RPCV Photographer Nathan Fitch (Micronesia 2004–06) works as the studio manager for a National Geographic photographer, and is also a photographer with a brilliant new show —  “Double Vision” — that is currently at AS220’s Main Gallery, 115 Empire St. in Providence, Rhode Island.

Nathan writes, “The “Double Vision” show came out of my interest in working with people with disabilities and in the arts.”

A while back Nathan was looking for an organization with which to do some volunteering when he found Top Drawer Art Center, a nonprofit visual art center providing art programs for adults with developmental disabilities. By chance they had a part time job they needed to be filled. During the nine months he spent at Top Drawer he took photographs of the adults as they worked, and he started thinking that a show might evolve from the photos. “Rather than only having my outside perspective upon the center, I wanted to give each artist a say in representing him- or herself.”  So after he left Top Drawer and moved to New York, he began to send prints of his portraits back to Top Drawer so that the artists could each draw, paint on, or otherwise embellish the photos of themselves. Nathan then paired his portraits with the artists self-portraits to  create a dynamic interplay within each set. The result is Double Vision. Nathan says: “Basically, the artists at Top Drawer are a very interesting group of special and talented people who are doing work that deserves to be seen.  The show is about and for them.

The show runs through Saturday, September 26, 2009. The website for Top Drawer is: http://topdrawer.squarespace.com/

Neil Sagebiel, the editor of the wonderful blog Armchair Golfer just published this short piece I wrote for him on Arnold Palmer. Here it is, story about the King.

The iconic Palmer brought golf to the masses (and breakfast table).

By John Coyne
Special to ARMCHAIR GOLF

GOLF MAGAZINES THIS PAST month were filled with remembrances of Arnold Palmer on the occasion of his 80th birthday.

I read Boo Weekley’s account in the September 14, 2009 issue of Golf World about how Arnie said he always signed an autograph so people could read it. It reminded me of seeing Palmer at the PGA Championship at Congressional Country Club back in the ’70s. Arnold was coming into the press room for an interview and was stopped by a 10-year-old for an autograph, and I watched as he carefully wrote out his full name for the young boy.

However, the best story I have heard lately comes from a former caddie at Tam O’Shanter Country Club in Chicago back in the last days of the famous World Championship staged in the ’50s by George May. Researching a novel about Tam during those glory days of early golf tournaments in Chicago, I have been in touch with a number of former caddies who worked at Tam.

A Palmer Caddie from Yesteryear

The following account of Palmer comes from Ted Born, who lives and teaches today in Denver. Ted recalls his brief looping days with Arnie-before Palmer was Palmer.

Ted writes:

“In 1957, when the All American and World Championship tournaments were held during consecutive weeks, I was in a National Guard summer camp until the Sunday of the last round of the All American. I decided to bike out to Tam on Monday to see if I could get lucky. Freddie Seibel, the caddie master said yes, he had a bag for me and it was Arnold Palmer. He stressed that it was Arnold and not Johnny Palmer, who was also a touring professional during that era. Arnie had won a few tournaments to that point, but he really burst onto the radar the next year when he won his first Masters. I asked about Arnie’s caddie during the All American, did he get sick or injured? No, Freddie replied, Arnie had fired him. Why? I asked. Because he lacked enthusiasm, replied Freddie. Then and there I decided that I would be enthusiastic.

“I caddied practice rounds for Arnie on Tuesday and Wednesday before the start of the World’s and I will never forget the first drive I saw him hit. Arnie hit down on his drives so the ball took off like a 747. One hundred yards out it was 10-12 feet off the ground and rising!

“During the tournament, Arnie changed balls every three holes, using six new balls a round. After three holes the soft ball would go out of shape, so changing balls frequently was a must.

