weekly big night, where our Raja condoms and our Maya birth control pills were being openly displayed and sold under a multitude of flickering candles and lanterns The jolt of the evening, as our little troupe wandered amidst packed, roiling humanity, suddenly appeared in the form of a man with no arms or legs rolling along on the path beneath the feet of the indifferent crowd, while vociferously chanting what I took for an appeal for alms. In a flash he vanished in the tide of people, so fast that later I could hardly believe I had seen such a phenomenon. During this PSI employment I traveled to every corner of Bangladesh. One was almost never out of sight of people on the land., and towns and markets were jammed. A train trip had its own unique aspects. For one, the ancient engines traveled ever so slowly because the narrow gauge tracks ran on very unstable roadbeds, probably because most were covered by water a part of every year. Also strange to a Westerner were the riders on the tops of passenger coaches, themselves so packed that passengers were bursting out the windows and doors. Of course the slow progress of the trains must have reduced the danger for the top riders En famile we traveled to southeast coastal Chittagong and Cox’s Bazaar near the Burma border on a brief holiday. On two weekends we flew the half hour to Calcutta, where many Dacca expats visited regularly “for shopping.” On one of the low flights from Calcutta my window seat gave on a marvelous view, through just then parting clouds, of the great junction of the Ganges (Padma to Bangladeshis) and the even grander Brahmaputra (or Jamuna). Since Bangladesh is almost entirely flat, not much above sea level, there are ordinarily no magnificent vistas on terra firma. For another treat we went with a group to a Hindu Durga Puga in the center of the country where we were treated well amidst the wonderful high excitement. About 18% of the Bangladeshis are Hindu and there are a few Christians and others amidst the majority Muslims Bill, Again When our family arrived in Bangladesh, we were somewhat surprised to find that our colleague from Nigeria, Bill the Builder, was still there, given the time elapsed since we parted in Nigeria, over six years ago. He had become known to expatriates in Dacca as "Bangla Bill," because of his long tenure. We soon got in contact and established a cordial, but more acquaintance-like relationship. Bill had finished his work with CARE and now had some connection with a Bangladeshi quasi-government organization making products using jute, a major agricultural crop. Again he had come up with an idea that gained acceptance. Using molds and a formula with chemicals imported from Japan and jute as binder-fabric, he designed and turned out a variety of practical plastic products: including portable shelters; hollow platforms for squat latrines that could be filled at the point of use with local earth for stability and, so, making them easier to distribute to rural areas; even plastic body parts to be mounted on imported automobile chassis. His employers, in prideful recognition, mounted an impressive exhibition of Bill’s various plastics productions, some ‘merely’ astonishingly decorative. At one of our informal meetings Bill and I hatched a scheme. I don't remember the chicken or egg sequence, but I believe that I asked for his old hand advice on procuring a boat to facilitate our distribution of condoms and pills to market places often, or always, best (some only) reached by Bangladesh's numerous water ways. But it may have been that Bill mentioned his current project of designing and producing for sale plastic hulled boats suitable for local conditions. Whichever, this led to agreement that he would try to produce a boat for us, which, if meeting our needs, would be purchased by PSI. I brought my Bangladeshi assistant, Anwar, since he was to eventually take over from me, into the discussion, and he seemed to like the idea. He had been exploring other boat venders and builders but had found nothing satisfactory at a feasible price. Bill's price would be modest because our project had the benefit for him of providing a chance to demonstrate a new product for marketing. I turned this boat-acquisition task to Anwar, who checked regularly with Bill on progress. Since Bill was something of an artist, his work habits weren't too regular, and there seemed times when nothing was happening. But eventually Anwar was invited to take a test run in the 'finished' boat. Well, The engine wouldn't start. There were other dates set for Anwar to check out the testable boat, but something always went wrong, rough weather on the Meghna River; a necessary assistant couldn't be found; Bill was sick, etc. Finally, Bill told us that all problems had been resolved and he had a final test demonstration ready for my approval and handover of the boat. He had attached a new Austrian engine; that had been one of the past problems, but now it had all of the wrinkles straightened out, and he seemed proud of the neat 30-odd feet vessel that he had to show me. We got out to mid-stream on the broad, placid, but well trafficked Meghna in fine shape, then the motor sputtered a bit. Bill seemed to straighten this out, and I tried to assure him, out of some sort of sympathy for his creator’s ego, that it hadn't shocked me into instant rejection. But sputtering became more frequent. I tried to make a sympathetic joke over it. Finally, the sputtering and the engine(!) stopped altogether, and no exertions by Bill could avail. He was so crestfallen and embarrassed that I felt my main immediate task was to soften his disappointment. Now we were floating, dead in the water. The three crewmen who were along simply jumped overboard and laboriously swam the boat to their shore, Bill's self-laceration mounting all the long while. The best I could do was to make somewhat light of the situation. I didn't even mention that of course PSI would want its advance money back until we met a few days later, when Bill felt he had exhausted any possibility of trying again. He only asked for a little time to return our money since it had gone for the moment into this ill-fated venture. He did eventually make restitution. My family and I still saw Bill occasionally, but from there on he seemed less at ease with us. He left Bangladesh on putative vacation sometime before we finished our two and a half years there. Bill hadn't returned by then, and it was rumored that he might be not be coming back. But no one seemed to know his plans That seemed to be the end of our contact with Bill, and it was for several years. But my good boss, Mert, for CARE in Turkey, had known Bill well from other common assignments, last year I sent Mert my story on Bill as it ended in the above paragraph. Mert had been in contact with Bill and gave me his address, now in New Jersey just across the Hudson from Manhattan. So I sent Bill a letter with the same story. He answered at length with the information that he had indeed returned to Bangladesh for a further six years. During that time he was in demand on a variety of construction projects, including the very ambitious new Dhaka Airport. Reinforced concrete works had long been his main specialty. After these 14 years in Bangladesh he had returned to finally “make some money” in the USA. More recently, May of 2000, when attending a wedding in Zee’s family in nearby New Jersey, we got in touch with Bill and met him in the Newark Airport at the early departure of Holly for Detroit. Holly had only a brief greeting with Bill before her flight, but the remaining three of us, including Randy whom Bill had never seen, had an airport meal and a delightful few hours reminiscence with him before the hour of parting, now to stay linked by E-mail. Tehran Ramifications About six months before we left Bangladesh, the storming and occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran, with the taking of the staff as hostages, shook the world. Some Iranians in Dacca held excited demonstrations and set up a ragged road-block on the main street in Gulshan. Official Americans, and PSI was a Government contractor, were offered the option of sending their dependents home in this uncertainty, and Zee and the children took that opportunity. Perhaps there was the fear that Muslims in Bangladesh would rally and support, even copy, their co-religionists. But in the end nothing of that sort happened and relative calm was maintained. By official routing, Zee and the kids were returned to my home in Menominee. But it was real winter in the Upper Peninsula, and soon Zee took the children to her home in Belize. They didn’t return to Dacca till March of ’80. In the meantime I had broken my dominant wrist when diving for a shot in my klutzy tennis game, and so greeted them with a forearm cast. During their absence I was often ill at ease, and after work found it hard to stay in the house. So, in mild seasonal weather, I walked the quiet evening streets of Gulshan, and often imposed my self on friendly neighbors. A Czech version of Valium was available on the open market, and I sometimes took recourse to that. While Zee was in Belize on evacuation, I was invited to Washington for an interview with another NGO with a position in Bangladesh. That went well except for the fact that they had reconsidered replacing the departing officer who had recommended me. But that left several days of the period for which I had taken leave, so I went to visit my family in Belize. While there I learned that a housing developer was rampant, and he seemed to offer us a good deal, to build on a prime piece of land that Zee’s father was disposed to hand over to Zee. Pitching the housing was a convincing American with a basic template design and technique for quick construction. The price was right and we had the cash. He had a local partner who has since become one of Belize’s more entrepreneurial builders, one Javier. They both seemed keen to build our house first and quickly, on the idea that our plot was in the city and, so, quite visible to potential buyers, while the land for the other constructions was a few miles beyond the city limits. We signed some papers, put down a big first payment and returned to Bangladesh, full of imaginings for the new house. And in a few months we were back in Belize. Nepal Sojourn But on the long way back we first took a week in Kathmandhu. We began at a tourist oriented hotel in the middle of things, near to a large temple complex where the holy monkey Hanuman, all painted red, guarded one of the temples. More memorable, even a bit shocking, was the neighboring Freak Street where the smoke of ‘hash’ and kindred potions hung in the air. The inhabitants of indeterminant nationality, slowly, dreamily milling around and hanging from windows and balconies in the jammed up buildings seemed “out of this world”. They were dressed in as varied a range of costumes as could be imagined. Eleven year old Holly, who seemed keen, and I wandered in for about a hundred yards, when an exotic habitué said something and beckoned to Holly. That frightened her and led to our handholding exit. Since our hotel and its neighborhood seemed rather crass and touristy, we shifted to a distant part of the city where a matronly Austrian widow had a hostelry of sorts. The low buildings were few and the grounds spacious, inviting quiet contemplation. In front of most of the small structures were a number of large, carved wooden antique-seeming figures and patterns. A strutting peacock fascinated out five year old Randy. (Zee liked to call it a pea chicken.) Among our ventures out in a rented car was a guided trip – just us – and hike into the nearby mountains, from where, it was said, that one could see Mt. Everest on a clear day, but that wasn’t one. In fact we were already in befogging cloud-like vapors. As we tried to soak in the still awesome scenery, suddenly from a nearby hovel emerged a tall young woman in baggy pants who trotted a short distance down into a small structure that suggested a privy. I imagined a spiritual seeker of some sort. Paris and the Wine Country of Bordeaux Next stop Paris – still early summer! Upon a recommendation we stayed in antique hotel with a cage-like lift on the left bank, near the National Assembly building, handy to many classic sights. We did the Eiffel tower ascent, tour-boated on the Seine, ogled Notre Dam, and like that, for just two days. Then we took the excellent train to a small station, Gitre, in the Dordogne. In Nigeria we had become close friends with Phil, a young American of French ancestry, and his striking, blonde German wife. The two had met in Vietnam where he worked for the US Government and she was a volunteer nurse. Phil, who had been so helpful when we arrived in wartime Nigeria, had ‘inherited’ a winery, the Cave de l' Abbeye, indeed under the ancient abbey, with living quarters just down a long passageway. One of our most interesting jaunts took us to St. Emillion at some sort of annual wine awards ceremony. There on top of a castellated tower was a gaggle of red robed gentlemen, the apparent heart of the jubilation. Also of note was some sort of fishing competition on the Dordogne, which was a particular treat for Randy, while I slept in. We stayed in touch with Phil and Monika for a few years through their and our then nomadic lives. Not long after our delightful stay with Phil, we read in a letter that they felt that they had to leave France, because Monika felt so uncomfortable there. During World War II, Bordeaux had been in the Nazi occupied part of France and a deep hatred of Germans persisted that found an outlet in Monika. The last word of them came from Kenya, and then we lost touch. Chapter 11 Belize, Round II Life on Catfish Row When we got to Belize, now mid-1980, our new house was far from finished and the fuss with our builder went on for almost six months , so we -- optimistically expecting a brief stay -- found a poorly furnished ‘apartment’ on old Prince St. This was the second floor above our landlord, an aging American known widely as “Mom” who ran, of course, “Mom’s Restraint.” (Her eccentricities are discussed elsewhere.) Her old clapboard house had suffered in “Alice” the 1960 hurricane, and the side facing the Caribbean was propped up by long two-by-fours, without totally restoring our upper floor to full plumb. The only glory for our frowsy ‘flat’ was the gorgeous view at sunrise through our bedroom window over Haulover Creek’s broad estuary and the Caribbean, which was the main small boat harbor. Prince Street ran from the Creek's estuary to the major Regent Street. and zagged beyond, but the stretch with our residence ended at Regent. Between us and the water was a large empty lot where the hurricane had taken out at least three houses. On the corner across from the lot, right on the water was fine stuccoed house (rather compound) of a leading merchant family, but the rest of the street was “Catfish Row,” houses built right up to the narrow street, typically modeled on ours and in no better, and often worse, repair; None I can remember appeared to have been painted since “Alice.” Immediately next to us -- no yard in between-- lived a young mother who bellowed from her upstairs veranda for a presumably bewildering offspring, BERNADETTE!! at frequent, unpredictable hours of every day and late evening. It was the salient sound in the ambient buzz of life on the cramped one auto lane street. But the most interesting sound on Prince Street came from the house directly opposite ours, the equally dilapidated, at least on the outside, home of one Mrs. Vasquez, a post-middle-aged music and dance teacher. About three in the afternoons strains of classical music, usually Tchaikovsky, came floating across and down the street. At the same time some of the finest cars in Belize began pulling up there and disembarking pre-teen age girls in tutus. These cars returned just after dark and reembarked their princesses. Because of our proximity the strains of the Nutcracker Suite for those hours easily overwhelmed the radioed pop music otherwise heard most of the day from the wide open portals of Prince St. residents. The contrasts never ceased to delight me. That autumn on Prince St. some heavy rain and the incoming tide conspired to overflow the low seawall and flooded our stretch of Prince St to a depth of about two feet. To have a place to work, I had arranged with the now television mogul, American Stuart Krohn to use a small corner of his then all purpose space. This was in one of the oldest buildings in Belize. Made of weathered reddish -- allegedly imported -- brick, quite uncommon in Belize, it had been a holding pen for slaves during that unlamented dispensation. A few of the shackling tools were still in place. This remarkable building was then still is on broad Regent St. , where more humble Prince St. meets and crosses it . This meant a very long block’s walk for me to Krohn’s office, ducked into by a very low door led to by three steps down from street level. On the morning of the ‘flood‘ I looked out of our street side window to discover that the street proper had disappeared under an uncertain depth of murky water still running into the street. To get an idea of my options, I decided to test the depth with a stick, and then, mostly as a lark, I decided to wade to my ‘office.‘ I rolled up my rousers, off with my socks - into my pocket - and my shoes, tied together and hung around my neck. The water came to just below my knees, but the invisible pavement under the murky water was quite uneven and each step had an element of testing about it. I got to the office to find no one there. I tried to shake off as much water as possible before leaving the doorway. But the water was what the British call dicey and my legs needed rinsing. There was a little had washing basin in the rear of the larger office, and with a sense of certain disapproval by Krohn were he present, I managed by twisting around and splashing to get clean water over my soiled lower legs. With my trousers still rolled I sat at my little desk till my legs dried before restoring my normal haberdashery arrangements. A Little Side Trip and Thereafter After about 3 months on Prince St. our own house still wasn’t ready yet for us to occupy. But then a telegram came from Schneider’s Shipping office in Green Bay, some 55 miles south of old home Menominee, saying our household effects from Bangladesh had arrived at their office, and that there were some problems that I had to come and deal with. I caught an early plane to Miami, then to Chicago before a commuter to Green Bay. It was just a few days before Xmas. The climate was naturally not much above zero, but no snow on the ground in GB. At Schneider's the 6 or7 large wooden crates hadn't been opened before my arrival because they appeared to have suffered a lot of water damage. We pried open one and then a second. Both let out the smell of damp rot and mold. An overstuffed sofa seemed to have become a sponge and obviously rotted; an arm easily separated when we tried to move it. It was simply put aside to discard. Another more emotional tug came when a few boxes of treasured slides were found to have ‘melted’ into Jackson Pollock-like drip-ons. Some complications set in. It wasn’t clear whether the shipment had been insured by my organization at departure in Bangladesh, where it had been held up for 6 months over some local customs matter, and must have lain in the open or got flooded in the Bangladesh of heavy monsoon rainfall. But the document that came with the flawed goods referred us to an insurance surveying organization in New Orleans whom I contacted. An Adjuster who served the territory that included Green Bay was to meet me there in a day or two to go over the mess. We opened all the crates to find varying degrees of water damage; certain materials survived better than others. Cloth and other soft materials were a complete loss. Even wooden pieces, furniture, were warped, joints sprung or veneer peeled. Only metal and china survived intact though typically badly tarnished. Almost all the treasured LPs had become firmly bonded with their jackets. (I later salvaged many with very laborious but delicate effort.) That was the heart breaking picture. The surveyor glanced over the articles as the shippers and I pulled them out. He did a few samplings for moisture or perhaps evidence of salt and snapped a few photos. With that he said that I should make an inventory of everything, estimating its original cost and degree of damage, then he took off, all very coldly “professional.” The Schneider's guys were very sympathetic from the start, as if they hadn't seen anything quite like this before. Our big house that I had painted had a large basement, and the tenant (behind in the rent) agreed to let me use the largely empty space. On an agreed date, now with snow heavy on the ground in Menominee, I met the Schneider's truck that brought the many salvaged pieces, many with hope for repair, and with