In Illinois, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the tournament every caddie wanted to loop in was George S. May’s two weeks at Tam O’Shanter Country Club in Niles, Illinois, on the northwest side of Chicago.
George May, a one-time revival-tent Bible salesman who earned millions as an efficiency expert teaching big corporations how to work better and smarter, bought Tam O’Shanter in 1936 and rebuilt it. 
The Tam O’Shanter clubhouse was a vast concrete-and-glass, triple-decker building with a sprawling dining room overlooking the course and a one-hundred-foot high water tank in the form of a golf ball atop a red tee. You could see it for miles. At the height of its operation, the club had thirteen bars and telephones on every tee for the convenience of the members. 
Noted golf historian, Al Barkow, former Golf Magazine editor and author of Golf’s Golden Grind, about the PGA, grew up as a caddie at Tam. He recalls anyone could join Tam, if they could afford the membership. “The elite of Chicago’s Mafia were an integral, visible, part of the scene at ‘Tammy O,’” according to Barkow, “some playing golf at the club under assumed, anglicized names.”
Barkow describes May as a “short man who walked with the head-high, shoulder-back erectness of those who carry a well-fed but not much exercised stomach. He always seemed to have a kittenish smile on his face, a little like someone who had pulled a fast one on the world.” 
George May was the P.T. Barnum of the professional tour, the first really big-time golf promoter in America. In 1941 he staged the Tam O’Shanter Open, which had a purse of $11,000, the biggest in pro golf at the time. In 1954, he set the first prize for his World Championship at Tam at $50,000 and guaranteed the winner another $50,000 for a series of fifty exhibitions. He was promising golf professionals this amount of money at a time when the entire purse for the average pro tour event was around $25,000. 
He staged his tournaments for 17 years, from 1941 through 1957, giving away over $2 million dollars in prize money to the golf pros. But for all his efforts he was scorned by those same professionals and their association, the PGA. As Al Barkow puts it in his book on the Tour, “he [May] was effectively drummed out of his game … [he was] harangued and held in contempt to his exhaustion, and he left the scene.” In that way, as Barkow points out, May was like Bill Veeck dealing with the major-league baseball-club owners.
May was the first to put up grandstands for a tournament; the first to put up scoreboards to show the up-to-minute scores of the leaders called in from around the course by short-wave radio. He had programs printed with the players’ names and sold them for a quarter. And that’s where he got in trouble with the players. The pros balked when he suggested they wear numbers so spectators could easily identify them by matching their numbers with his program. A compromise was finally worked out: caddies would carry the numbers, pinned to their backs, and not the player.
The golf professionals also didn’t like that May employed clowns to walk around the course, brought in a “masked marvel” golfer to play in the events, gave away door prizes, and told the spectators they could gamble on the club’s slot machines, or hang around till evening and dance in the outdoor pavilion. Nor did the pros appreciate that the gallery might just spend the day picnicking beside the fairways while watching the players go by.
By the end of his career, May would put up a sign in front of his country club stating that no PGA pros were allowed on his golf course. But before that, for well over a decade, he put on quite a show that thrilled golfers and fans and put real money in the pockets of the pros.

Shriver introduced Wiggins and Josephson at the February 6th meeting and distributed copies of “A Towering Task.” From this point on, Wiggins and Josephson became the engine room of the Peace Corps. Shriver describes Wiggins as “the figure most responsible” for the planning and organization that brought the Peace Corps into being.
     Twice more in February Kennedy telephoned Shriver to ask about progress on the Peace Corps. The final draft of the report was done with Charles Nelson sitting in one room writing basic copy, Josephson sitting in another room rewriting it, Wofford sitting in yet another room doing the final rewrite, and Wiggins running back and forth carrying pieces of paper. Shriver then made the final edits. On the morning of Friday, February 24, 1961, Shriver delivered to Kennedy what was, in effect, the Peace Corps Magna Carta. He told Kennedy: “If you decide to go ahead, we can be in business Monday morning.”
     It had all taken less than a month. On March 1 President Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the Peace Corps.