“I didn’t read greens for Arnie, but gave him a lot of help with distance and club selection. In that regard, I distinctly remember my ‘mistake’ on the 71st hole, the uphill 17th. Arnie had about 145 yards to the pin with an out of bounds fence immediately back of the green. Arnie pulled a 7-iron out of the bag and asked me for confirmation. Granted, it was uphill, but this was 27-year-old Arnie, as strong as a bull! He already had the club in his hands so, of course, the caddie has to tell him how to hit it. I avowed that it was not a full 7 (it wasn’t). Arnie eased up on the 7, and when we saw the ball on the green short of the pin, Arnie turned around and gave me a ‘look.’ 72 holes and I had one mess-up.

“After the second round Arnie was at 140, and he was upset. I explained that 280 would probably win the tournament (and it did, Dick Mayer won, the same year he won the U.S. Open). Unfortunately, Arnie finished 74-71 for 285 and won $1,500. He paid me 5 percent, $75 for six days of work. Caddying for members, I would have made $120 during those six days. I found out later that Arnie always paid his caddie 5 percent, which is why he had trouble hanging on to a caddie later in his career.

“I remember meeting Winnie and their infant oldest daughter as I loaded his clubs into the trunk of the Cadillac he was driving at the time.

“I have been in contact with Arnie since. I sent him the number he had to wear on the back of his pants during the World’s. That was May’s idea, so the spectators could more easily identify the players. In return, Arnie sent me several autographed Cherry Hills scorecards, one for me and one for each of my four children. He also sent an autographed copy of his personally published book commemorating his win in the 1954 U.S. Amateur. He is a great guy. He is 80 this month and I hope he has many more years of golf ahead of him.”

Many have Arnie stories, but few had the opportunity to spend a week working for the man. That’s a caddie’s life.

John Coyne is the author of The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan and The Caddie Who Played with Hickory. Learn more at John Coyne Books.

This morning on NPR Garrison Keillor, as a part of his writer’s almanac series, honored Peace Corps and read part of Kennedy’s speech in Ann Arbor, MI.  Click the link here for the text or option to download the audio. http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/

Kennedy first spoke about the idea of a Peace Corps in his final weeks of campaigning for the presidency. At 2 a.m. on October 14, 1960, after a long day of campaigning, the young senator stood on the steps in front of the student union at the University of Michigan. The journalists had gone home, thinking that nothing more would happen that day, but 10,000 students remained, hoping to see and hear Kennedy. He gave a short speech, in which he said:

“I think in many ways it is the most important campaign since 1933, mostly because of the problems which press upon the United States, and the opportunities which will be presented to us in the 1960s. The opportunity must be seized, through the judgment of the President, and the vigor of the executive, and the cooperation of the Congress. Through these I think we can make the greatest possible difference.

“How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, but on your willingness to contribute part of your life to this country, I think will depend the answer whether a free society can compete.”

Within two months of taking office, Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps. Then, on this day, Congress authorized the executive order that Kennedy had signed, creating an agency whose purpose was “to promote world peace and friendship” by making available to interested countries American men and women “qualified for service abroad and willing to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help the peoples of such countries and areas in meeting their needs for trained manpower.”

Since the start of Peace Corps, 195,000 volunteers and trainees have served in 139 countries. Currently, there are more than 7,800 volunteers (60 percent of whom are female) serving abroad in 76 countries.

[Coming soon on this website will be a new blog by David Searles, Remember the '70s, as we fill in some missing years in the history of the Peace Corps. David is the author of one of the important books on the  agency,The Peace Corps Experience.   Welcome, David! We look forward to your stories and observations.]

P. David Searles served three years as the Country Director for the Peace Corps in the Philippines (1971-74), and two years at Peace Corps headquarters as Regional Director for North Africa, Near East, Asia, and Pacific (NANEAP) and as Deputy Director under John Dellenback (1974-76).

His career has included periods during which he worked in international business, government service and education. After service in the United States Marine Corps (1955-58) Searles worked in consumer goods marketing and in general management positions in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Latin America. His business career was interrupted by a brief stint as a high school teacher (1969-71), the Peace Corps experience noted above, and four years as Assistant Chairman and Deputy Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts (1976-1980).
 