the truckers help, through the blowing snow, shifted everything inside till the basement was jammed. Then I set about a week of over twelve hours days at inventorying. Though much was guess work, I worried over most pieces in order to guess right. I valued our loss, probably conservatively, at about $8,000. In the end, no insurance, but a bill came for $600.0 for the few ministrations of the surveyor, which I, feeling hard done by, never paid once back in Belize despite a series of threats from he New Orleans headquarters of the surveyor, till hey gave up. My planning during the inventory process looked forward to me buying a used pickup truck, get a cap put on it, cram -- and I mean CRAM -- it full of the things we would want for an indefinite stay in Belize. When that was accomplished, I headed off down the highway, three days to the Mexican border, and then beyond . I crossed to Neuvo Laredo Customs, where a $40.00 tip was quickly arranged so that I escaped the monumental task of unloading and, perhaps impossible, reloading. I had spent the night before in a truckers rest hostel in Laredo, Texas. Then 3 more days through sere mostly highland central Mexico and then the lowlands east and south of Mexico City. Zee, still in Belize, alerted the Belizean border Customs at Santa Elena of my coming, and they let me pass after just a few verbal questions, saying that my cargo could be assessed in Belize city.. Aside from the crammed capped truck bed, I had the cab jammed with suitcases to where my driver’s seat was so reduced that I was firmly pressed against the cab door. I should note that at loading, when every internal space had been impacted, I discovered that one essential was still outside, my 5 year old son‘s Big Wheel plastic tricycle. So I strapped that on top of the cab where it rode well throughout the whole trip, not even stolen during my overnight stops in some rather dicey venues -- heavy rains and all. Prince St. We couldn't park on one lane Prince St., So I had to park the truck across the empty lot bordering our digs on the water-side street. Well, the first morning I found the foolishly left binoculars missing. Next morning the jack, the next the glove compartment stuff with flashlight were gone. After the first loss I tried as best I could to seal up the cab. But I never succeeded in securing the little flip windows on pivots against burglary. Once everything loose had been taken, the problem solved itself. After a few months of use the truck left my tender ca re. A rather louche Mexican mason was engaged at the new house to do some quite adequate masonry on our imperfect low boundary wall, but leaving more undone pending negotiations. The deal: He would buy the pickup, giving me half my price in Belizean dollars and then he would finish some major masonry work with out further recompense. The truck and he went off and were unseen for several days. I finally hunted him down in a rundown house where he was staying with a Mestizo family whose daughter he was to marry. But now he was “sick.” But he would send an assistant to start on the work till be was better. A laconic Latino chap arrived and chipped away day after day at one of the cement gateposts. When I asked where Tomas was, he acted as if he didn't know. After some days I again sought Tomas at the same house. The family, in some disgust, told me that he had disappeared, probably gone back to Mexico. The gate chipper never showed up again and that was that! I had to pay another older, more diligent Mexican, Mr. Canto, who became something of a friend when I helped him get some needed medical attention, to properly finish the masonry work The Village Women Project The Ford pick-up had at least one more or less productive occupation during my ownership. I was asked by the Social Development Department head to do an assessment of a project funded by a UK NGO, Countrywomen of he World, focused on villages along the lower Belize River, with such names as Double Head Cabbage, Scotland Half Moon, Bermudian Landing, Burrell Boom, Hattieville (named after a divesting hurricane and where victims were resettled.) The project to be assessed provided for two local women, each provided with a light utility pick-up (LUV), who would make the rounds of ten villages, establishing organized women’s groups and then making return visits to check on and encourage pursuit of the villagers’ own agreed upon activities. What I found: The two LUV vehicles were soon “under repair” for the rest of the two year project. One of the circuit riders (hereafter Visitors) couldn’t drive and so her husband took control of that vehicle for its limited life and no villages were visited. The other visitor was a bright young women who seemed to want to take her job seriously, and did effective visiting, along with a Women’s Dept simple skills trainer, as long as the LUV held up. She was remembered in some of the villages. Her colleague was never seen in the villages. I used my covered pick up to visit every village in the project, and near the end collected as many group leaders who could come for a wrap up meeting in Hattieville. My truck had to deal with primitive “roads,” mostly muddy tracks to reach most villages. In a few villages there had never been a visit and so no knowledge at all of the on-paper project. On the final roundup in Hattieville, with several women aboard on crude seats I had arranged, we did get stuck in deep mud, obscured by the water on the surface. After my inside the cab efforts failed, all of the women, in long skirts, now hoisted, got out and pushed, still to no avail. One woman knew of a “prosperous” farmer near by. She took our plaint there, and with the help of his larger truck we got free and about our serious business. In each village I did tape recorded group interviews, of numbers ranging from 5 to 12, some with elected leaders. I had taken the one effective project worker, and on some trips along came a Social Development Dept. skills trainer who remained absolutely silent throughout the meetings. The younger Visitor did usefully pitch in at times, as I hoped both would to focus on details or issues I had missed. These meetings, when held, usually went on for about two hours, once the village women were rounded up in the local school. I had a number of set topics I wanted to cover, but the conversation was allowed to flow on particular interests by the participants. Most of these were complaints about the Government for no providing proper roads, electricity, good water, telephone connection, a better school and concerned visits by someone from Government to see and respond to these deficiencies. Although my impending visits were supposedly known, up to an hour was often taken before the interested women were searched out and gathered. For the round up meeting in Hattieville (the only village with a community center) I had to go to each interested village to collect their representative Although distances were not great the roads made travel time lag and we were almost two hours late in getting to Hattieville, where people from nearby village had come and a few had left, not so much out of impatience, but the belief that nothing was going to happen. (There is an old expression in Belize that “everyt’ing brukdown”; that many plans never get off the ground for one reason or another.) With the village women who had stayed on, being familiar with “Belize time,” and my truck’s passengers, a slightly more formal meeting was conducted. However normally quite out of touch with one another, the women's views and complaints were remarkably similar. After 6 weeks mostly spent on the road I wrote up and with maps handed in my report which apparently had been asked for by the funding NGO in the UK to consider continuing funding the project or not. I didn’t explicitly recommend closing the Project, but my observations could hardly put a positive face on the past efforts. If nothing else the LUVs were clearly not up to Belizean rural tracks. And my keen insight suggested that the Visitors should be able to drive their vehicle -- unless a driver was to be provided. And certainly one would want to carefully select both Visitors for having a commitment if not devotion to such a project’s goals. Then, too, some one should be monitoring progress en route, before the final evaluation when it‘s too late for remedy. Some weeks later, Zee accepted a Government job as head of the new Women‘s Bureau. Her exciting innovation was a radio program to really get at rural women's concerns. To get a real life feeling she used some of the clearer quotes on my Project tapes, along with ethnic music and new interviews The program got quite an excited community response. Perhaps too excited, catching the attention of the Government of the day. A Cabinet meeting was held and it was there decided that Zee's real villagers program might be dangerous for the Party in power, perhaps because they sensed unwanted rural dissent, challenging their relentless happy talk about progress on the still Government and ONLY radio station. So Zee’s “controversial“ program was taken off the air. After a flurry of limited popular disgust, the move was taken as to be expected in the political climate of the day. The New House We got into our still unfinished new house after some six months on Prince St. I had had regular bouts with the remaining, rather amateurish, builder, one Javier Garcia, over the gross delay in the completion dates promised. He had fallen out with his earlier, now departed American partner. In the end he, playing fed up, said, “Here’s B$1,000, leave me alone and get it finished yourself.“ The amount was adequate for basic completion, except for one very unfinished small ground floor room. The basic living quarters were one floor up, as in most Belizean homes, out of respect for high water from the heavy rains, even hurricanes, in season This unfinished bottom corner room I used as an office for the duration of this two year stay in Belize. Visions of Cairo While in Belize and very underemployed, I had sent applications and over the transom CVs to a number of development organizations. Near Christmas of 1981 I got an invitation to interview at Oxfam America (OA) in Boston. After my self-financed trip I had a number of interviews with staff members, some of whom seemed very young and full of very simple far Left ideology; others seemed more professional. A decision on my engagement would be delayed, but nothing ever came of it. OA had arranged my overnight stay at a hotel that once must have had some cache, I think it was named Regent. But now with hardly more than an undistinguished paint job, its vast, high ceilinged entrance hall, had only an unoccupied entrance clerk. One time elegance had clearly faded, and suggested that the place had been out of action until recently, reopening for a less opulent trade. The taxi driver summoned to take me to the airport was a grizzled black man of about my age. After very friendly introductions, he began a rather intense conversation by describing his university education and his feats in early life as a professional boxer. This soon led to a well informed litany of White America's oppression of Blacks and Native Americans. Being rather well informed on these matters, I attempted an interpolation now and again. He promptly shut me up with a claim of my impudence for not deferring to his greater age, which may not have in fact been the case. As the long drive to Logan airport went on, it became me who was importantly part of the oppression. For quite a while I just sat back and listened. But when he got to indicting me, I got a little angry and tried to tell him he had no idea to whom he was orating. This just fired him up even though his talk remained quaintly formalistic, and I just resigned myself. When we were separating at the airport, he pointed to a medallion hanging around his neck which he claimed came from the hand of Malcolm X. When I tried to turn it into better light, he backed away in some dudgeon since I had not asked his permission. I had arranged to spend a few nights in Washington with some good American friends from Bangladesh days, now living near the main American University campus. They were expecting me, but I arrived quite late because of flight delay in Boston. It was almost midnight before I reached their home. After hasty pleasant greetings, I was told, with puzzled, curious expressions on my friends’ faces, that a call for me had just come to them from a nearby location. I learned that the caller had first tried to reach me in Belize, from which I must have written as a job seeker. My wife told them I could be reached at my friends in DC. and that was tried before I got there. The message was that I should call the lady caller at whatever hour I might arrive. Thinking this was all very strange, and stirring to my imagination, I made the call. A lady whose name I have forgotten identified her self and organization, something like Psychology in Development and urged me to come immediately to her nearby office for some urgent work on a deadline for a big contract project in Cairo, Egypt. Having had a long stressful day, I begged off and promised to come to meet her in the morning. Her office address was so close that I could quickly walk there. In a quite upscale (Sutton Place) neighborhood, she and a small staff had a very neat suite in an attractive brick building of some 5 or 6 floors. After letting me know that she was a Mensa achiever, and a few other personal attributes, she outlined a contract open to bids to practically make over Cairo: police training, infrastructure upgrading and community development work in poverty blasted slums. I could have the community development position, if I wanted it, if the contract were won. Then I was immediately thrust into a brain storming session with the boss and a younger female staff member and a chap who was apparently a temporary hired gun for the write-up. The lady boss owned the organization and this headquarters was entirely women staffed which would give a leg up on government contracts at the time. That first day went well into the night. The next day was more of the same, and I was asked to write up the Community Development section. I simply threw down some generic boilerplate familiar to me from the literature. In the end it was reproduced verbatim in the proposal, even to a misspelling I had missed. On the third day the proposal was ‘ready.’ But the deadline for submission to the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Washington had slipped past and the desperate last ditch plan was to get the proposal into the hands of a next day traveler to Cairo who was to deliver it immediately to the US Ambassador or the head of USAID there, both of whom the lady boss claimed to know personally. Whatever the subsequent dynamics, the proposal lost out. I had worked without any promise of compensation, other that of a job in Cairo if it had won. The whole episode had me bemused throughout, but I could imagine any number of “Beltway Bandits” and others scattered around DC having worked, if in a better organized way, somewhat similarly on the same contract competition, and of course many other contracts of that nature. I spent another day or two in Washington on the job trail. One promising idea was to hook onto an organization, TransCentury, headed by two former Peace Corps officials. one of which had been the PC Director in Afghanistan before I got there. Specifically, I could represent them in Belize and the Caribbean with a jazzy title and no compensation until I brought in some business. Agreed, and I returned to Belize, followed in a few days by a small pack of business cards naming me a Senior Associate and TransCenntury’s Representative for the Caribbean. A Near Miss In spite of my prestigious TransCentury titles and a clever brochure produced in Belize. The only nibble on a job for our resources just dragged on and slowly evaporated . The Regional Representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) based in Panama or Costa Rica, called on me one day to discuss the possibility of a UNHCR project for resettling of Chinese “boat people” who had fled from Vietnam. This very pleasant young Swede, a Mr. Cederburg, had an agreement with the Belizean Government to explore such settlement in the generally unpopulated, largely forested areas in Toledo District, the most remote and least developed District in Belize. One Belizean interest seems to have been to populate the substantial open areas near Guatemala which claimed all of “Belice” based on Britain’s failure to comply with a boundary treaty of over one hundred years earlier. Together in some excitement, Cederberg and I sketched out a crude plan as best we could with the paucity of information. After this promising meeting, I traveled to Washington to discuss TransCentury’s possible interest. I was a little disappointed by their cautious, wait and see reaction. I would have liked TransCentury to make an “expert” visit to Belize to pursue the planning and the Minister more effectively. From there on everything seemed increasingly tentative and drawn out in my discussions with the concerned Minister, and with Cederberg on his two or three additional visits. Along the way I learned that the Minister had decided that the Chinese would bring too alien an ethnic culture, too difficult to acculturate, especially in their remote area. Strangely, a modest number of Chinese had immigrated much earlier and were well established, generally as merchants in the towns, such as Belize City’s main ironmonger, Augusto Quan. The younger Chinese, born in Belize, seemed healthily integrated. Maybe the Minister felt that that was ‘enough already.’ In any case I learned from a frustrated Cederberg, that, after much Government dawdling, The Minister was toying with the idea of settling Haitians in Toledo, presumably of a more compatible “race “and culture But in the end nothing came of that whole Toledo settlement scheme. Much later, when I was in Somalia, I learned that Belize did a job applauded by UNHCR in settling communities of Salvadorian self-exiled refugees in a more central part of the country, near their comparatively new capitol, Belmopan. The Salvadorians had filtered into Belize and had been almost in hiding and were found in miserable straits. During his last visit with me, Cederberg expressed a sort of civilized rage over his dealings with the Belizean Government, which had drawn out discussion over more that six months without, in his view, ever having been serious about the project. My own suspicion is that laid-back Belize could have become more serious about the project if someone with appropriate experience could have made the case for Belizean benefits, including a closer relationship with UN institutions leading to more sustained development assistance. But that’s as much a passing thought as a conviction. TransCentury’s caution saved possibly wasted energy. A Second Near Miss During this time in Belize we met a Dr. Hawley and his wife who had rented a pleasant seaside top floor flat. I’m not sure what he was doing, but I believe it was in connection with the World Health Organization. We had as pleasant dinner at their invitation and eventually got into some keen discussions of Belize’s development problems. With nothing promising in view and shortly before we planned to leave Belize again in mid ’82, I learned that an NGO, Project Concern, headed by my old colleague from Turkey and Nigeria, Henry Sjaardema, was recruiting for someone to represent them in supporting a village based health project in Southern Belize. I wrote to Henry expressing interest, and he wrote back that I was their man. We had hardly begun thinking through the arrangements for the kid’s education and making other concrete plans when another letter arrived. This said he deal was on hold but was generally ambiguous. When I asked Henry for definite information, he said that my assignment had been blocked by one of his board members, and the best I could gather was it was Dr. Hawley who h ad now gone from Belize. Well, that was that, and we retreated to Menominee again. Another Interregnum After fizzling out in Belize, we returned to Menominee and were able to spend some weeks in our 7th St House while our tenant was away. Another hard period for me, but it was summer. Sleep came hard and I took evening walks of several miles, starting over the new bridge whose ancient predecessor I had gamboled over in boyhood days. this got me on the empty residential streets of Twin City Marinette, Wisconsin. Since late, only a few barking dogs were aroused to acknowledge me. In daylight I took the children to parks and playgrounds. My right wrist was still in a soft caste from the Bangladesh tennis mishap. One evening when, I was following Randy on his BIG Wheel trice, he veered in front of me and to avoid crushing him I dove over him in a fashion and caught my weight on that wrapped hand, setting recovery sharply back. But it eventually healed to my surprise. Looking around for new organizations where I might catch on in development work, I came across a group titled the Institute of Cultural Studies. They were an outgrowth of the Ecumenical Movement developed around a Midwest protestant seminary, but sharply focused on service to the poor at home and overseas. Being unanchored, I pressed the family into going to a conference of theirs being held in Chicago. They put us up in a donated old business building, partly converted to a very basic hotel for their travelers and guests. But meetings were in a former labor hall on the poor far Westside. The group had a formula for communal living, and had residential quarters in a few major cities. Hardly out of more than curiosity, I inquired for more detail on how their system of living and working carried out. These people were bright, almost all white middle class appearing folks of young to middle aged. Individuals put all their wealth into a pool at their particular residential group. Part of each community would work in the outside world at any sort of job, to support the rest would do full time humanitarian work. The intention at this juncture was to ever more actively go into foreign locations. As I talked on details with some of the leaders, Zee, and her own questions, grew from uneasy to controlled hostility. The very idea of giving up our wealth for such “nonsense!" She didn’t let me soon forget that unorthodox excursion! But in early winter, a bright, clean-cut young man of the group visited us back in Menominee. He was on his way to a much further point in the Upper Peninsula, and asked of I would care to go along. Maybe to try to escape the winter blahs, I agreed. We ended up in Ironwood, Michigan, the western tip of the UP for discussions with a collaborator on setting up some sort of local conference. What first surprised me was that my companion simply asked the manager of the small Best Western hotel if a free room would be granted us two chaps who were from an organization carrying on humane work, and the wish was calmly granted. There was a sense that it was a common consideration for our group. (Of course the hotel was probably at a state of low occupancy in this wintertime). During this travel, I learned that the group in Washington, DC had inherited an abandoned nun’s quarters on the campus of Catholic University. That group was particularly active with the NGOs of good will in the DC area. Since that promised to be interesting and would give me time to explore broader job hunting where it mattered, I left Zee and the kids with my Mom and spent a few weeks there in the softer winter of Washington. I had a nice little room, helped collect food from the charitable food bank, even did a little simple cooking and a lot of dishwashing, and also helped scrape old wallpaper off a room’s wails before painting. My substantive value to them was to introduce a young woman paired with me to some of my contacts in Washington. The purpose was to interest weighty Washington figures in the movement’s planned big meeting in India where strategies were to be thrashed out on how to attack poverty in poor world towns and villages. Obviously I had a little something to say and hope for along these lines. And there were encounters of real interest. But nothing paid off for me. And I drove home after about three weeks. In the late summer I got a phone call from Henry Sjaardema, still the Director of Project Concern in San Diego. He asked me to come and consult on their program in Belize where his man on the ground was bitterly complaining about the difficulty of dealing with the government. Henry’s modus operandi was, on reflex, to deny project flaws and to conceal project difficulties.. He concluded that the fault lay with the man in Belize. About all I could say was, from my experience in Belize was that the man in the field was probably a truth telling messenger. Henry just couldn’t see that possible reality. Anyhow, another Project Concern worker was scheduled to drive through Mexico, via Tijuana to deliver a repaired van to the Belize Project, and Henry asked me to go along to check out the project. Meanwhile, as I was in San Diego, Zee got a call responding to my application for a job in Somalia with Save the Children, They wanted me to come soon for pre-shipment orientation. I would have liked to take the Belize trip, but that had no job continuity. And SCF was a bird in the hand. 0I told Henry that I would think about the Belize trip after I returned home and consulted family. SCF was the decision and I so informed Henry. Chapter 12 Somalia In early fall of ’83, I entered Save the Children Federation (SC F)’s training program in Westport, Connecticut along with a few others bound for other parts of the world while I would be assigned for Somalia to direct a refugee settlement project near the town of Qorioley, also supported by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and USAID. SCF was just one of the several non-government organizations (NGOs) similarly engaged as the various refugee camps. The Training sessions were in the SCF headquarters along the tidal Saugatuk River. Trainees were billeted a short walk away in a delightful ”heritage” colonial house, where we were on our own for breakfast and supper victualing. The training was reasonably well done. The head of the Africa Region, Mel, appeared near the end of the training, He and I got on swimmingly, and before departure for Somalia, we went on a field trip to get acquainted with some technical resources available to SCF. Mel would travel with me to Somalia after which he would tour other SCF programs in Africa. En route, Mel and I had a three day stopover in Geneva for a United Nations conference with non-government organizations (NGOs) on refugee programs, the core of my work to be in Somalia, at which we slipped one another witty notes of commentary on proceedings. He and I seemed to have a common world view. Despite the rainy weather, Geneva struck me as an attractive city. The last leg, from Nairobi, had us there over night. Mel had once been stationed there and enjoyed the brief reprise. In an interesting twist, when we arrived at the no-star Hotel Taliban in Mogadishu, the porter carrying our bags took mine into a fine large room and black Mel’s into a much smaller cell. Mel understood the porter’s thought that the white man must surely be the superior, and I was older, too. While Mel was out of the hotel, I quickly switched rooms with the luggage, which he politely accepted. He stayed with us for only three or four days. Much later when things were first getting sticky for me with headquarters, I learned to my alarm that Mel had left SCF over some disagreement, to be replaced by a ‘dunderhead’ as described by another helpless friend at headquarters. When I arrived in Somalia in early December 1983 I was without my family since Zee wanted to stay behind with the kids so that they could finish the school year in America. My predecessor and I were meant to have an overlay for smooth transition. But as I arrived, he came down with, in his words, “explosive diarrhea.” ; and I soon had a variation myself, so communication was minimal. To provide me with expected household/cooking services, Khadija the office bookkeeper sent me a young woman to do the needful. She happened to be quite beautiful and ladylike. Although like most Somali women, she did not cover her face, her flowing wrap around garments were unusually colorfully ‘tasteful’ to a western sensibility. Her household skills were barely adequate. Khadija and others at the office would smirk and hint that my wife would maybe not be pleased when she arrived to find the glamorous servant in the house. Since she wasn’t very competent, I did drop her and hired another more ‘ordinary’ young woman, Shamsa, who worked much better and met with Zee’s approval when she and the kids arrived. My first quarters were on the top floor of somewhat modern style house, the bottom floor of which was to be used by field personnel when in Mogadishu. The neighborhood electrical wiring seemed entangled with the standard masonry water tower in the yard, and this provided startling sizzling fireworks around the tower from time to time. Soon after Zee arrived with Holly and Randy, through the chaotic Mog airport (where the US marines later “stormed ashore, well lit by the CNN camera crews) we had o move our family living quarters, and also find new office space to be combined with quarters for visiting field staff , all in the same “K-4” Hoban sector of Mogadishu as before. My first quarters had suffered a break in and our family quarters were entered twice without waking us, once by pulling the ‘burglar bars’ off a downstairs window. A sizeable wad of local currency was their only loss noticed aside from the disarray from the looters’ searching. The guard that night got fired. Before my clan arrived, I received a professional visitor whose contract with SCF had been set up by my predecessor. This Spooner was a businesslike young British man who apparently had spent much of his earlier life in Somalia, as the son of an earlier ‘Somali expert, ‘ perhaps a colonial officer in former Somaliland.’ Spooner was to examine our project at Qorioley and make recommendations for its future. He did a quite thorough exploration and report. However, it was heavy on new, expansive activities, well beyond our terms and uneasy dealings with the government; and as you will read, we had enough troubles just keeping our project’s head above water. Just after Spooner arrived, I was out of the country for a few days, and he occupied my rooms. Just his luck, there was a break-in through simple removal of some glass louvers at the back of the house. Apparently he slept through this, only in the morning to find his papers strewn around an ante room, but nothing stolen. Spooner also had the use of my Toyota SUV while I was away. This, too, attracted miscreants. While he was on one of the lovely, but locally ignored, Indian Ocean beaches with some of the Qorioley expatriates, with the Toyota parked at some distance, a rear window was broken through, but again nothing stolen. It just meant that plywood replaced the window for as long as the car was in my use. One other, a second hand memory, of Spooner remains etched. Also during my absence, a very senior young woman, blonde and not unattractive, from SCF headquarters passed through Mogadishu on the way to a meeting in Harare, Zimbabwe where we would meet for an Africa wide conference of SCF expatriates. In Mog she met with Spooner and my team members. As characterized by Steve, our facile bargainer with local suppliers, a heated exchange developed between the hard empiricist, Spooner, and the lady who suggested an “animated Barbie Doll” by simply returning to her faith in the SCF house ideology of the time, “C-BIRD”, (Coordinated Basic Integrated Rural Development). Before Zee and our children arrived I saw that there was not adequate provision for both their schooling in Mogadishu. There was an American sponsored elementary school, but eight years old Randy (who as an adult became a medical doctor) didn’t do well there, and so he joined fourteen year old Holly who from the school start had been attending a good boarding school in Thika, Kenya originally for the expatriate employees on what had been a large Dole pineapple plantation. Staffing My project was well underway before I arrived. Some major irrigation works had been excavated and a parallel forestry project, with a nursery and water tank were in operation. Our five then six expatriate staff lived near Qorioley. The refugees to be worked with had been in four make-shift camps for up to seven years out side the town of Qorioley. Of Somali ethnicity, they had fled from neighboring regions of Ethiopia when the Soviets changed sides and supported the Ethiopians. The camps were ‘officially’ holding 40,000 people, but no more than 25,000 were actually there. Most of the men had gone off to find jobs or just to return to herding cattle and camels as was their tradition. Of course I inherited a small staff. The chief figure was Jama, who I was led to believe was well connected and worth keeping, despite weaknesses, for that reason. He was a handsome young man with an outgoing manner, but there was a sot of a cool lackadaisical style about him that reminded me of a Nigerian type. He had actually spent some early years there with his father, a United Nations officer. Although we got along almost pleasantly, he fancied himself as expert in gaming the system while I wanted to play things relatively straight. After a while I found him inadequate and sought a replacement. Jama seemed to take no offense, perhaps in part because I gave him a favorable dollar exchange rate for his local Shillings. A newspaper advert brought about half a dozen responses. Except for one, they were young men who had worked for other NGOs, and presented themselves as good ‘fixers.’ One was a neat soft spoken and dignified older man who had been a civil servant at the highest levels of government, once Secretary to the Cabinet. I had asked the opinion of my office staff for their choice and they all voted this Hashi last, apparently fearing his authority. Still he was clearly vastly more promising than the others and he was hired and became a great asset.. The very effective forestry technician that I inherited was soon due to leave, and headquarters sent out a replacement, David L. David produced very little beyond criticism of his own forestry project, with blame put on his hapless government-sent counterpart, while some of the local forestry staff wanted to be more active to forward the goals of creating farming windbreaks. Not long after his arrival, David began to complain about all sorts of non-specific illnesses, so after months of this I had him return to headquarters for diagnosis and treatment, where he stayed for weeks, and still nothing particular could be found medically wrong with him. They proposed to send David back to us. In the meantime one of the bright Somalis on our field forestry staff who worked as closely to David as anyone, reported to me that David had not shone much respect for his Somali workers. I telexed this back to headquarters, suggesting that it be considered in deciding about his return. Nevertheless, to the surprise of all of us in Somalia, he was returned and continued being passive about work and a solitary figure. His one sign of life was to curry favor with our bookkeeper, Khadija, by bringing her quite elaborate gifts, much to her delight. I soon settled on a pattern of visiting my field staff and the camps at Qorioley, some 75 pot-holed miles southwest of Mogadishu, for a two day stay every week. I often drove myself in the office Toyota Land Cruiser in the morning, and late the next day drove back On one trip I swear I saw a large spotted cat, a leopard or cheetah in the middle of he road at a distance. It only moved off to the side and stared at us – I had a passenger -- from the road side bush as I got close. Earlier I had been led to believe that all these large cats had been wiped out in Somalia. Another time I also saw a pangolin, the emerald anteater, on the road edge On one of first nights in Qorioley I slept in a ’spare room’ of my inherited agriculture specialist, one Tin, a Burmese who soon left the project. I was told that the thatched roof might harbor bats. But I fell asleep soon enough.. At some point I was awakened by the sensation of something on my bent knee. I grabbed my flashlight and found a bat at rest there. I slowly reached for a magazine I had nearby and gave the bat a vicious swipe off my knee. He lay ‘lifeless’ at the side of the room and I confidently fell back to sleep. To my surprise in the morning it had disappeared. After Tin our Agriculturist departed, he was replaced by Mike, a young Australian with a wife and two children, who had previously been working with refugees elsewhere in Somalia. Mike had been lined up for the job before I arrived, but he turned out to be a excellent team member in most respects, even more dedicated after his children were off to the boarding school in Thika, Kenya. But Mike got us into a bit of trouble. In Qorioley he controlled a SCF local bank account, replenished periodically by Khadija, for the site needs, including the payroll for a work force of around 20. Since Mike was busy with farm work, under him was a local bookkeeper, actually from neighboring Kenya where a large eastern portion of the country is populated by ethnic Somalis. As on other paydays, the “Kenyan” as he was known , brought a large check for Mike’s signature, mentioning that it was for payroll and other large expenses that he would take to the Qorioley bank for the cash in Shillings. Mike, a somewhat casual type, came to have trust in his bookkeeper after a number of similar dealings in the past. This time the bookkeeper never returned, and, untraceable, was believed to have escaped to Kenya. His timing was clever since he brought the check to Mike just as he was leaving the field to come to Mogadishu, and Mike, without the usual questions hastily signed the check on the hood of the camps’ Toyota. In the Name of the Prophet’s Wife SCF’s bookkeeper/accountant, Khadija, was a bright woman in her late 20s and of assertive personality that seemed to fit her station. Her local university degree was not in this field, but she had long since mastered basic organizational procedure. Some time after I arrived she complained that her work was becoming too much for her and she asked that we hire an assistant. When I showed willingness to consider the idea, she recommended a young married woman of her acquaintance, Faduma. After due consideration Faduma was hired and she worked conscientiously. Khadija saw herself and was generally accepted as the least expendable person on the staff when I arrived. But her very presumption put her in disfavor with a retired senior civil servant that I hired as my top staff member. Before Hashi came on, Khadija had been chosen to go to the States for an SCF training course for local staff from various countries. There she seemed uncomfortable with some of the clashes with her Islamic beliefs. After initially praising Faduma’s assistance in her work, about six months later Khadija began criticizing Faduma and asked that she be dismissed. But this did not seem clearly related to her work. I couldn’t penetrate beyond the appearance of some sort of personal relations clash, not likely to be related to the work scene. I refused to take any prompt action without more justification. Because the limited public transportation was dreadful, at the end of each work day Deeq (Deck) a very responsible young driver took our half dozen local staff members to their homes in an elongated vintage Toyota ‘jeep’ with facing benches behind the driver. One morning Deeq came go tell me in his limited but usually adequate English of an event that ramified for several weeks. On the previous afternoon’s drive home, Khadija had passed up her early drop, apparently so that only she and Faduma would be left in the rear of the jeep. Then suddenly, in a heavily trafficked area, Deeq became aware of a disturbance in the back, as best as he could tell with his traffic concerns, it was a snarling, hair pulling , and scratching brawl between the two women. (Khadija was far the beefier of the two.) And I had noticed some sort of scratch on Khadija’s cheek the following morning which she tried to cover with her head scarf. Of course, Deeq couldn’t immediately stop the car and try to deal with the conflict. When he was able to pull over, he was aided by an off-duty police officer who separated the women. As best I could tell from Deeq’s careful account, which included the policeman’s observations, Khadija must have been the instigator, and she never clearly denied this, while Faduma firmly insisted that she was attacked. I had Hashi also interview Deeq on details. and he talked with each of the women. Khadija was more articulate. She pointed to her deep scratch. Faduma who seemed physically unmarked, claimed that she had suddenly been jumped upon and she had merely defended herself. She came across as the more credible. Then Hashi and I discussed our options. I suspended both women for 30 days during which I hoped to get some clarification on which to base a decision. A few days later I was visited by two of Khadija’s older sisters. One was a genuine virago, denouncing the sanction and even the slightest cloud that had been or might be attached to their excellent sister. I listened uncomfortably, saying only that I had to consider the disturbing evidence. In another few days I was visited by an impressively uniformed Somali army officer, who I understood was of general rank, and who introduced himself as Khadija’s uncle. Hashi had brought him into my office, and after the introduction, they repaired to Hashi’s office to have a gentlemanly discussion of Khadija’s