Following the end of his business career in 1990 Searles earned a Ph. D. from the University of Kentucky (1993), and published two books: A College For Appalachia (1995) and The Peace Corps Experience (1997), both by The University Press of Kentucky.

David and his wife live in Owensboro, Kentucky.

As the Peace Corps approaches its 50th anniversary, the service program is at something of a crossroads. The agency never fulfilled President Kennedy’s dream of sending 100,000 Americans abroad every year, and it has been criticized for parachuting too many inexperienced college grads into development jobs they aren’t prepared for. But friends in Congress have secured a 10 percent budget increase for the Peace Corps, and some of the agency’s boosters are hoping for more soon.

Enter Aaron Williams, a volunteer in the Caribbean in the late-1960s who has now returned to lead the agency. He spoke to NationalJournal.com’s David Gauvey Herbert about putting a price tag on the Peace Corps experience, the dangers of tying the agency too closely to American foreign policy and his own experience in the Dominican Republic.

NJ: You served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic from 1967 to 1970. What doors did it open for you?

Williams: Well it gave me a view of the world. I had never been on an airplane before the Peace Corps. First time I’d been on an airplane, first time I’d been in a foreign country, obviously. And to have a chance to learn a foreign language, to work cross-culturally, to really see the world from a different perspective. Peace Corps opened all those doors for me. And I always had the interest in going back into international development.

NJ: You may have read a report from Sen. Patrick Leahy’s office that it costs $50,000 a year to put a Peace Corps volunteer in the field but only a few dollars for life-saving measles medication. Do you think it’s right to be running these cost-benefit analyses when you’re talking about a development budget that is limited?

Williams: I think that the United States, as the leader in the world in terms of international assistance, it’s important that we have different kinds. The Peace Corps plays a special role because we’re the person-to-person humanitarian assistance. It gives Americans an opportunity to serve and it gives the people of many nations the opportunity to learn more about Americans. And I don’t think there’s ever any substitute for that.

Citizen diplomacy is an important aspect of America, it’s what we always do, whether it’s through churches, or volunteers organizations, NGOs, universities, high school exchanges, all this is important. And Peace Corps is a formal, targeted way of giving Americans the opportunity to do this.

NJ: You spent two decades at USAID. How will that experience help you now that you’re back with the Peace Corps?

Williams: I’ve seen the developing world close up for many, many years, starting out as a Peace Corps volunteer. And I understand all aspects of development, I’ve worked on all the continents, I’ve worked with NGOs, I’ve worked with the private sector, I’ve worked with governments. So I have a real keen understanding of what international development is all about, what it looks like, what it takes to be effective.

NJ: What do you make of the criticism that the U.S. shouldn’t be sending volunteers to countries like Fiji, Vanuatu and Cape Verde because the U.S. has no strategic interests there?

Williams: Many, many countries are interested in having Peace Corps volunteers serve there. Since President Obama was elected, the reengagement of America in the world is enormous and there are extraordinary opportunities, and we’re going to continue to look at a wide range of countries. You need to look at couple things. First of all, where are there countries that desire Peace Corps volunteers? And also, what about U.S. interests? I’m going to look at both sides of that equation.

NJ: A wide array of abroad service programs have sprung up that weren’t around when the Peace Corps was founded. Do you feel like you’re competing to the best and the brightest?

Williams: I hope we are vying for the best and the brightest, absolutely, all the time. We want the best coming to the Peace Corps. I think that’s also good for our country that there are many, many opportunities for people to serve because everybody isn’t going to go into the Peace Corps….

But I think that because we offer this wonderful, and in most instances, unique opportunity to serve in a very structured way, the Peace Corps will always remain strong and will have a chance to recruit Americans with interest in serving abroad. Right now our applications this year are up 12 percent, and we’ve got 14,000 applications for 4,000 slots.

NJ: What do you attribute that jump to?