case. Hashi reported that the general’s brief was based on his Somali cultural understanding of proper resolution, which seemed to be that the most well family connected of a pair in conflict should be excused from further unpleasantness; the facts in the case hardly mattered. Hashi, skilled civil servant that he was, finessed this by saying that the decision wasn’t his but that he would lay the general’s proposition before me. In my rather perfunctory greeting and farewell with the general he had been entirely genial though we didn’t have a common language Next I was visited by a Somali who identified himself as an Inspector of the government’s Labor Department, who proceeded to lay out some legalisms in a generally threatening manner, designed to get Khadija back to work and clear of any punishment. When he had finished, I simply said that I would consider all aspects. One of our staff members had noticed out of a window that the Inspector had been driven up in a taxi which had parked around the corner, and wherein sat Khadija’s virago sister, and to which the Inspector returned. Near the end of the 30 day suspension, a note came from Khadija saying that she resigned and included her accounting of the monies owed her, including the legally required severance pay, which in her case was abundant because of her longevity with SCF. To our best calculation she was correct in her figures and we sent her the money as soon as we were sure of the amount. But she refused to accept the money and sent it back. A day or two later, Khadija appeared at my house after office hours. With a minimum of self-abasement she asked for her job back. She straightforwardly stated that this decision was not hers but that her family council required that she do this. But even before Khadija had resigned, Hashi, who disliked Khadija, had urged that, as a contingency measure, we interview and tentatively hire a well trained young man, and once she did resign we promptly set him to work. I told Khadija that that development foreclosed any possibility of her being rehired. She responded with surprising calm. I suspect that may even have been the sort of answer she wanted, for cover, to carry back to her family. She eventually accepted her SCF pay. Much later, when I was forced to resign myself – as explained later in the story of John Denver’s visit to Somalia -- I took a three month consultancy to deliver a feasibility study on vocational training for Mogadishu’s unemployed youth. My employer was the British NGO Action Aid. On my first day in their office, who did I discover as their accountant but Khadija. Again, she sat at a critical (payroll) junction for all office employees. I was in and out of the AA office many times in the three months and we got along easily The Bridge at Qorioley When visiting our SCF field team I first passed through the town of Qorioley. It was entered by mounting and , because of its human traffic, haltingly crossing a short single lane bridge over the narrow Shebelle River. Immediately alongside the bridge, upstream, was a weir whose vertical vanes must have been intended to be adjusted to control the river’s flow beyond the bridge, but this apparatus seemed out of order and the vanes stood at a variety of angles. During a season when the river was high the faux dam had trapped two or three Hippopotamus carcasses bobbing against the vanes, and they were there for two or three of my weekly visits to the project camps. When the Shebelle ran dry, which was a not unusual seasonal occurrence, were the hippos removed and dumped alongside the road, attracting the scavenging Marabout Storks and the Sacred Ibis. Bizarre as was the scene of the hippos bobbing along side the bridge, to which the busy passers by seemed quite indifferent, the dry season scène was far more fantastic. When the river ran dry, since there was a drop in the river bed below the dam, a small pool remained in that declivity. In the two or three weeks of my visits, there was around this apparently last water near Qorioley an animated panorama worthy of Bruegel. The brownish puddle seemed a center of town and village life. Naked boys were jumping in and splashing about. Mothers were bathing their children. Other women were washing cloths and clothes or filling containers Men were washing their parts in preparation for prayer. Domesticated animals – camels, goats, horses and donkeys, alone or tended - were drinking. All were in an animated swirl of life. Although I didn’t see it, it was said that a quite live feared hippo wallowed in the pond, which the villagers stayed well away from at the water’s edge. I forgot to bring my camera during this dry period and so never got what would have been a priceless photo, one of my lasting regrets. Zee’s Vicissitudes Zee had made a favorable impression on the UNICEF chief for Somalia and he hired her to work on woman’s issues. This put her in close touch with a number of activist Somali women, all related to senior government officials. But after a time she left to return to her writing. Later still, when my situation attenuated, she felt obliged to take a ‘local hire’ (i.e., greatly less paid that an imported staffer) job as secretary at the USAID agricultural office. Not long after her arrival, Zee offered the comment, and repeated it from time to time, that she felt Somalia to be somehow lacking reassurance, with some sort of malaise in the atmosphere. I tried at first to pooh-pooh the idea, but over time I came to have similar feelings, aside from my troubles with our project. But I tried to “keep hope alive.” “The Green Card While in Somalia, Zee lost her Green Card, the permit to reenter the US since she was not yet an American citizen. The location of the US Embassy in Mogadishu was in what must have given those responsible for its security ferocious headaches over its exposure. Its entrance was two or three steps off a busy street in old Mogadishu. A new Embassy was being built to new security standards on the remote edge of the city. Once Zee gave up hope of finding the Green Card, we went to the Consulate part of the old Embassy bulling. At a formidably high window a good looking young American woman gave us a surly greeting with a strong suggestion of suspicion in her response to Zee’s problem. With Zee’s skin as dark as a Somali’s, the officious young woman may have suspected that Zee was a local trying for a means to enter the selective USA -- just a guess. In the end we were told that no business could be conducted that day and were told to come back on a later day. When we did come back a few days later, the same woman handed Zee a complicated form to fill out and turned away for good, leaving Zee with questions about interpreting the form. After her best effort Zee got no further attention and simply pushed the form through the window before we left, wondering about the fate of the ‘application.’ A week or so later we were back to see how matters stood. The same women came to the window and threw a fit about our annoying her with our importunities. She ‘ordered’ us to see her superior and led the way to a large office. Behind an imposing desk sat a puffed up little man. The young lady seated herself demurely to one side while we were meant to sit facing the barrier desk. Well, the officer, whatever his rank, lit into Zee and I in the best imitation of an old movies’ Edward G. Robinson-James Cagney crook/cop I have ever seen in real life: We were in big trouble for forcing our insignificant, even dubious, case on the kindly, patient young Consulate officer. If we didn’t ‘back off,’ unpleasant consequences would follow. His performance brooked no interpolation and was startling in its abnormal intensity of censure, at which the young lady regularly nodded in a most subservient way. For a fleeting moment I thought he must be kidding and the silliness would end for more adult discourse. No such thing! As my gorge rose, I was tempted to complement him on his ‘performance art,’ but that was edited out as too risky. We left that encounter somewhat dumbfounded about how to proceed on the Green Card problem. I suspect that our good relationship with the new Ambassador must have filtered down, because a week or two later we were invited to the Consulate to be humbly greeted by another official who presented Zee with her new Green Card. Great Dictator” Episode The occasion was International Women’s Day on March 8, 1985. Zee had been doing some work with the Somali office of UNICEF and with the well connected official women’s organization. I believe it was more likely through her connection rather than mine that we were invited to attend the celebration at the national auditorium in central Mogadishu. It was clearly mounted as a major showcase event with all the international organizations – and there were many at that time -- represented. In the large hall, at a prominent central bank of seats were seated about 100 women dressed in a colorful common uniform version of traditional dress. Faces and most of their hair were uncovered. (This government professed “scientific socialism” and was avowedly secular. In a hall where business was conducted with foreign aid agencies, large medallions with the faces of Marx, Engels and the five military members of the “Politburo” looked down.) The uniformed women seemed to have been well rehearsed as they seemed to know exactly when to cheer, which was often a precisely delivered, full throated chant. The evening’s program had a few preliminary speakers interspersed with some local groups singing and dancing, where the pretty young girls were quite bare headed but otherwise modestly dressed.. The main event was the address by the President, General Siyaad Barre. Here was where I had a series of smothered chuckles . Of course I couldn’t understand the Somali. But the ladies cheering section rose to chant at the appointed times. When the cheering went on too long, Siyaad Barre calmly, ever so slightly, raised his hand, in the manner of Chaplin’s parody of Hitler at speech in his “The Great Dictator,” and there was instantaneous silence. At times like these one wonders whether anyone else had the same recall, probably connected. When John Denver Visited Somalia "But, after all, development is theater." Thus spake a friend -- call him Max -- with whom I was just then involved in a project and personal career crisis (mine) in Somalia. I had been railing about the irrationality of our Save the Children (SCF) headquarters as I drove us from our project site near Qorioley back to the capital, Mogadishu. Max didn't get much chance to explain or expand on this theme because I assumed that he was trivializing this field of my Life's Work, and I launched into a filibuster on how all of the world's great religions mandate a concern to share in the development of the less fortunate peoples and regions, and so on and so forth. But I have often thought further about my friend's thesis since then. First, I believe that Max was referring to foreign development assistance or aid, not the whole sweep of social and economic developmental change in the Third World. And, I believe, that he had more particularly in mind the perspective of aid donors, including our SCF. (Of course, to be philosophical, there are elements of theater in almost every human action, in that most of them take place with some sort of audience, present or absent, in mind.) The above exchange with Max occurred on the eve of a trip in July l985, by Maureen Reagan -- fresh from The UN Women's Conference in Nairobi -- to Somalia, where a visit to our SCF field project was to be the main item on her agenda. Max had been sent from SCF headquarters in Westport, Connecticut to get my resignation as the Somalia Field Office Director. Although there were other factors, this headquarters action must have been strongly influenced, especially for timing, by an earlier event, a filming visit by John Denver to our project in the previous October. The then massive burden of allegedly over one million refugees in Somalia, continuing since the late l970s war with Ethiopia , had attracted great world-wide attention and large scale assistance efforts (not without USA strategic interests there at the still cold war time). SCF had come to focus on a group of four of the camps, outside the town of Qorioley, officially holding 40,000 Somali-ethnic refugees from Ethiopia, but actually nearer 25,000 since almost all the adult men had left for employment elsewhere, many as herdsmen. The CSF camps were some 75 miles southwest of Mogadishu and a few miles inland from the Indian Ocean, alongside the River Shebele. The official count had the advantage of scoring food aid for the larger number One of numerous NGOs that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and foreign government agencies, including USAID, had engaged for refugee projects, SCF was to develop irrigation of farm land for cultivation and settlement by the Qorioley camps' refugees and for the benefit of surrounding villagers. A nearby forestry project was part of the contracted SCF mandate. The John Denver visit of October l984 was in conjunction with the Hunger Project whose swing through SCF projects in Africa was to bring a filmed message back to Americans that Africans were not simply idlers waiting for aid from afar, which they would probably fumble; but, rather, were actively working toward self-reliance, more or less intelligently conceived. This was intended to counter the presumed despair -- when not indifference-- with which Americans observed Africa's plight. Our advance information regarding this visit was sketchy and shifting, especially as to the promised "advance" people. But eventually a party of ten showed up, including top Hunger Project officers and the film crew, along with Denver and two SCF home office representatives. Based on what little we knew, one of our field staff members, Kim, who lived near the camps and who had an interest in film and drama, drew up a menu of camp scenes that seemed likely to interest the filmers. The absence of clear information on the visitors' chartered jet's schedule and identification marks worried us almost until the last minute, over whether it would be cleared to enter Somalia's militarized air space and to land in Mogadishu. The advance man had arrived without news on these points just the night before the whole team, who were to spend only two days in Somalia. In the short time available to arrange concrete official cooperation, one pass, thought (hoped) to be of secondary importance could not be obtained; that is, a pass for filming outside the refugee camps. When we finally got news on the plane's arrival time, it was already in the air from Nairobi, one hour away. At this hour of 11 PM the Mogadishu airport control tower was normally not manned. So special, almost desperate, arrangements had to be made to get someone for the tower. The Somali, so hurriedly found, cut quite a figure. From his dress in casual mawees (a wrapper-skirt), he could have just as well been herding camels nearby and taken time off to bring in the Denver plane. But he seemed to know his stuff. The advance man, Charlie, had been booked into Mogadishu's most prestigious hotel, the government managed Al Uruba, where his bathroom flooded (a seeming tradition) during the night, leading to his shift the next day to the Jubba Hotel, also run by the government, where the Denver group joined him. This, too, they found unsatisfactory, and next day they all moved into a small private hotel, the Italian run Croce del Sud, which had not had room when they first arrived. (The Alitalia weekly plane's pilots and stewardesses had been in occupancy.) While the Denver group proposed to rest and look over previously shot footage on the first of their two full days in Somalia, I urged them to at least have a look at the target area before their only day of shooting. This led to an agreement that on the first afternoon -- without Denver -- the film crew, the Circassian-American lady, Bilge (Bill-geh), sent out by SCF as an experienced facilitator, and a man from the Somali National Refugee Commission (NRC) would travel to a pleasant, if Spartan, seaside hotel-restaurant, the Sambusa, outside the ancient port town of Merka, and about 20 minutes from Qorioley. Before spending the night there, they were to be met by Kim and others of the Qorioley staff to discuss concrete plans for filming the next day, when Denver and the rest would arrive at the camps. The filmers were reminded that they had no permit to film outside the camps, and were advised to be guided by the Qorioley folks on any such temptation. The film crew left Mogadishu earlier than planned and so arrived at the Sambusa before the Qorioley people. The sunset on the Indian Ocean beach was too much to resist, and they unslung their equipment and began shooting. A single strolling family got in their sights. Unfortunately, the father was a senior police official for the region. He was outraged over the filming of his womenfolk, a sensitive matter for Moslems. The police were summoned and the film crew, Bilge and the NRC man were being hustled off to the Merka police station when up drove the Qorioley bunch. They joined the caravan to the police station and shared the next two hours of inquisitional accusations and harangues. Our Somali staff members, when trying to explain and ameliorate the unfortunate situation, were abused as lackeys of these miscreant -- possibly spying -- Americans. With worse possibilities escaped, the film in the cameras was confiscated and the filmers were ordered to return to Mogadishu that night and to come back to Merka the following day with evidence of their permission to be filming around the Sambusa. On the way back to Mogadishu, after dark, they were given a hard time at a military check point, some l5 miles short of Mogadishu, over the suspicious pick-up load of fancy equipment. That did nothing to ease their shaken condition. I myself had been in Qorioley until late afternoon that day, but returned to Mogadishu for last minute planning with Denver and the Hunger Project people. As planned, I waited for their after-dinner call. About 9 PM I received an excited plea to come at once to their hotel to discuss the misadventure of the filmers who had just returned in near panic. I rounded up my two senior Somali staff members, Hashi and Jama, and we joined a tense planning session over what to do next. This produced a plan for Hashi, my senior-most Somali staffer, a very widely known and respected former top civil servant, Bilge and I to head off for Merka early next morning to visit the key officials, including the Regional Governor, and to prepare the way for a smooth last day of filming at the Qorioley camps. This was to override any concern for the previous evening's confrontation with the police; and the officials that we met so assured us. The remaining Denver team was to follow us after one hour, visiting exactly the same officials as we had, as we told the officials they would, before all of us would meet at the Qorioley camps for filming. But, alas, another hitch: The NRC man who had been fecklessly present at the previous evening's police station session, now insisted, after our advance guard had left Mogadishu, that the main body, with Denver, must return to the Merka police station before proceeding to Qorioley, since that had been a condition of the crew's release the previous evening.. The result was a reprise of the last evening's hectoring before they were allowed to leave Merka for Qorioley. It was noon-time before they arrived rather than the expected mid-morning when the filming was planned to start. Only about 6 hours of daylight were left. (If one is following the news as of mid-November 2008, one should recognize that Qorioley and Merka, the latter recently serving as a port for food aid shipments, have recently become towns taken over by the rebel Islamists who seem to be gaining ground in that hunger hounded failing state.) Denver did one or two set pieces before the cameras and then wandered off with no one paying much attention to him. The refugees were long used to "western" visitors. (Among the pre-arrival telexes, one included the note that Denver wanted to "play down the celebrity aspect." One of our Qorioley Somali staffers commented, "That's no problem. No one has heard of him here.") The film crew spent the afternoon feverishly, and rather insensitively, setting up and filming various of the camp activities that Kim had suggested, until the very last of the daylight.. The film crew proper rode back to Mogadishu with me. While driving through the unlit, meandering dirt streets of Qorioley town, I mistakenly took a turn that led us into the police compound where my headlights picked up four or five men with their rifles trained on us. The police, who soon recognized my Land Cruiser, and I laughed off this innocent blunder, but the unease among my passengers was palpably advanced. The next morning the group's chartered jet was to