Williams: First of all, I attribute it to the fact that the president has called on Americans to serve. We’re one of the president’s two signature initiatives in national service, the other being the National Corporation. I think that Americans are interested in serving, they want to know more about the outside world. It goes back to my earlier point that, as a nation, we’re more service-oriented than we have been in the last 30 or 40 years. All of this bodes well for Peace Corps.

NJ: There been a push for older volunteers in recent years, and now 14 percent of your volunteers are over 30. The advantages older volunteers are obvious, but don’t older volunteers contradict one of the stated goals of the Peace Corps, that your experience informs your career for decades to come?

Williams: I would think that, actually, an American coming back who has had that kind of positive experience, whether you’re 25 or 55, I think it’s equal…. Whenever a Peace Corps volunteer comes back home, they’re going to play an important role in their community just by the nature of their experience.

NJ: I spoke with former Sen. Harris Wofford [a founding member of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy administration]. He takes issue with Sen. [Christopher "Kit"] Bond’s vision for the Peace Corps as a tool of American soft power, particularly in the Middle East. Wofford worries that linking the program with American foreign policy, no matter how benign, may hurt its credibility around the world.

Williams: I think not only is that Sen. Wofford’s view, it’s also Sargent Shriver’s view and it was also Kennedy’s view, and I stand by that. It’s been a successful way of viewing the Peace Corps for nearly 50 years.

NJ: What’s your 20-second pitch for why a college graduate should spend two and a half years toiling in Uganda teaching English? [Pause] Go. [Laughter]

Williams: Only 20 seconds? You’re so generous. I thought it was going to be 10 seconds. [Laughter]… It’s a unique opportunity to find out what you as an individual can contribute to the community that you are involved in overseas. It’s a very structured environment, you’re going to get the best possible training, whether it’s cross-cultural or linguistic. You’re going to have an opportunity to work with people who care about the issues and programs you’re working on….

And then when you come back, you’re going to be better prepared for the rest of your life because of that experience. I think this is unique. There’s no better time for us to serve our country. We’ve got President Obama, who’s asked us to serve, we have opportunities to serve, and Peace Corps is a wonderful channel for that.

Tina Thuermer (Zaire 1973-75) grew up in India, Africa and Germany, and was at the airport in Ghana in 1961, aged 10, to greet the first Volunteers who arrived to serve there.  That inspired her to join the Peace Corps after she finished college at Bard. She served as a PCV English teacher at a Protestant mission in Zaire after only  two weeks of pedagogical training. Today, Tina teaches journalism and Theory of Knowledge at the Washington International School in Washington D.C. and is considering rejoining the Peace Corps when she retires, assuming she can ever afford to retire.

Having read about PCVs and what they are reading (or read) on this website, Tina sent me the following account of  her reading time in Zaire, back in the day.

 One of the wonderful things about being in Peace Corps back in the day was that without the internet, a phone, TV, or even mail, one was left with a lot of time to do things like bake bread, sew clothes from scratch, learn to make yogurt, write the Great American Novel, drink copious amounts of beer, sleep 12 hours a day and, in particular, read.  Based in Zaire as an English teacher (with no qualifications) from 1973 to ‘75, and being a reader of at least three books a week, I look back on my time there with wonder at how I managed to feed my habit.

Books were in short supply in this French-speaking country no matter what, but books in English were particularly hard to come by, especially if you lived in a village.  At first I resolved to continue to improve my language skills by reading more in French, and also to give myself a wider stream of reading material — surely I could get more of my particular drug that way?  That resolution didn’t last long because reading even Hemingway in French felt more like work than pleasure, especially when Mort Dans L’Après-Midi almost lead to my own mort dans l’après-midi when I snoozed off and fell out of my chair.

Next I got inspired when I found Cosmopolitan in French.  That worked much better since, at the age of 21, I was still interested in how to curl a man’s toes with tricks known only to the Amazons, and other such nonsense.  Plus there were a lot of pictures.  When I realized that I had got my hands on the only copy of Cosmo in the country, however, I passed it along with a sigh to the next volunteer who came along, and that was that.

Being a literature major and still interested in the life of the mind, something I have long left behind me, I just read whatever I could get my hands on.  It was some pretty heavy going, but rather than being left with my own thoughts, a fate worse than death, or with more lesson planning, a fate worse than a fate worse than death, I read whatever came my way.

Proust became my best friend for a few weeks, not only because someone sent me his books, but because he was the 19^th century equivalent of Steven King in terms of production, having had diarrhea of the mind.  His major seven-volume oeuvre, Remembrance of Things Past, runs to 3200 pages and has 2000 characters, and kept me absorbed in musings over madeleines and memory for some time.  On top of that, I somehow got hold of Jean Santeuil, in English, his unfinished novel that someone had thoughtfully completed for us posthumously, which gave me a few more days before facing the void-without-books.

Probably the most esoteric thing I found myself reading, and not out of choice, of course, because not even a PhD student in literature would read this, was The Art of Andrew Marvell’s Poetry.  Now I apologize, J. B Leishman, whomever and wherever you are now, but I can’t help but think you have lived a somewhat precious and extremely proscribed life, if you could put so much of yourself into analyzing Andrew Marvell’s poetry.  Especially since, when I looked Andy up again while writing this, one of the first references to him on the web was on the front page of the International Review of Psycho-Analysis (and yes, they did put the hyphen in, can you imagine the decision-making process on that one?), with an essay entitled “History, Pastoral and Desire: Andrew Marvell’s Mower Poems,” which, frankly, gave me the yawns.  Not to mention sounding as if it were written in incorrect English.  Since when was Pastoral a noun?  I mean, who are these people? At least they stay in their libraries and computers, and out of our way.  But I do have to admit that for two years I was one of them.

One reader volunteer told the story of having a young man from her village show up at her door with a book in English, offering to sell it.  She paid through the nose and grabbed it, only to find when she opened it up for a reading treat, sitting in her special chair with her bottle of eau gazeuse and her madeleines next to her, that it had been inscribed to her by her mother, who had sent it all the way to Zaire to be stolen at the local post office and then sold to the hapless daughter.

At one point, a friend of mine sent me a whole box of books published by Heinemann’s African Writers’ Series, a wonderful two weeks’ worth of reading, and an introduction to Elechi Amadi, Chinua Achebe, Camara Laye and others, which fit more perfectly with what I was going through as a person living in Zaire than most of what I was reading did.  Reading Newsweek in Zaire is mostly an out-of-body experience, and only highlights the absurdity of the divide between the “developed” and the “developing” world.  Or, as Mobutu Sésé Seko Nkuku Ngbendu wa Za Banga, the then-and-almost-forever-president of Zaire, whose photo hung in every classroom, office and meeting room throughout the country in case you forgot who was in charge, would say, the world of the “sous-équipé”.  I was certainly “sous-équipé” when it came to books, so I had a lot of sympathy for that point of view.

A classic that made its way from the grimy hands of one volunteer to the other throughout the country was The Zin-Zin Road, written by Fletcher Knebel in 1966, described on the website Fantastic Fiction as “a political thriller in which the idealism of the Peace Corps clashes head-on with the harsh realities of government in the steamy West African state of Kalya.”  Since most volunteers at that time were feckless 22-year olds just out of college, they read this thinly-veiled roman à clef (sorry if I’m making you feel less educated than I, but if you don’t know what that means, you are) about service in the Peace Corps in Liberia with fascination, pride, and large doses of cynicism and kaopectate.