take off. But there was a modest delay while someone went to bring from his home an immigration officer to record the departure, since, as there were no flights scheduled for that day, the airport post was unmanned. When it was all over, our staff heaved a mighty exhalation, and we exchanged comments on our respective exposures to events, accompanied by many a sardonic chuckle. Although John Denver was always polite, he had tended to stay in the background while some others in the group tripped into impatience, rudeness and arrogance, particularly toward the Somalis, including our own staff who took no small offence since Somali dignity is prized rather more than that in most cultures.. I understand that the Hunger Project/John Denver film (for TV) was never shown commercially, or for fund-raising, as was intended. Whatever its quality, it had the misfortune of being ready just after the sensational BBC film of famine in Ethiopia, which riveted attention on that disaster and spurred the wondrous, but questionably useful, phenomena of "Band Aid" and "Live Aid." (Talk about development as theater!) Some eight months after the Denver visit, my colleague Max was explaining to me why the head office wanted my resignation before Ms. Maureen Reagan would arrive next month. The timing was to avoid awkward moments, with which, regarding visitors, I had become indelibly associated. There were other differences, but those, alone, would have permitted a more graceful separation. This seems to have also been a time of career crisis, of sorts for Max. He indicated that he felt that he had been sent on this mission, in part, to test his loyalty to SCF's leadership, which had been viewing his 'team-player' qualities askance. And he was in the process of reconsidering his association with SCF. An especially lively episode in Max's brief Somalia sojourn came one evening at Mogadishu's then one of two (to my knowledge) modern hot spots, the Lido, a disco of sorts. By coincidence or cleverness, Max's visit was timed to overlap with the temporary assignment to USAID's Somalia office of an African-American secretary who had been a sometime lover of Max -- himself clearly a swinger. Max had been accompanied to Somalia by a young karate-wise accountant from SCF headquarters, and they took the fair lady for an evening at the fabled Lido, where the Mogadishu moderns, prostitutes, and very few foreigners disported themselves. While Max was dancing closely with his lady, she was suddenly attacked by a number of Somali bravos who tore at her clothing, apparently believing that she was one of theirs, traitorously entertaining a white foreigner. Our chaps fought their way outside and jumped into one of the yellow Fiat taxies always there. Max described the event next morning with a sense of marvel and almost pride. After doing his duty with me -- in the end I did resign -- Max disappeared into Europe for a week or so when headquarters was trying urgently to get in touch with him while they believed he was still in the Horn. As I later came to understand, the widely seen BBC film on Ethiopia's simultaneous famine had resulted in thousands of unsolicited dollars pouring into SCF-Westport, where it was decided to keep it and hurry up to open an Ethiopian operation where none existed. (The quite distinct UK's SCF was there and TV-viewing Americans must have been confused.) The long gone Max was, supposedly, to rush to nearby Addis Ababa and get that project going. All this eventuated in his resignation shortly after. Although I resigned, I intended to stay longer ant try to work in Somalia. However, I did feel that after resignation I should take a short solo trip to the USA at this point, primarily to see how my 92 year old mother was doing (fine, it turned out) and also to touch some future alternative employment bases, and to check on family business matters. This took me from the scene during Ms. Reagan's visit to Somalia. Although absent, I got first hand accounts from SCF staffers and other friends when I returned to Somalia. It seems that the official US agencies pulled out all the stops to give Ms. Reagan an undisturbed progress, including her only 'field' exposure at the Qorioley camps. The SCF people told me that she just seemed to be "going through the motions," expressing barely polite interest and giving no sign that she understood what she was viewing or the complexities of development in general. Noblesse Oblige While in Westport, Connecticut, for training before heading to Somalia, I had met an attractive young black woman on the headquarters’ staff who, in conversation, seemed remarkably conversant on some of the theoretical issues in 3rd World development. Some six months after I was at work in Somalia, I felt that we needed some beefing up of staff, especially for computer skills. The young woman at headquarters came to mind. She was willing, but her assignment was blocked by the fact t that she had recently become married to a young doctor, and she wouldn’t come alone. By remarkable chance, I learned that the doctor for the whole sizeable American Mission in Somalia was about to leave. This led to a number of explorations and discussions, whereby Sherese’s husband could have the open position. The somewhat extended negotiations having worked out, Sherese and husband came to Mogadishu. Sherese turned out to be rather grandiose, as if she were not just another staff member but had her own independent authority over local staff. Her husband seemed a rather quiet decent chap. After a time they became fixtures in expatriate circles. My decisions and directions seemed a matter of indifference to Sherese, and she did her work in a rather off-hand way as if it were not the main reason for her presence in Somalia. After my resignation, although my family managed to stay in Somalia for another year, we had to vacate the house that SCF rented for us along with the furnishings that weren’t our own. This was understood, and a day had been agreed upon for removal of the furnishings. On that day Zee and I were on some errands using a borrowed jeep. At one point we passed an SCF truck with some local staff in the back and Sherese in command in the front seat beside Deeq.. As the staff was gaily waving to us, Sherese waved for us to stop. She said that they were planning to head for our house for the furniture. We said fine, and that we would be at the house shortly after a brief errand. With the briefest interval for our errand, we arrived at our house, to find that the SCFers had been and gone, leaving our personal effects from the chests of drawers roughly thrown on the floor, not even on the nearby beds which would remain. Since the removers were under Sherese’s direction, this discovery was not entirely surprising however disgusting and disappointing was her degraded behavior. One sometimes despairs over certain individuals. More Thorns in the Path Among my travails in Somalia, one surrounded a visitor from headquarters, Judy B. When she arrived her ostensible mission was to tighten up our bookkeeping by working with Khadija and on a better accounting system, which later was found to be all but impossible to implement in the conditions of Somalia. Judy was obviously bright and seemed pleasant and even sympathetic during the few days she stayed as a guest in our house and shared our meals. She even confided in us, rather remarkably, on her severely jaundiced view of SCF’s headquarters administration; even expiating on the scurrilous misbehaviors of her divorced husband. I later speculated that this may have been designed to draw me out on my views of superiors and on other matters. In her drawn out stay, Judy became more and more intrusive around the office and her criticisms and corrections quite imperious. She took Khadija’s side in the episode described above. On her one visit to the field operations near Qorioley, she met and stayed a few days with our unproductive forestry project technician, David, who was ordinarily an isolate among the eight other expatriates there, and who gave her venomous complaints about our whole operation. She hardly spoke to our other field people. Before she left, we had a face off. She proposed to stay on indefinitely to look after our ‘shambles’ in the presence of another headquarters visitor -- and a not very bright one. I announced that if she stayed, I would leave. Well, the visitor, Mel’s successor, felt that would be too disruptive, and he suggested that Judy do the leaving. A few weeks after Judy left, a copy of her report on her Somalia visit arrived, denouncing my management in its every dimension. Some of it was easily refuted, and other passages made no sense at all, but sounded awful!. I prepared a response in detail and with care, getting Hashi’s advice on every point and his assurance that my rebuttal would easily carry the day. Well, it didn’t. Later when it was all over, after Max got my resignation, when I was passing through Westport, one of the friendly officers there told me that Judy had been sent out to do a “hatchet job” and was applauded for her execution.. At almost the same time as her report, there came another headquarters telex saying that Judy was returning to Somalia, without any description of her purpose. She did arrive, but we hardly saw her. She moved in with David our forester who had complained on occasion about his “lack o’ nooky,” in his cottage in the project area. One or two of my local staffers shyly told me that Judy had been seen several times in the halls of the large USAID mission. By some chicanery Judy had wrangled a SCF trip without any intention of helping with SCF. She was back to nail down a USAID job, to ride herd on the Somali government’s accounting for USAID projects, working under the very officer, Loren Waggoner, who later hired me on an evaluation job. Judy and I passed near Loren’s office a few times , with studied avoidance on both sides. Before David first came, his predecessor had purchased for the forestry project a number of donkey carts, minus donkeys, prime vehicles in this rural social and economic life. David seemed mystified and found no use for them, so they remained tilted up on their shafts beside the simple forestry office. I urged him to do something with the carts, or to give or sell them away. Nothing moved. When Max arrived, he apparently had authority to clean house, beside my resignation. When he found the donkey carts without an explanation from David, Max fired him on the spot. Something I would probably have had more trouble in doing. Since Judy had become well set up, with a USAID apartment and having had an intimate relationship with feckless David, he moved in with her, on her long term contract. One day as I walked to the USAID offices where I had a connection, I crossed paths with David, who was walking Judy’s fine looking German Shepard dog. He sort of veered away as I smiled at him. Judy, who was smart and sophisticated in the New York manner, kept David, a far narrower type, presumably as stud, for almost a year before throwing him out. On the very day of our own final departure while at the Mogadishu airport, there was equally sweaty David in the same hot processing queue. A Reluctant Guest of Honor . On the night before I left for the visit to the States to check on my mother, someone cooked up a going away dinner ‘for me’ with the SCF expatriates at a well regarded seafood restaurant on the waterfront, I suspect it was Sherese, who acted the impresario. I should have declined and certainly didn’t look forward to it. But Zee urged that attending was de rigueur. Once we were all seated, the conversation was hesitant and a little awkward. I tried to say something just to ease my discomfort, but mine and everyone else’s attenuated conversation seemed to fall flat, with periods of uneasy silence. After ordering, it was taking a long time for the food to arrive. I had been struggling with my powerful urge to escape, and finally I did, on some lame excuse. Outside I wandered for repeated distances on the crumbled sidewalk. I finally felt I could cope with returning, where the 10 or 12 at the long table were still rather quiet. But the food had just been served. I tried eating, but after a few bites, even that became overwhelmingly oppressive to the point where I excused another exit, to repeat the earlier meandering. Finally, Zee came looking for me and exhorted another return to the table. This time I lasted, uncomfortably, till the end of the meal and the group’s unceremonious dispersal. I should have felt relieved then, but my anxiety lingered and I felt the added shame of my exposed extraordinary behavior. Hanging on in Somalia Zee and I remained in Somalia for one year after I left SCF, with Zee taking a "local hire" job as a USAID secretary, and myself finding a mix of temporary consulting and fill-in jobs. Some fortuitous 'house-setting' for vacationing expatriates played a critical role in helping us through our children's school year at the Imani boarding school in neighboring Kenya, after which we promptly left Somalia. The stay in Somalia gave me a bystander's chance to observe a chaotic year for the SCF program in Somalia. Almost all of the Somali staff were close friends of ours and continued to help our family in occasional tight spots. (I will always think fondly of them for that.) I popped in to see Hashi from time to time. While still being paid by SFC, he seemed completely alienated, and I invariably found him sitting in a small room just reading from books he had piled on the desk. Some years after I had been out of Somalia, I came across a book about that period in Somalia, “The Road to Hell,” by Michael Maren, that included in detail an absolutely gruesome picture of events for some members of the expatriate SCF staff, as Somalia was falling apart – maybe connected with Zee’s earlier intuition that something was “not right” about Somalia. Once off the scene of decay, staying in touch with the Somali friends has of course proven impossible so far because of subsequent events there, but we are still hopeful of reconnecting with those who have survived. At least one close friend is known to have been killed. It May Have Been a Kindness? After the evaluation job for the USAID office, I took a three month consultancy to deliver a feasibility study on vocational training for Mogadishu's unemployed youth. My employer was the British NGO Action Aid, locally headed by an Indian chap attached to a young British lady friendly with us. On my first day there who did I discover as their accountant but Khadija. In this and other visits to that office we exchanged fraught smiles. Friends, Peggy and Loren . When I got back from my quick trip home to see how Mom was doing, I learned that Zee had met Peggy , the wife of Loren Waggoner a senior officer in the USAID Mission who had hired Judy. Not long after that we were invited to a dinner at their house. Loren fancied himself something of a master chef regarding exotic cuisine and maneuvered us to watch as he, with preening flair, prepared something special in a huge pot. (not special enough for me to remember what it tasted like). My successor at SCF had been named, a rather eccentric, bluff young man in his 30s. The mention of his name seemed to pain Loren, suggesting that their paths had crossed unpleasantly somewhere else. From that evening our families seemed generally pleased with one another. Since I was available, fresh out of work, Loren’s shop hired me to join a small team that was to evaluate the USIAD refugee programs for which NGOs were responsible. I would be responsible for writing up the evaluation. The job first took us to the Northwest province, with Hargeisa its major city. The locale of main concern was the huge slovenly organized camp with the many new arrivals just milling around on muddy, open ground at Tug Wajali on the Ethiopian border, near Boromo where refugees were pouring over daily. We understood that these nomadic people, ethnically similar to the Somalis, were being forced into a ‘villageization’ project of the then communist Ethiopian Govt. We spent one night in the town of Boroma and another under tenting. When we got back, for the write-up I was joined by a bright young USAID lad who made certain that my prose was shaped to bureaucratese. The SCF project at Qorioley was also to be evaluated, but SCF demanded that I not be in on that – an insult to my ability to be objective, but understandable. Loren had organized a little half mock, half serious country-western band of himself on guitar, two Filipino guitarists, an occasional keyboards man and a British drummer. Since the latter was a way for a few weeks, I became the drummer with the old kit that I have always dragged along. Among the songs we sang as a chorus – and I got a kick out of - were, “Red-neck Mother” and “Drop-kick Me, Jesus, Through the Goalposts of Life.” Loren would sing one or two old country ballads. The two Filipinos, one an unusually large, plump extrovert and the other a small crippled, extremely thin young man, did a few Simon & Garfinkle songs almost better than the originals. The little fellow was something of a virtuoso on the guitar. Most of the time we just play/practiced for our own amazement at the Waggoner’s nice house. But I remember three or four occasions where we played for expatriate gatherings. Several weeks after we had met, one night, rather late, Peggy called us to ask if we could come to their house. Loren had been unusually late and she was afraid about what might eventuate. We learned from Peggy that Loren had had “fall-down drunk” (his term) episode, and she was afraid of what Loren might do when in such a state. Sure enough, at about midnight, when Peggy asked me to answer the door knock, there was a totally sloshed Loren supported by an Indian man about half his size, who left promptly after getting the wobbling Loren inside the door. He stayed on his uncertain, meandering feet for a while, incoherently mumbling some curses I could make out as referring to my successor at SCF, who as best I could make out had once beaten up a drunken Loren - was it in Manila? In any case, Loren lurched through the rooms, quite bellicose. Peggy asked us to take Loren’s antique gun collection, fearful that Loren might do ‘anything.’ Following him into the kitchen, while he seemed attracted to the stove, I saw a large butcher knife on a counter and hid it behind my back for the same reason. Eventually Loren flopped down on the sofa and fell asleep muttering. Peggy must have seen Loren like this before and was frightened, afraid to spend the night alone in the house with him. After a discussion among us, it was decided that Peggy would go to our house with Zee, and I would stay behind with Loren. I sat up for most of the night in an easy chair facing Loren sprawled on the sofa. Toward morning I must have fallen asleep because I was awakened by the arrival of Peggy and Zee. Loren slowly awoke about the same time and seemed to have slept off his drunken episode, but was clearly badly shaken up. He still kept expressing anger and amazement at not clearly specified events of his ‘lost’ night. But he seemed tame enough, so after a while Zee and I left without much fear for Peggy’s safety. She seemed stoical about the situation. But when we checked with Peggy a few times soon after that night, she said that Loren had never quite settled down since and was behaving unsteadily. Zee and I took it upon ourselves to take our concern for the couple to the Ambassador, a gentle man with whom we had become on easy terms through his openness and social mingling. Our message, reflecting Peggy’s concern, was that Loren should be respectfully sent home to the US, and we described our observations and Peggy’s own decision. The Ambassador may have checked further with others, but shortly thereafter Peggy and Loren were on a plane to Nairobi, after a nice going away party. After my family was back in the States, we got a letter from Peggy, now also back in the States. She described the short flight to Nairobi, to transfer onward, as wonderfully full of fun, laughs, and hope between the two of them. But in Nairobi, Loren became ill and went into the hospital. During the night he died! We have stayed on a Christmas card notes basis with Peggy in Annapolis, where she goes on with her life as some sort of social worker. But never a reference to Mogadishu days. Farther Somalia For my very last job I had been asked to represent USAID for two months in what had once been the British Protectorate of Somaliland, in the far Northwest Province of the country, based on the main city of Hargeisa, which was heavily bombed later when Somalia spiraled into civil war and chaos, well after I had left. That very last job in the Northwest included the management of the US guesthouse in Hargeisa. I would have a separate house for dwelling. I was in effect the U.S. representative in the Northwest since I was the sole direct employee of the US government. Other Americans there were from NGOs and as were contractors for a military communications outfit. One memorable episode on this short tour involved my relations with General "Morgan" Hersi -- I knew him then only as General Morgan -- a son-in-law of dictatorial President General Siyaad Barre. Before I left for Hargeisa the our Ambassador urged me to make close contact with General Morgan who was just then to be sent to the Northwest to "calm" that disturbed region. (Well after I left, when Somalia was more completely falling apart, Hargeisa was reported as bombed to near dust.) Morgan arrived there shortly after me, and I promptly sought an audience. He was quite friendly and even tried to affect a somewhat American style -- he had received training at Ft. Riley, Kansas. Soon after that introduction, he sent a message asking me to round up the local foreign community of aid workers, most from United Nations agencies and several NGOs such as CARE. These formed a rather close-knit group, with a clubhouse of sorts and regular volleyball games. They were to be invited to dinner at Morgan's large official home in Hargeisa. This was done and some 20, mostly young, people attended. Once inside the house we saw no other Somalis beside the General and the meal servers. Aside from brief formal greetings, the youthful, camouflage-suited General said very little, just basking in his role as provider of a quite decent feeding and later of surprising entertainment. This last consisted of a long series of MTV videos -- Madonna, etc. -- which he seemed particularly proud to offer before us. Some of the young guests later chuckled over what they found to be: Wow! What far-out entertainment for that setting! A week later Morgan's young liaison-with-foreigners came to my office in the USAID guesthouse to ask, in the forceful Somali manner, that I write a brief speech for the General to deliver at a theatrical entertainment, with the foreign community as special guests, by the visiting Somali national dance and comedy troupe. With a sense of irony, I dashed off some unexceptionable phrases and sneaked in a welcome to the refugees who may eventually "settle among us." Without changing a comma, the speech was read out by the liaison man, since Morgan must have lacked confidence in his English elocution. A few weeks later I was back in Mogadishu gathering with my family for departure from that already sad if not quite yet chaotically self-destructive country. Its corruption and the smoldering political disturbance, which burst out into civil war shortly after our time in Somalia, can now be seen as part of the running difficulties we faced in dealing with the Somali officials and even with SCF’s major funder, the USAID. With the subsequent catastrophic events in Somalia, I can only wonder what traces remain of our work there. Chapter 13 Another Try at Belize In the Mangroves of Academe In the summer of l987 I had been in Belize a year without solid, continuous employment for my modest talents. Months earlier I had offered myself to the President, Dr. Colville Young , of the brand new University College of Belize (UCB) in its temporary (evenings) quarters in the old buildings of the Teachers Training School, but I was summarily discouraged. Then, in the fall, I met Dr. George Walker, who was the school's Vice President, the representative of Michigan’s Ferris State University, which had designed the UCB curriculum after its own, and promised a jointly underwritten degree for UCB graduates. Walker promptly signed me up as a part time Lecturer. Later I would become full-time. Near the end of the winter quarter, l987-88, Walker asked me what my wife, Zee, was doing. He had recently become acquainted with her first novel, "Beka Lamb." I noted that she had recently left her government job as the Director of the Women’s Department. She wanted to work on her second novel. Walker asked if Zee would be interested in a teaching position at UCB. He seemed excited over the prospect of having Belize’s internationally known novelist on board as a prestigious find. I put the proposition to Zee and she cautiously weighed it. She was far from bowled over by the prospect. I argued the favorable points as I saw them. She worried over not having any degree beyond the diploma in Journalism from her time in London at a polytechnic. And Zee felt that she must get a salary at least matching hers from government. Then started something approaching a courtship by Walker to get Zee hired. After some agonizing, the salary could be met, and he felt her lack of degree wouldn't matter in the light of her achievements. He even queried FSU headquarters and they assured him that she was indeed qualified for their purposes. Zee had expressed her concern so strongly over the possibility of problems arising later due to her lack of a formal degree, that she must have seemed to be rejecting the job offer, and Walker turned up the persuasion. Zee taught that last quarter of the school year and was asked by President Young, himself something of a Belize cultural icon, to act as Master of Ceremonies for the very first UCB graduation of four new baccalaureate achievers. Things were going swimmingly. A week before this first graduation, at a full faculty and staff meeting (of about 15) it was noted that an important detail had been allowed to slide until this late date; a Charter for UCB was needed in order for its degrees to have any formal standing, or recognition by the Government. A draft Charter had been lying dormant for some time, and it must now be quickly rushed through the Cabinet and the Assembly, but no problem was anticipated by the school's President. Teaching faculty asked if they might have some input on the Charter since they hadn't seen whatever draft existed. The President said that would be impossible since the Charter document was now confidential; it was in the hands of the Government of the day, for processing. Unhappiness was expressed by teachers over their exclusion from even access to the draft. How securely enshrined was academic freedom, among other questions? Both Walker and Young vigorously and dismissively allowed as how charters of colleges hardly mattered as substance, just a formality; and academic freedom itself was of little importance, a weightless slogan. As a meeting participant, I could hardly believe my ears! Teachers insisted on some assurance in the Charter for academic freedom. Dr. Young finally, condescendingly scribbled a short note with a phrase for inclusion in the Charter, vaguely recognizing academic freedom. Tossing the note to Zee, next to him, he said in effect: "There, does that satisfy you?" No one objected, but access to the whole draft was still wanted. The meeting ended less than amicably. Outside the meeting a knot of teachers huddled and shared their great unhappiness over the Charter process and unknown content. It was suggested, then urged upon Zee, as presumably the least vulnerable and perhaps most respected, that she arrange a meeting with the Prime Minister (PM) whose Government (Belize has a parliamentary system.) had so recently initiated UCB -- over the induced corpse of the preceding Government's effort at higher education -- to express concern over the Charter's content. One member of the huddle said, now, on a Friday, that he believed he could, very unofficially, get a copy of the Charter draft over the weekend if it and our amendments could be smuggled back into "proper channels" by the beginning of the next week for Cabinet consideration. The Cabinet was to take the Charter up on Tuesday. The graduation was set for the very next Friday! We got the smuggled draft Charter. Events became very compressed. Zee and I made some suggested changes in the draft, which apparently had not been much changed from the Charter of the school that the current Government had so recently trashed. We took the draft and our suggestions around to all the faculty members who seemed concerned and could be contacted. The Charter with our amendments was somehow spirited back into proper channels. The Prime Minister agreed to meet with a representative group of faculty on Wednesday, and he invited UCB's President Dr. Young, who declined to attend. We found five teachers, including Zee and I, who were willing and able (some excuses seemed feeble) to travel to the capital on Wednesday. Two would travel there with Zee and I in our Trooper. A third would be returning from a short visit to Miami and would rush from the airport to the capital as soon as possible; and she did arrive just before we were ushered into the PM's office, where his Cabinet Secretary was also seated. As we went to pick up a young woman teacher, an American who had married locally but since separated, we found her with her three children, extremely agitated. She said that she had just been visited by Dr.Walker, who made vague threats of consequences if she were to attend the PM's meeting. Zee and I were aware of her feelings of vulnerability (none of us had any security of employment) so we did not press her to join. But in the end she did. Apparently Walker had become aware of the PM meeting through Dr. Young who had begged off. Suspicions of something seditious were aroused in both of them. Our Charter suggestions, we learned from the Prime Minister, were all accepted by the Cabinet, and the PM himself added the welcome provision for representation on the governing Council of both the student body and the teaching faculty. The President and Vice-President were already on the Board, as well as representatives of the Government, other educators and a few leaders in the community. Our most important change in the Charter was elimination of provision for the very political position of Minister of Education to direct UCB policy at his will. This would now be the unqualified responsibility of the U CB Board -- as yet unnamed -- and the school officers. Other buttresses of academic independence were also accepted. The PM seemed to find the discussion with faculty stimulating, not standing on any ceremony, and we went on amicably into evening hours when all other government offices had long been emptied. I had to cancel my evening class at UCB. The very next day, Thursday, I waited for Dr. Young to arrive at his office, hoping to explain the nature and intention of our PM visit, and to make peace. He immediately expressed a controlled bitterness over our "process" while caring less about the actual Charter changes made, and he quickly ended any further discussion by passing on into his inner office. Zee called Young on her own later the same day and was similarly treated. For Walker and Young, Zee and I had become "trouble makers," or "thorns-in-the-side," in Walker’s phrase. At a last faculty meeting before that first graduation, Zee was elected to be the teaching Faculty Representative on the UCB Board. There were a number of unaddressed concerns of, and complaints by, the teachers, most importantly the lack of employment contracts. Zee regularly solicited their views and represented them in the new Council's meetings, which were held frequently because the College was still taking shape, and was felt to need micro-management by the nascent Council. That Friday evening the mini-graduation went off as well as could be expected. The school closed for the summer of l988, to open again in the fall. A few days after the graduation, Zee and I were at home when we were visited unexpectedly by a David Winston-Smith of a research institute in Panama. He had been seeking Dr. Young, but was told, wrongly, that Young was out of the country, and Winston-Smith was directed to Zee as someone who would be interested in his mission. This was to interest Central American and Caribbean area creative writers and scholars in attending a conference to be hosted by his organization. Smith noted that in past visits to Belize he had worked with or contacted two particular Belizean scholars. A few days later Zee sent W.-Smith's calling card to Dr. Young, with a covering note naming Winston-Smith's contacts in Belize. Although seemingly innocuous at the time, a time-bomb was planted by this episode. Just after the start of the next school year there occurred what seemed to be an effort to `get' Zee. Sylvia Cattouse, the politically `sent’ Administrative Dean, noted the small numbers enrolled in Zee's classes and arbitrarily posited a minimum number, just above these, required for continuing the classes and their teacher's employment. This fizzled out when it became clear that the size criterion was not intended to be applied to other teachers' classes of similar size. Early in that same fall quarter I informed my Applied Management students that they were expected to do term papers or projects. One, a mature business woman, proposed to take up a question out of the textbook, to do a SWOT ("strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats ") analysis of the student's own college or university. With some enthusiasm I told Wallace of this student project, feeling it might even help the fledgling UCB as well as give students, many of them adult working people, a sense of the school's management as listening to their views. Walker's response was minimal and neutral. .That project's student dropped my class for scheduling reasons, and another adult student, a civil servant, wanted to take over the same project. After some discussion I said OK. About one week later this second student handed me a paper just as class was starting, so I put it aside for later attention. After the class I went into the small room crowded with Walker, Ms. Cattouse, the bookkeeper, a secretary, duplicating apparatus and our mailboxes, UCB's temporary administrative heart. Walker and Cattouse seemed quite disturbed over something. This turned out to be copies of the same paper that my student had given me before class. It was a questionnaire related to her SWOT project. I now examined it for the first time and had to agree with them that the questionnaire was pretty crude and could use improvement, while they saw something subversive about it. At just that moment Bruce Wiegand, an American Fulbrighter, entered the room. He was teaching a class in Research Methods. I asked him if he might ask his students to critique the questionnaire as an exercise. He enthusiastically agreed since it fitted nicely with the current stage of his course; this planning was within clear earshot of Walker and Cattouse. Wiegand followed through and a number of useful suggestions resulted which I passed to my student. At this point, in November l988, I received word that my Mother, at 94, had died at the comfortable nursing home in Marinette, Wisconsin where she had spent the last three and a half years. I flew there the next day and, after arranging her requested cremation and a memorial service, returned to Belize one week later. Zee had some more bad news for me, but she tried to trickle it out gently. A Council meeting held during my absence had discussed my "undermining" of UCB’s leadership through a student's project. Zee, who was present as the Teachers' Representative, could only say that she was sure that had not been my intention, and she urged the Council not to act without a fair hearing for me. The sub-committee on Faculty and Staff would arrange for this. When it convened, with Dr. Young present as a member, I was given a respectful hearing to explain my intent and initial hopes for possible benefit for UCB from the textbook-set project, and how the second student had proceeded on her own to hand out her questionnaire, and even tried to interview Drs. Young and Walker along the lines of the questionnaire without my knowledge, and to their great irritation. In the upshot, the Council issued me a letter accepting my good, if misguided, intentions, but laying it down that in the future students were not to be encouraged by Lecturers to interfere with management of the school. Not long after that, Dr. Young sent a letter of resignation to the Council's Chairman, and a Council meeting was hurriedly called to deal with this development. There Dr. Young gave it out that his doctor had warned him that he was experiencing too much stress from his job, and that he, Young, never expected to be exposed to this level when he took the job. Sympathy was expressed, but on the latter matter he was mildly chided for not being realistic in his expectations. Young then read off a litany of episodes he felt were undermining his position and hence contributed to his stress. The culprits were not actually named but the listeners had no trouble deducing Zee and myself. The Council asked Young to reconsider his resignation, and he agreed. The matter was never raised again until Young's political party, that had appointed him, lost the next election in September l989. At the Council meeting Zee was so non-plussed that she hardly knew what to say. But feeling some sympathy for the ailing President, her one-time personal hero, and hoping to patch relations with him, she sought to catch up with Young on the street after leaving the meeting. She even twice called his name after him. But he seemed to move ever faster and beyond her speed until he reached his car and drove off. He later claimed that he had hurried in order to take his medication. In April of the spring quarter, l989, Zee received a call from Dr.Young's secretary to set an appointment for her with the President. When she was seated in his office, Young handed her an enveloped letter and asked her to open it. A few days earlier Zee had asked Young, among others, to write a recommendation for her in connection with her self-initiated application for a University of the West Indies (Jamaica) degree programme. He had hesitated to agree to do this. (All the other such requests were promptly honored.) Zee's best guess as to the import of the meeting, and now the letter, was that he had in fact now prepared the recommendation. Instead she found a letter of dismissal, effective as of the end of the quarter in June, for which there had been no forewarning. He asked her what she thought about what she had read. She said little more than that she felt wronged and would challenge the dismissal before the Council. Zee had initiated contact with the University of the West Indies through their Belize representative and started a process of qualifying for baccalaureate degree equivalence, eventually achieved, which would lead to her entering a programme for a Master of Philosophy degree. This could be followed without leaving Belize except for a few assessment visits to Jamaica. Walker and Young were of course apprised of this effort by Zee to upgrade her academic credentials when she asked Young for a recommendation. Earlier, when she was first hired, Walker had enthusiastically promised that Zee could achieve a Master of Arts degree through a Ferris State program to be essentially completed in Belize. But, as relations attenuated, the matter was never again raised by Walker. Instead of rushing to the defense of their chosen Representative, whose problems with management could be seen as resulting in large part from her efforts on behalf of her colleagues, the latter were studiously silent except for the teacher who had been threatened by Walker. She expressed private outrage and urged Zee to fight. I later asked a gathering of most of the teachers why they had not come to Zee's support since they did affirm their belief that her dismissal was based on personal enmity, with possible elements of literary envy. A young man who apparently spoke for the group said that they did not dare to risk similar dismissal, an experience he and some others had had when the previous start on a Belize baccalaureate-granting college was terminated upon a change in governing parties. News of Zee’s dismissal soon went abroad and the newspaper of the party opposed to Dr. Young's printed a large attention-getting cartoon showing Young hoisting Zee by the neck on a gibbet, with a fire nearby where her novel "Beka Lamb" was being burned. His lawyers must have been quickly mobilized because the same paper soon printed an apology under the caption "Not Qualified" which stated that Zee had been properly dismissed because her lack of academic qualifications in some way threatened the standing of UCB at this point in its development. Indeed, Angel Cal who had recently been appointed to the new position of Academic Dean, with Zee's strong support, had been given by Walker an excerpt from a pamphlet on US accreditation standards, which stated that, normally, university teachers should have at least the degree level which their students are pursuing. The fact that exceptions for equivalent achievement were not unheard of was not acknowledged. Cal, presumably hoping to calm the waters of possible faculty disturbance over Zee's dismissal, actually showed this excerpt around. Zee found it hard to forgive him for that. Since Zee felt entirely in the right, she sought an early hearing at the UCB Council. But this was felt by other Board members to be