One of my favorite book memories of Zaire is of walking a few kilometers through the bush to a soccer game at a rival school, and meeting up there with a Jesuit priest who taught there.  The Catholics were all over Zaire like white on rice.  Huge cathedrals sprang up in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by mud houses.  Some of the priests I met had napery and silver on their tables at lunch every day, not to mention wine, lettuce (lettuce!), and pork from gargantuan pigs they raised themselves.  One group even raised prize-winning rabbits that got shipped to shows in Belgium regularly.  The fact that they also grew schools made up to some extent, in my eyes, for these excrescences and excesses.  At any rate, in casual conversation, we discovered a mutual love of books, and spent two hours enthusing over Iris Murdoch.  Under what other circumstances would a 50-year old Jesuit priest and a 21-year old American girl be thrown together and so quickly find mutual love?

Looking at my very depressing journal entries from those years, I came across lists of what I was reading, and I can credit my time in Zaire for having given me a masters level course in literature, although no self-respecting college would ever allow such a catholic reading list.   There are references to Huxley’s  Point Counterpoint, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Crime and Punishment, Thus Spake Zarathustra, scruffy hippie  poetry by e.e. cummings, Isak Dinesen’s Gothic Tales and Out of Africa, For Whom the Bell Tolls (in English), Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography, The Psychology of Women (oy!), Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, Quentin Bell’s biography of Virginia Woolf, The Idiot, Mary Ellman’s Thinking About Women, Enemies a Love Story, The Sot-Weed Factor, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, On the Road, Graham Greene’s The Honorary Consul, Tom Jones, and so on.  I even wrote down Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress,” no doubt in enthusiastic response to reading The Art of Andrew Marvell’s Poetry.  I also, inspired, made my own attempt at writing poetry in the journal, and entitled it “Collected Poem.”

So even if I were teaching English as a third or fourth language to the hapless youth of Zaire, most of whom would never encounter an English-speaking person in their lives, even if I felt sometimes as if the last thing I was doing was any good to anyone, and even if my body were slowly turning to mush, riddled by exotic diseases and beaten down by a diet almost exclusively based on papaya, mangoes, pineapple and manioc, my brain was healthy and educated, and I’m hoping that some of that love of reading and the books that fed it found their way into the psyches of my students.

On the website Gamasutra, the Art & Business of Making Games there is a piece on Aaron Oldenburg, who was a PCV in Mali and has come up with a great idea for a game that tells the story of his time in Africa.

Now at the University of Baltimore as an assistant professor, he has created an interactive narrative, much like being a counselor for the player, he said during a Tuesday session at the GDC Austin Game Writers Summit.

Here is his story, as reported by Kris Graft:

Oldenburg is the man behind the Flash-based interactive narrative called The Mischief of Created Things, a work based on his two years as a Peace Corps worker in the West African country of Mali.

During his time there, he had journal entries, letters home, and many pictures of his experiences. “Coming back and telling stories wasn’t satisfying. It didn’t go far enough,” he said. An interactive narrative seemed like the best way to present his time there.

Oldenburg also previously worked as an HIV and AIDS hotline volunteer and educator on the disease. In that capacity and while in the Peace Corps, he found himself often in the role of a counselor, a role that he found has parallels with game design.

In counseling, he said, you’re not giving a subject advice, or telling them what they should do. Instead, a counselor leads the subject, subtly, to their own answer. “I think with interactive narrative in game design, [leading a subject to their own answer] has a huge potential in this kind of media.”

In some instances as an AIDS hotline worker, he’d encounter someone contemplating suicide. Telling people simply not commit suicide, isn’t always the most effective way to approach the situation, he said.

Instead, Oldenburg explained, he had to find ways to lead the subject to present all options to himself, to make all routes obvious. Every option and path is valid, even suicide, although that would lead to the most undesirable outcome. But to take that choice away is denying the subject of the complete reality of the situation.

In The Mischief of Creative Things, Oldenburg explained how the narrative presented all possibilities about the perception of AIDS in Africa from the viewpoint of Malians. People typically become tied closely to their own perception within their own culture, and Oldenburg encouraged people to step out of their comfort zones, and see things from other viewpoints.

That’s where players of a game or an interactive narrative like The Mischief of Creative Things can peel back “multiple layers of truth,” he said.

For example, Oldenburg said there is a belief in Mali that AIDS doesn’t exist, and that he, as a Peace Corps worker, was there to spread propaganda. Picking apart that belief can reveal its sources. One “layer” under that belief might be an ignorance of medicine, for example. Another layer might be the belief that, although AIDS exists, people deny its existence, as they feel the disease doubles as a way to facilitate negative population growth through family planning programs. The Peace Corps can also serve as a propaganda machine for U.S. culture, some might believe.

With The Mischief of Creative Things, a player of can walk away with any of these or all of these kinds of conclusions, whether they are considered “right” or “wrong.” The point is, the narrative presents all possibilities for the player to ponder and draw conclusions from.

“Subtly leading” the player to make their own inward discoveries has much to do with being ambiguous — not everything has to be laid out conspicuously for a player. “I think there are huge benefits for allowing the player to go from the known to the unknown to fill in the gaps,” said Oldenburg. “…Gaps are sometimes just as important as actual conversation.”

He encouraged writers to go outside of comfort zones, and learn how to allow someone to see their own beliefs in a different way. “[The Mischief of Creative Things] affected my philosophy toward interactive game design as a type of counseling,” Oldenburg said.

In the fall of 1964, just back from Ethiopia and working for the Division of Volunteer Support, I met Peverley Dennett and Bill Kinsey during their training program at Syracuse University. Bill had been assigned to Malawi and Peppy [as Peverley was called] to Tanzania. In those early years of Peace Corps Training groups were often trained together on college campuses, but that decision was changed because too many Trainees from different projects were meeting up and falling in love. The Peace Corps might be the “greatest job you’ll ever love” but the Peace Corps didn’t want you “falling in love” during Training.]

Bill and Peverley were two young goodlooking kids just out of college. Bill, as I recall, had a bright smile, blond hair cut into a crew cut, an All-American looks. Peverley was sweet and shy and very pretty. They were the picture of what Peace Corps Volunteers were all about: bright and articulate and good looking kids going off to the developing world to do good.

Peppy and Bill, hearing that “someone from Washington” was on site, sought me out, and asked if Bill might be reassigned to Tanzania. In those early years of the Peace Corps rules were stretched and bent and I helped with some paperwork and Bill was transferred out of the Malawi project and into Peppy’s Tanzania group. Ninety-four days after they met, Bill married the beautiful auburn-haired Peppy and the couple spent their honeymoon in transit to Africa and started their tours, and married life, as secondary school teachers in up-country Maswa, Tanzania.

A year-and-a-half later, in March of ‘66, I was back in Addis Ababa as the APCD in Ethiopia and opening the International Herald Tribune early one morning I read where PCV Bill Kinsey had been arrested for killing his wife Peverley while they were picnicking near their school. He became the first Peace Corps Volunteer ever to be charged with murder.

Bill’s story was that Peverley had accidentally slipped and fatally injured herself in a 20-foot fall from a rocky ledge. The state prosecutor of Tanzania said Kinsey, inflamed by jealousy, had battered his wife to death with a length of iron pipe.

When Bill was arrested at the picnic site by a Maswa policeman, he was being held captive by 100 local people who said he had been trying to flee the scene. Nearby, the arresting officer found a rock and metal pipe caked with fresh blood and some threads of human hair. Kinsey’s shirt was also blooded.

Bill told the Maswa police that the pipe was part of his camera equipment, and he had not know how the piece had become bloodstained. His clothes, he said, had blood on them because he tried to help his wife after she had fallen.

Later Bill told the Tanzanian court that Peverley and he had spent the weekend grading papers and then late on Sunday afternoon had left for a picnic at the rocky site. Because they were going so late in the day, he decided to leave his camera and other photographic equipment behind. The piece of metal, wrapped in a towel, had been left by mistake in the picnic basket. The pipe was used, Kinsey told the court, as a lightweight tripod for his 400 mm telephoto lens.