impossible because the Chairman was out of the country, and was to remain so for about one month. It has been a tradition for Belize's Prime Ministers to hold regular open-door "clinics" to hear constituents' concerns. Zee had decided to use every ethical opportunity to fight the dismissal, so we went to such a clinic held in a Spartan government health center, where we sat on bare benches most of a hot morning, waiting for our turn with the PM who had treated us so civilly over the Charter. The PM was now a different man, perhaps put off by all of the distressful stories he had handled before our turn, or already briefed from Dr. Young's perspective. The PM seemed hardly to hear what we were explaining. He only lit up briefly when he was reminded that Zee was contemplating a programme with the University of the West Indies, and he exclaimed, with rather pleased relief: "Well, so you will soon be going off to Jamaica for some time." Zee explained that the programme could be completed in Belize, and we argued that this initiative should be supported by her institution if academic qualifications were really critical at UCB. But the PM seemed again to be tuned out, and we left quite disappointed. Zee had also spoken to each of the individual Council members that she could reach, explaining her situation and the context for it. All appeared to respond sympathetically, implying support for her position. For one point, Young's dismissal of Zee was a violation of the Charter, since under it only the Council had the power of faculty dismissal. Out of concern for her students and a wish to retain her integrity, Zee continued to meet with her classes and carefully did all the resulting work until the formal end of the school year. The Council finally met in June to take up Zee's case. She later admitted that she had been quite tongue-tied there and made few points, even though we had gone over a great many that could have been persuasive. She had already explained her perspective to most of the individual members during the Council's hiatus, and she expected their support. But, too, although usually not at a loss for words, she acknowledges a character trait of sometimes tending to quietly withdraw from directly conflictive confrontations. This may have been governing her behavior during the hurtful parts of the meeting. Only one other person voted to support Zee on the confidential Council ballot eventually taken. It must have been a conservative bent to support the senior-most, hierarchically elevated person; let the merits of the case go hang. Zee and I were very shaken by this unexpected turn. Feeling that injustice had been served and that her good reputation might be unfairly tarnished, we considered our options to get broad public understanding of Zee's dismissal. We considered a press release, but were advised by a lawyer friend that this might be subject to prejudicial editing. So a paid, explanatory advertisement appeared in the country's two major newspapers (weeklies). Next came a painful dialogue between Zee and me, over whether or not I, too, should leave UCB. In the end I chose to stay, partly influenced by the need to sustain family income, meager as UCB salary was, but, perhaps, more importantly, to pursue my deep career motivation to contribute to the development of Third World countries where I have lived and worked; and here was an important new institution at a critical stage of building, at which I believed I could be helpful. Zee seemed to finally accept my decision, but in her heart, I later came to understand, she felt somehow betrayed. I decided in May l990 to take up a suggestion of UCB's new President-designate (on the verge of Doctorhood) Angel Cal to apply for full-time status. I was interviewed by a recruitment search panel, that included Dr. Walker, which seemed to agree that I should be appointed to full-time. But the lame-duck Dr. Young was still `on seat,' though in the process of being quietly eased out. His letter on my new status only extended my appointment until the end of that imminent summer quarter. I wrote Young a letter protesting this truncation, so contrary to the known recommendation of the search committee. Young's answer of justification was, to my surprise, circulated to the entire faculty -- and then so was my rejoinder. Cal assured me that my status would be regularized as soon as Young was gracefully deposed, and it was. As that school year was coming to an end and graduation was imminent, great concern arose among expectant graduates over rumors, later found to be based upon fact, that Ferris State was withdrawing their underwriting of UCB degrees. Again, events became compressed. Since a substantial portion, some 25, of the graduates felt they had not got satisfactory reassurance from UCB's administration, they made a foray to the office of the recently elected new PM, George Price, who was actually returning to a previously long held office. He finessed the issue with his long-honed skills, by promising to appear at a meeting the next night at UCB. He would bring his relevant subordinates and deal with the situation that had so disturbed the graduates-in-waiting. Just prior to that meeting in the UCB library, the graduates met to make their choice for the graduation's guest speaker. They chose Zee! A good part, from the beginning, of the rather boisterous meeting, for which the PM did not show up, was taken up by UCB and Ministry of Education officials in unsuccessful efforts to allay the graduates' concerns. Actually, the importance of Ferris State's underwriting of UCB degrees had been greatly exaggerated, but that's another story. It had been the promise-based and highly valued expectation of the students upon entering UCB. . The graduates' choice of Zee as their guest speaker had become known to Walker and Young, and they next at the meeting tried to argue that the students did not have final say on this matter. That was not acceptable to the graduates! Then Young claimed that Zee would not be appropriate because she was a" controversial" figure -- Zee, who had spoken, and was in demand, as guest speaker at several high school graduations. Young was asked why she was controversial. He answered that she had been dismissed from faculty for proper cause and had made a great fuss about it. The graduates' response was, in effect: "So what? We still would like her to be our speaker!" Now Young had to dig deep for a home-run (‘for six’!) reply. In apparent desperation he described an episode in which Zee had once, "disgracefully," informed him that two prominent Belizean educators were in contact with a touring `red' revolutionary. While neither Zee nor I were at that meeting, two students called us immediately after it to tell us of Young's charge. One of them actually promptly wrote down, at our request, his recollection of Young's words: "And another reason as to why Zee's service was terminated was because she wrote a letter accusing another staff member of being a leftist, of being a revolutionist. She not only wrote a letter, but various letters. And I have documentary evidence to back me up” A faculty meeting followed close after this eventful night. Unusually for Young, he was present, perhaps alerted to my far from secret intention to challenge his characterizations of Zee. I asked Young just how he had described Zee's concern for `reds-under-the-bed.' First, he went into a distorted version of her earlier dismissal and then repeated the charge that she had written him, shamefully, about two alleged Belizean revolutionaries, one of whom was a UCB faculty member, who were in contact with a visiting Central American radical. I asked him to produce the letter, and he tossed on the table a note which I had to agree was in Zee's handwriting. But the message was innocuous: "Dear Colville, . . . David Winston-Smith's card is enclosed. His contact at UCB is Joey Belisle and the other the University of the West Indies Representative, Joseph Palacio, a member of the Council. Sincerely, Zee." And Zee, in wildest imaginings, could never, as she avowed, have made the sort of reports that Young claimed, as will be more evident later. At that faculty meeting I was knocked off my wits' pins, partly because Zee had not recollected and told me about writing anything of the sort to Young, but also because the Young version was so incredible, and yet confidently delivered. Three days later, after collecting my thoughts, I addressed a long memo to all the persons who had been present at the faculty meeting. I challenged Young's version of Zee's dismissal, but did not dwell on that. But I did go into some detail on the ‘revolutionary’ Winston-Smith episode, noting how different and far from reality was Young’s tale, recited both to the graduating students and now to the faculty, and I characterized this as "Dr. Young's long stored-up, purposeful fantasy." This was quickly followed by a letter to me from Young, affirming that Zee had indeed "made serious allegations concerning Belisle and Palacio," and that I had in effect called the "President of the University College of Belize a liar." Without an immediate apology, he would recommend my dismissal to the Council. At least this time he was promising to follow the Charter prescription regarding dismissal. I wrote back, with the help of a lawyer's editing on Zee's advice, that I could not contradict my clear sense of the facts, and so could not apologize. I was, however, prepared to continue to work conscientiously for UCB goals and with him for as long as he was President. Zee reminds me that at this point she spoke to the new Minister of Education about my jeopardy, and he promised to "do something." Young had had a long lame-duck regime. It was well understood that with a new party of Government, he would be replaced. The new Minister of Education knew just whom he wanted to replace Young. But this worthy, with a cushy foreign-aided job, while not wanting to peremptorily say "No," stalled as long as possible, several months it turned out, before the Minister gave up on him and designated Dr. Angel Cal as President of UCB. Young asked the Council to meet promptly to hear his recommendation for my dismissal. That was done, but one or more people on the Council urged that I be heard at another meeting before taking any punitive action. I was called to a meeting two days later, on the 4th of July, an uncalculated but ironic twist, given my nationality. Cal who had by now been designated UCB President was out of the country for a few days, but had otherwise already been attending Council meetings as President. Again, I was given a respectful hearing, with Young glowering at me from across the Council room table. I gave my basis for challenging Young's tales that were clearly intended to darken Zee's reputation. The Council had already acted on his recommendation that Zee not be the graduation speaker. He apparently had already repeated to the Council members the tale about Zee's prejudicial informing on respected Belizean scholars, one of whom was on the very Council! At the Council meeting I was able to read from an unsent memo to Walker about the Winston-Smith visit -- unsent because Zee had already phoned Young about it -- where no hint of radical-hounding hysteria was to be found. I also had a copy of a column Zee and I had written for the newspaper of Young's own party, with which Zee's father had also been associated, arguing that cries by others over "Communists are coming" was both unrealistic and unconstructive. (It had not been printed, probably because the chief crier was prominent in the party.) Young was quiet throughout. After hearing me at length, and with very few, and those easily answered, questions, the Chairman dismissed me so that the Council could deliberate. Immediately after, I learned something about this deliberation from the Student Representative on the Board. I was to receive a letter with a mild wrist slap and a `go and sin no more.' The letter didn't come for almost three weeks, a period when Young was out of the country, returning the day before the date of the letter. Although it wasn't a dismissal, it had some strong censoring language, including reference to my "instigating students against authority." This last matter had not been explored at my `hearing,' so I felt it was wrongly rehearsed in the letter, and I said so. This was, in a way, a strange outcome. If the Council had believed I had falsely called Young a liar, then his tales on Zee were indeed true, and then, logically, I should have certainly been dismissed by the Council. If they believed my version, as seems to have been the case with my non-dismissal, then one must logically conclude that they believed Young had actually lied about Zee. Or perhaps they didn't know whom to believe! Or perhaps the Minister of Education, two of whose officers sat on the eleven person Council, had indeed `done something.' In mid-June Dr. Colville Young presided over his last graduation ceremony at UCB, having already been substantively unseated with Cal's designation. His Speech -- he was usually quite good at set pieces -- was quite remarkable in at least one respect. Young in effect apologized for having given a poor performance as UCB's first President, saying, in extenuation, that he had been assured by the leaders of his party, then newly in power, and bureaucrats of their persuasion, that he needn't trouble his hesitant self too much as President, because experts, presumably from Ferris State, would see that things ran well. In fact for quite a time, Walker did seem to be running the show. But Walker had steadily lost good will and credibility in the eyes of the faculty. He was even shorn of his Vice-President's title. After that, in April l989, he was denied, by a rare faculty vote, the new position of Academic Dean, which he sought, and into which Cal was voted, all at a stormy faculty meeting, at which Zee, as then teaching faculty leader, had a major voice. However, Walker remained the Ferris State representative at UCB for over a year longer. Young’s l990 graduation speech had even more dramatic accompaniment, perhaps influencing his mea culpa. Only Young, Walker, Cal, a few Council members and the leaders of the Government, had learned a few days earlier, and had closely held, the news that Ferris State wanted to immediately and completely withdraw from the co-dominion. Their own accreditation was at risk over this uncertified connection. And at the graduation itself, right in the front row, was a not inconspicuous team of reporters and photographers from a Grand Rapids, Michigan newspaper working on the story of this rupture. Their two full pages feature with color pictures appeared in Michigan a few days later, and copies quickly filtered to Belize. The graduates of the day and students once looking forward to the USA-bestowed distinction were greatly upset, confused, and in doubt about what a UCB degree may now mean. Enrollment for the next school year, l990-91, actually dropped while soaring in every year before and in the others after the thin year. After this graduation day bombshell, Walker disappeared, literally over night. It was later found that he had spirited away one of the UCB computers. Walker, the widely believed story went, had never been on the faculty of Ferris State, had not even visited there till well after he had been hired at long distance. An actual Ferris State faculty member, who had been their first representative, and briefly the Vice-President at UCB, was apparently anxious to leave Belize. He had discovered Walker `at liberty' as a result of his group of once friends breaking up their recreational cruise prematurely in Belize. And Walker's claim of a doctorate degree appeared valid. Aside from the Ferris State upset, the new Government that displaced Young and installed Cal had had their own earlier effort at a first degree granting college trashed by Young's Party, and it was widely suspected of intending to return the favor. Though some vague reassurances had been given Cal, there was widespread public expectation of a tit-for-tat plan, and this hung in the UCB atmosphere and worried its students for several months after the new Government was in place. In this new l990-91 year's sour climate, I privately urged the new Minister of Education to make the intention of support unconditionally clear, especially for anxious students and for prospective students. So now, well into the new academic year, the Minister came to address the student body with clear reassurances of his Government's recognition of UCB's own degrees and of the Government's essential support for the school's continuation -- which turned out to be not over-generous. Three more years passed before Zee and I left Belize, in l993, during which she had finished and launched her second novel, tutored at a writing workshop at Miami University, spent one semester as "Writer-in-Residence" at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, and was recruited for a full-time faculty position in the English Department at Kent State University. The latter arrangement was the reason for our leaving Belize. All the while before that departure, I worked away at UCB, eventually winkling out the title of Coordinator of Social Sciences. Then in March of l996, near the end of our third year in Kent State, Zee accepted an invitation from Belize’s respected Jesuit junior college, St. John’s, to give their prestigious Annual Lecture. While in Belize, Zee made other appearances, almost in the manner of a royal progress. On one grand occasion, Dr. Colville Young, who was now, with his Government back in power, the Governor General of Belize, sat on the stage in the supporting cast, for a time right next to Zee. Zee behaved as royalty should, with self-assured dignity, at least on the outside. The Trooper With a little money from the sale of our house in Menominee, we had scouted for a family car and found our desiderata in a two year old (l984) Isuzu Trooper II. This neat vehicle seemed just the right sort of car for Belize where we were headed after finishing a two and a half year stint in Somalia. Belize is Zee's homeland and I had spent over 4 years there earlier; two-plus as a single CARE Representative and later two more as a married man. Driving through Mexico this time wasn't as bad as some other trips (border and police harassment). We took the coastal route via Matamores, Tampico, Vera Cruz, and Villahermosa, and stayed at comfortable hotels in each of the latter three. On board beside our foursome family was all of the worldly goods we could stuff in and on top and a bike was strapped on the back. Belize became our home for seven years. For the first time 11 year old Randy seemed to flourish in his school experience through high school and into the post-high school Sixth Form of the inherited British system. Now he was active in sports and was elected class president for a year After a year Holly was off on a scholarship to Ferris State College and then to finish her degree at Michigan State University. She had been more or less drafted into the Miss Belize contest by the local Committee. Holly won the contest and the scholarship. But this set off a long series of stresses before Holly traveled to Singapore for the final Miss Universe contest. One was her ‘training’ by an American wife of a Belizean merchant, herself a self-certified former beauty queen, which seemed more upsetting than reassuring for 17 year old Holly. Then the Committee began harassing Zee and me to have Holly give up her US citizenship. She was, of course, also a Belizean by virtue of having been born there of a Belizean mother. But the Committee was angrily insistent and finally took up the matter with their own Party’s Prime Minister, who, to the Committee’s dismay, said that he saw no problem with the dual citizenship. By l986 it appeared that, by coincidence, Troopers were the cars of fashionable choice for the tout de Belize, especially Government Ministers. But after a routine repair by my local roadside mechanic (all in Belize City were on the roadside), Mr. Garbutt, our Trooper boasted a roaring exhaust noise, which no one could fix, nor could anyone later at garage and muffler shops on our next US trip. During summer school break in l988 we drove the roaring Trooper back through Mexico and visited some friends in New Mexico and Minnesota on our circuitous route to my mother's home in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Driving back to Belize, car crammed with possessions, I noticed some overheating. But this was at the end of the trip. Mechanic Garbutt made several tries at diagnosis and solution without much effect. But we didn't put the car to hard use for some time and I sort of wished the problem away. Some two or three months later we set out for the unusual house (no walls but large overhangs) of a transplanted American couple we knew, near the western border with Guatemala, some 90 miles from Belize City. We had hardly gone 10 miles when steam was coming from under the hood. Right here I made a fatal decision to press on while Zee counseled that we best turn back for home. I carefully removed the radiator cap, waited for some cooling and then poured in water. At three or four more points on the route west I did the same thing. The Trooper got us to our friends, coughing and steaming, and couldn't be restarted. We spent the night at the Hurleys. Zee and Randy next day took the early rural route bus (a repainted old US school bus) back to Belize City while I stayed to deal with a local (Benque Viejo) mechanic who pulled our Trooper to his shop. He found that the head gasket had been shredded and I had to get him a new one since his efforts to improvise came to naught. So I took the later bus back to Belize City and got a friend traveling to Miami to bring back the needed gasket. With this in hand I bussed back to Benque Viejo with 'the ‘solution.' I was disgusted to find that I had the wrong gasket. Again I arranged to get the right one from Miami, and the mechanic, with that one, declared the Trooper ready for action. I got in and drove as in the good old days for about 15 miles, where, at the village of Teakettle, a muffled explosion, well, exploded, and the car lost power. I tried to turn back to the mechanic's, but the car would die almost as soon as it was started. A passing beat-up truck stopped to help or out of curiosity and a couple of rustics, after some engine probes and tinkering, stroked their chins and threw up their hands. I asked if they could pull me back to the Benque mechanic and they towed me in. Now the mechanic after close examination decreed that the block of the engine must be cracked because water was getting into the oil, carburetor and spark plug recesses. So I decided to get the Trooper back to Belize City and asked the trucker who hauled me in if he could tow me, and he did for what must have been a good day's take, since I was too desperate to negotiate effectively. My city mechanic, Garbutt, who seemed relatively competent and trustworthy, decreed that I needed a totally new engine. Now the car lay for several weeks on the street side along with others in process, or was pulled into his open sided shed when the police occasionally decided to warn that street-parked cars were against the law at that location. Dealing with a supplier in Miami by phone was agonizingly drawn out since it took several calls and three shipments before all the necessary parts were sent. Fortunately, Zee's sister Laura's husband had a shipping business in coalition with a Miami container shipper, and he could help get the stuff to Belize. After several months of borrowing cars and taking taxis, I was back in the driver’s seat, in a manner of speaking. Many pretty, scarce pennies had been required. And now, miraculously, the exhaust roar was gone, without explanation. The car still tended to run hot. Garbutt had several tries at solving the problem, but in vain, and we lived with it, gently, for a year or so. Then, one Friday afternoon the fairly new helper (They seemed to turnover fast.) of mechanic Garbutt came by the house as I sat on our veranda and said that he could take the car back to the 'shop' for the completion of some repairs started earlier that day, and this would save me the trip. This helper, one Harrison Garbutt, a shirt-tail relative of the mechanic, had seemed one of the brighter in the series of helpers, and had in all recent encounters been well-spoken and helpful. . He had at other times brought the car back to me, and his present proposal seemed unexceptional. The Trooper wasn't returned before nightfall and I assumed that they were to complete whatever repairs on Saturday. morning. But that Saturday afternoon Mr. Garbutt called me to say that he had seen his helper, whom he had fired on Friday, driving around in our car. Garbutt felt somehow responsible and was as helpful throughout as he could be. I called the police, not particularly known for their crime solving, and gave them vehicle information and a description of Harrison. They expressed surprise because, they said, car theft was at that time an entirely new crime in Belize. In the course of that Saturday two or three friends called to say they had seen our car being driven about. Daughter Holly's boyfriend at the time later told me that he had seen the trooper Friday evening parked in one of the poorer part of the city and although wondering what one of us could be doing there, didn't immediately try to contact us. With each one of these sightings, I relayed the information to the police who didn't seem overly concerned. Zee's mother, one of the town's respected matrons, even called the head of the police, a family friend, to emphasize our pained circumstances. On Sunday when Holly's boy friend showed up, we learned of his sighting, and he suggested that we borrow a car, Zee's mother's it turned out, and he would go with me through some of the rougher parts of town, where crack was a common commodity and in which he claimed to have some renown, to get on Harry's trail. Garbutt had told us Harry had been fired for 'messing around with crack' and that he was a definite 'crack head,’ whom, as a relative, he tried to help with a job. At groups of street boys we got tales of Harrison's Friday and Sat nights rambles with the Trooper, in which he would drive these very pals around if they would pay for the gas. We were even told where Harrison had parked the car on these two nights/mornings. Well, not surprisingly, he and the car were no longer there upon our Sunday checking. Someone told us a few days later that they had seen the car on Sunday, being driven away from town on the Western Highway. Days ran into weeks and we got stories from time to time, from Garbutt, among others, that Harrison had been seen; first in Dangriga, at the end of the Hummingbird Highway, l50 miles away to the south on some stretches of badly decaying road; then in San Ignacio to the west, not very far from where the Hurley's lived. Again, the police were informed at every word of this sort, but they were truly clueless and seem to have put no effort into the hunt. On the Dangriga possibility, I borrowed the vacationing Peace Corps Director's little Suzuki and sailed off with Garbutt and an off duty Police constable from Dangriga, the latter almost certainly expecting a tip for his pains, who professed, and exhibited a confidence that he could track down the culprit. No luck there. Then some furtive word came about Harrison's being sighted on more than one occasion on the roads near western San Ignacio. Garbutt and I drove first to a popular drinks and food oasis about half way to San Ignacio, where the two young American women behind the bar said, of course, they knew Harry who had been a fairly frequent presence there. They seemed to know that he was also in recent times a man about San Ignacio who had gone to the Saturday night dances at the Blue Angel. So Garbutt and I went on to San Ignacio where we picked up a constable form that station and waited till the Blue Angel opened, well after dark. We parked where we could watch the entrance and not be easily seen ourselves. The crowd pressing on the freestanding lady ticket seller and taker seemed to be all but overwhelming her, but she firmly stood her ground. The crowd at the entrance was so teeming, and continued so for hours after opening the grilled gate, that we could not be sure that Harry hadn't got in. After about two hours we gave up sitting in the hot humid night, and with the policeman as my bona fides, I passed, without a ticket, through the narrow and still crowded entrance. The policeman stayed near the entrance while I mounted to the Graham Greenesque, barn like, dimly lit dance hall -- with a live band -- and drinking arena. Since it was quite dark inside, it was necessary to move close and peer at people to have a chance of any certain identification. In any case, I wandered slowly around the sizable perimeter where most people were seated when not dancing. But I, a fairly tall, old white man, must have appeared so strange, even ominous in this dingy den, as I searched for Harrison, that I am sure that if he were ever there that night, he would surely have known about me in time to make himself scarce. After that fruitless meander, my gumshoes and I decided to visit some of the smaller bars and other shops that were open and where Harrison might be known. Some people had indeed seen someone like him, but not this day. Frustrated, but with so much time and travel invested already, I decided to have another roam through the dance hall, but with no better luck than before. After about three weeks of no noticeable action by the police, despite frequent and what I sensed to have now become for them annoying phone calls, we placed a radio announcement of a reward for leads in recovering our Trooper. Earlier a local television station interviewed me on our lawn about this strange sort of crime for Belize. I think it was the very same day of the radio announcement that a young man called from a village, Esperanza, not far from San Ignacio to say that he had seen our car. We still had the use of the Suzuki of our vacationing friends, and so asked where we could meet him, and be led to our vehicle. . He identified a Mennonite or some other religious community's compound some 70 miles west of Belize City, and Zee and I were off like a shot. But before that we called the police, again, about this development, and it was agreed that constables from the San Ignacio branch would come to meet us and observe developments. Our man was not at the place agreed upon, perhaps he felt that we were not serious about a meeting, but someone there told us where he lived and we found him at home. At about the same time a San Ignacio police twosome arrived, apparently not too sure of why they were so ordered. Our Creole informant, a Mr. Wagner, led all of us a short distance down and in from the highway to a group of shacks and sheds, not entirely erect, housing an old tractor or two and other dilapidated farm machinery. We passed through the area of the sheds, and there stood our Trooper, by itself in some tall grass. Its radio had been torn out. The spare tire and wheel were gone, the battery removed, and the engine's head was off and in the rear part of the car. Otherwise it seemed intact. Even some small tools were still there. We asked some local people who owned this land and the things on it. They said an American, I believe his name was Irving, who had his home nearby, and to there we repaired. We found a large 50ish, unkempt white man with a southern US accent and his small local mestizo 'wife.' Inside his gate on the main road we saw a, disorderly wonder world of old furniture, toilet apparatus, car parts, and god knows what else that would appear to have been salvaged from junk piles, or more likely was in some part stolen goods. And kindred miscellanea lined the long veranda that led to Irving's very rumpled 'office' where we found him in soiled undershirt and trousers. He said he had paid B$1000 (US$5oo), a bizarrely low price for a still good looking version of the prestigious Trooper, even if it was as we found it. Irving showed us the bill of sale where Harrison had forged my name, very crudely, and his description of the seller fitted our man. He even showed us Harrison's calling card with my name in a badly botched effort which should have stimulated some suspicion in Irving if he was half-way scrupulous. Of course, he assured us, that the “preacher” had vouched for Harrison and his assumed identity. And who was he to question a man-of-god? The story, as best we could assemble it, seemed as follows: Harrison was known to an American preacher-man in San Ignacio, who trained local boys in auto and farm mechanics in the area where we found the Trooper. Harrison must have made known his need, probably for buying crack, to sell this car, but the preacher should have suspected something fishy in Harrison owning such a car. It must have overheated and so harmed the engine to the point where it shut down, and it had first been parked in an open shed alongside the highway before being hauled to this final resting place. The preacher led Harrison to Irving and the deal was made. Interesting to note, the policewomen then in charge of the San Ignacio police station later told us that she had noticed the Trooper several times while in its open shed when she made duty trips up and down the stretch of Highway in her charge. Apparently she had no notice from police channels that such a car may be stolen and that the culprit was most likely in her area of responsibility. After the colloquium at Irving's compound, the two constables tied our trooper to their vehicle and pulled it to their station with me steering at the end of a chain. The constables hanging around the station were rather surly until their lady Chief arrived and had me write a statement on events as I understood them. Then Zee and I returned to Belize City, without the disabled Trooper, left impounded at the police station where it must stay for about one week for some reason. Exactly a week later I called and was told we could pick up the Trooper. Since Garbutt had always been concerned, I asked if he could help by towing our car from San Ignacio. I promised to pay for his gas. One day later he was ready with his large van for the journey of some 75 miles to, and, then towing, fro. At the San Ignacio station Garbutt and a reputed ruffian cop had words outside my comprehension before we were allowed to leave. Their lady chief had been transferred somewhere else in the short meantime. While towing me back to Belize City the chain in use came disconnected two or three times and we stopped to reconnect. On one such stop a car passed us and then stopped. It was the head of the national police, a handsome, dignified Creole who, I learned, was on the verge of retirement. Garbutt recognized him and nudged his identity to me, since I had only spoken to the gentleman by phone. The Chief recognized me and/or the car, but didn't seem aware of the recent recovery developments. He was congratulatory and seemed relieved as if his force's police work was central to the case. This plot was unwinding shortly before the date when our family was looking to departure from Belize for an expected job for Zee at an American university, so I was anxious to sell the car, after getting it in working order and perhaps painted. Garbutt now had a new helper seemingly actually quite competent at auto mechanics, named Carlos. Although jolly and straightforward in my perception, he seemed to have already, at perhaps 30, been involved in his native Mexico and in the USA in a variety of extra-legal activities which were made picaresque in his chuckling telling. In the repair at Garbutt's of the Trooper, Carlos seemed to be handling it more or less on his own, and the car was in and out of Gartbutt's shop. At least the engine head was damaged and Carlos claimed to have found the replacement. With the Trooper still needing tinkering for full health, from this point I dealt with Carlos who had set up on his own in another part of town with which I then became quite familiar. The car still seemed to easily over heat. But I again got foolish and tried to drive the 50 miles to Belmopan, the national capitol in central Belize, for a meeting at the new Junior College off-shot of the University College of Belize. I managed to reach, if steaming and a little late from stops to cool off and apply water to the radiator. Coming back was the same story, even a little worse and at the entering edge of Belize City the Trooper just gave up. I pushed it to the side of the road and went to look for Carlos who lived nearby. We managed to get the car towed to Carlos's where by some legerdemain and a sealing compound of some sort for the damaged engine block and head, he got the Trooper functioning well enough for our in town needs. At this point Carlos got interested in the sale of our Trooper, and I promised him a commission. He claimed to have some interested parties and suggested that we paint it, and so we did. None of his leads panned out, and I eventually sold the car to the Director of Public Prosecutions who wanted it for his wife, who had been a student in several of my classes at UCB. He had his mechanic drive and check it out, and got his positive assessment. What a sigh of relief I sighed, since I wasn't at all sure that the car was in full health. During these last few weeks, Carlos asked me to stand as a godfather for his new son, Delroy. Carlos beseeched me to accede since he didn't know anyone else so respectable, and he emphasized that this would not involve me in any long term responsibility as would be the case in most mestizo godfatherings. So I dressed up and played my role on the appointed day, and presented a B$50 check for Delroy. We actually delayed our departure for a few days so Zee could vote in the July national elections which did turn out one bunch of rascals. Shortly before our family left Belize in the summer of l993, I was asked by a police official to come to the Belize City station at a specific time to identify a young man who seemed to be the one who had enjoyed our Trooper for a time. I appeared at the appointed time, but was told that the officer in charge of this identification was not there and I was asked to wait, which I did for most of the morning. But being quite familiar with a certain Belizean attitude about reliability in such matters, I had brought along some student papers to grade. After a good two hours in this mode, I was asked to follow a Constable to where the accusable cad might be. What a sight met me! I was brought into the bowels of the station and led to what might have rivaled the "Black Hole of Calcutta," a pen which I later learned was familiarly known as the "pisshouse," an almost flattering designation. At least a dozen men were crowded into a small dark cell that probably had been designed for two detainees. When I was presented with this scene and had got my eyes accustomed to the deep shade, I was aware that most of the prisoners had anxiously rushed to the barred opening as if expecting some benefit or even release. There, hanging to the rear was our Harry, who unfortunately for him was the tallest encaged, with a baseball cap pulled low over his forehead and apparently attempting to distort his face. I identified him and soon was excused. I left Belize within a few weeks and never heard of what happened to Harrison Garbutt. But I did hear that in another case, such identification was not valid because there had not been a proper "lineup," which my involvement certainly wasn't. Afterword Reflections from a Distance Looking back on my 3rd World ‘aided development’ career, I see that I never was on a position to weigh the choice of jobs. I was not in demand, as periods of unemployment confirm. So when a job was offered, I took it without careful thought or bargaining on all the probable conditions that I and my family would face. I suppose I never had a job in which I was completely comfortable. Of course, Zee was ready for almost anything ‘overseas.’ This suggests a kind of desperation. But beyond that, each offer was wishfully viewed as a new adventure and even with optimism; or was it just relief, willfully forgetting past experiences of deep self-doubt and outsiderness, particularly once in new cultural-political surroundings. None of my field performances would be seen as star quality by conventional standards of the Development Set. Although I personally felt elements of pride over affects and effects on lives in most projects, and on the lives of certain local staff members, even perhaps in the lives of some Peace Corps Volunteers. None of my felt project successes were of the sort – or luck – to rivet the trade. Of course I was not often applauded for being a devil’s advocate – only rarely acknowledged as an “idea man” – at odds with policies and practices of my organizational superiors who often seemed overly short term, shallow and at times shamefully cosmetic. My relatively uncharismatic, skeptical personality didn’t thrust me forward. The paradox of welcoming adventure and then experiencing anxiety, even brief paralysis, in its midst is hard to explain except as a then unrecognized misfit between the self-ideal and the biological intervention in carrying out the desired behavior. Oddly, while uncomfortable, anxious and escape-driven in realistically low or no pressure group situations, at other times in high level encounters I performed at my optimum, as in meetings with the heads of then Somali National Refugee Commission,. the UCB Council and top officials in Nigeria/Biafra, Turkey and Afghanistan. Of course I was a central participant in those cases, not just present. So my ‘career’ as an international do-gooder ended in 1993 when Zee took up her teaching post at Kent State, where after a year I caught on there as an adjunct instructor.