Kinsey explained that after bicycling to the picnic site, he and Peverley climbed to the top of the hill to get a better view. At the time, Peverley was carrying a book and a bottle of beer.

Kinsey was standing one or two yards away from Peverley and looking away when he heard the sound of breaking glass. Glancing around, he saw Peverley had slipped from the top of the ledge, falling twenty feet to the rocky base.

He ran to help her and as she tried to stand he held her down. “She was struggling, kicking and kept on calling my name,” he said at his African trial. “I sat on her stomach and was trying to keep her from moving. I managed to get a towel and folded it underneath her head. She still struggled. I was shouting at her not to move. Some time later she did not struggle. I got up–I heard some people shouting–I shouted to the people and signaled to them to come to assist me. No one came.”

Finally he placed her in the shade and went for help, but people threw sticks at him, shouted and snatched his bicycle. He tried to run towards the nearby town of Maswa, but others surrounded and stopped him. Desperate now, he sent a student of his to get the school headmaster.

But when the help arrived, it was too late. He returned to the hill and found that Peppy had died.

Kinsey’s trial lasted three weeks. The courtroom was filled, mostly with PCVs from Tanzania and other countries. It was these Volunteers, on vacation in Africa, who drifted up to Addis Ababa and told us the details of the case.

According to Ededen Effiwatt, the Nigerian-born Senior State Attorney, Kinsey had induced his wife to go with him for a picnic, and had concealed the piece of iron wrapped in a towel in a picnic basket. They had ridden on their bicycles to lonely, rock-strewn Impala Hill, two miles from their school.

Once there, Kinsey had taken his wife between two huge boulders where he had set upon her, beating her on the head with the piece of iron. There was fierce fighting between them, but Peverley was soon overpowered. Apart from the piece of iron he also made use of a stone to kill his wife, Mr. Effiwatt alleged.

Effiwatt claimed that Kinsey’s diary, that the police had found in the couples’ house, contained written passages that tended to show unfaithfulness and implied a murder motive. The passages were not, however, Kinsey’s own prose. They were taken from Wright Morris’ novel, Ceremony in Lone Tree.Kinsey said he had simply copied the passages as examples of fine writing and that they had nothing to do with questions of infidelity in his marriage. In fact, he told the court, he had never suspected his wife of being unfaithful to him, and that he loved her. He said that he had copied the extracts because they reflected a character in the book, were particularly descriptive or they were humorous. He said he often did this, and had kept similar notebooks over a period of years.

A prosecution witness claimed in court that he had seen two people fighting from a distance of 140 yards. He said he saw a woman fall on the ground and there was a white man on top beating her with a “black tool.”

The case, however, turned on two defense testimonies.

A Nairobi pathologist testified that Peverley’s injuries were more likely to have been caused by a fall than by bludgeoning. And then on the closing day, in a dramatic gesture by the defense, Peverley’s mother, who had flown in from her home in Connecticut, testified that her daughter’s marriage had been “very happy and comfortable.”

Referring to her daughter by her nickname of “Peppy,” she told the court that she received many letters from Peppy and an occasional letter from her son-in-law during their time at Maswa. “I never had any letter indicating my daughter was unhappy in her marriage. None whatsoever. I was delighted with the marriage.” She said she had visited the couple at their school the year before, and “There was never any hint of trouble in their marriage.”

Two “assessors” (including a USAID official from Tanzania) recommended Kinsey’s acquittal, and British-born Judge Harold Platt brought in judgment. Kinsey’s guilt, he ruled, had not been “proved beyond reasonable doubt.”

After having spent five months in jail (where Bill spent most of his time teaching English to fellow prisoners), Kinsey flew immediately home, saying only that he wanted to be reassigned to Tanzania.

Instead of being reassigned, Bill worked in PC/Washington for slightly more than a year, and then went to Stanford for an advance degree. Years later, remarried, he returned to West Africa as a relief worker.