The day after the inauguration, Kennedy telephoned Shriver and asked him to form a presidential Task Force “to report how the Peace Corps should be organized and then to organize it.” When he heard from Kennedy, Shriver immediately called Harris Wofford.
     At the time, Shriver was 44; Wofford was 34. They had become good friends during the campaign. Wofford had worked as Kennedy’s adviser on civil rights, and together they had worked on the talent hunt for staffing for the new administration.
     Initially, the Task Force consisted solely of Shriver and Wofford, sitting in a suite they had rented at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Most of their time was spent making calls to personal friends they thought might be helpful. One name led to another: Gordon Boyce, president of the Experiment in International Living; Albert Sims of the Institute of International Education; Adam Yarmolinsky, a foundation executive; Father Theodore Hesburgh, president of the University of Notre Dame; George Carter, a campaign worker on civil rights issues and former member of the American Society for African Culture; Louis Martin, a newspaper editor; and Franklin Williams, an organizer of the campaign for black voter registration, and a student of Africa.
     Shriver had scheduled the first official meeting of his Task Force for February 6. Despite the recommendations, opinions, and reports they had received, Shriver and Wofford had made relatively little headway in defining the new program in terms of specific size, costs, organization, and objectives. Kennedy had called requesting a report by the end of February, and Shriver had to concede that, as of yet, he had not even settled on an official name for the new agency. While it was less than two weeks since the President had given him the assignment, “Kennedy wanted to know what was taking us so long,” says Shriver.
     Kennedy had given Shriver a report written by Max Millikan, the director of the Center for International Studies at MIT. The report stated that the development of such an agency should be slow, placing several hundred people in the first year or two. This opposed everything Shriver believed in. Shriver later wrote, “We knew the Peace Corps would have only one chance to work. As with the parachute jumper, the chute had to open the first time.” It had to be new, in both size and thrust.
     Unbeknownst to Shriver and Wofford, while they were busily managing the Task Force, two officials in the Far Eastern division of the International Cooperation Administration (ICA) were working on a Peace Corps plan. Warren Wiggins, who was the deputy director of Far Eastern operations in ICA, was still in his 30s but had already helped administer the Marshall Plan in Western Europe. He was totally dissatisfied with the manner in which American overseas programs were run; he called them “golden ghettos.”
      With Wiggins was Bill Josephson, just 26, and a lawyer at ICA.
      They started with a program which would be limited to sending young Americans overseas to teach English. But as they worked on it, their vision broadened.
     The paper they prepared detailing their recommendations they called “A Towering Task,” taking the title from the phrase Kennedy had used in his State of the Union address: “The problems . . . are towering and unprecedented - and the response must be towering and unprecedented as well.”
     They sent copies to Wofford, another to Richard Goodwin at the White House, and to Shriver. As Wiggins said, “we wanted to make sure Shriver would get it.”
     Shriver read the paper late on Sunday, February 5th. He thought it was brilliant and immediately sent a telegram to Wiggins inviting him to attend the Task Force meeting the next morning. With that, the so-called “midnight ride of Warren Wiggins” became an early legend in the Peace Corps.
     Meanwhile, Wofford had read the Wiggins proposal and he called Shriver at 7 a.m. to talk to him about it. Shriver told Wofford that Wiggins had already been invited to the first Task Force meeting.
     Wiggins had written the proposal in the hope that it might, as he said, “stimulate thought.” In fact, it provided a philosophy for the Peace Corps throughout the Kennedy era.
     Wiggins fundamentally disagreed with most of the academic and other institutional approaches which counseled caution and a slow beginning. Instead, he advocated initiating the Peace Corps with “several thousand Americans participating in the first 12 to 18 months.”
     What Wiggins and Josephson had going for them was that Shriver agreed.

On the Michigan campus, after hearing Kennedy, two graduate students - Alan and Judy Guskin - wrote a letter to the editor of The Michigan Daily, the university newspaper, asking readers to join in working for a Peace Corps. (The editor of the Dailywas the future radical, Tom Hayden. The paper later won a journalism award for its coverage and support of the Peace Corps movement.) On campus, students began to circulate a petition urging the founding of a Peace Corps. This effort began to spread onto other campuses in the midwest and east.
     Then a Democratic National Committeewoman and UAW official, Mildred Jeffrey, learned about the students’ response from her daughter Sharon, who was studying at the university. Jeffrey put the students in touch with the Kennedy camp.
     At first, they couldn’t reach anyone until they got to Ted Sorensen who liked the idea of a major speech on the subject and promised to tell Kennedy about the Ann Arbor petitions. By now the Michigan petition was also being circulated at other Big Ten universities and at colleges throughout Michigan - I signed at Western Michigan University where I was studying, as did a dozen other friends who later became early PCVs.
     In the Republican camp, Nixon was still being urged to embrace the Peace Corps idea. Two Michigan faculty members - Elise and Kenneth Boulding - who were critical of Kennedy’s cold war stances, pushed for the students to be nonpartisan with the idea. But when Nixon wouldn’t take up the plan, the Guskins turned to Kennedy in late October.
     Because Kennedy’s people had (incorrectly) heard that Nixon was on the verge of proposing an overseas volunteer program for college graduates, they urged Kennedy to move out front with the idea before Nixon could claim it as his own.
     On November 2, the Guskins were notified that at the Cow Palace that evening Kennedy was going to make a major address on the Peace Corps idea. And more important–at least to them–he wanted to meet with the couple and the other students taking the lead in the petition drive. This was six days before the general election.
     The Michigan students were told to drive to Toledo, Ohio, where they would meet up with Kennedy when he stopped on his way back to Washington. They could deliver their petition - this was the same petition that we had signed at other Michigan schools–in person.
     About this meeting, Wofford writes in his book: “Kennedy grinned at the long scroll of names, and sensed the students’ discomfort when he started to put the petition in his car. ‘You need them back, don’t you?’ he asked. He had guessed right; it was before the era of Xerox and they had not copied the names and addresses.”
     How important was this petition? How important were those students in the creation of the Peace Corps?
     In his book, Point of the Lance, Sargent Shriver concluded that the Peace Corps would probably “still be just an idea but for the affirmative response of those Michigan students and faculty. Possibly Kennedy would have tried it once more on some other occasion, but without a strong popular response he would have concluded that the idea was impractical or premature. That probably would have ended it then and there. Instead it was almost a case of spontaneous combustion.”
      So, as they say, ‘in a very real sense’ we can thank two graduate students at the University of Michigan, Judy and Alan Guskin, for making the Peace Corps a reality. And they, too, left the University of Michigan campus to become Peace Corps Volunteers in Thailand.

I don’t know who this PCV “dilana” is, but as far as I can tell, it is our first comment from a current PCV, and it is a wonderful one. It is an example of what Marian and I hope to achieve with this website and that is to get comments and opinions and information from all over the globe, and from all parts of the Peace Corps World. So, if you missed ”dilana” comment sent on the 21st of this month, here it is in full.

dilana on 21/03/2009 in 19:50

Honestly what I am disappointed about at this point is the fact that so many people actually think three months should be enough time apparently to bring the country out of debt, find money from somewhere to use to bring more volunteers to various countries, enlist new countries for Peace Corps, stop the war, increase the budget for PC and everything else, and a whole lot of other things. I am a current Peace Corps volunteer right now IN THE FIELD and to be honest there is so much going on right now in the developing world and at home that I think that its ok if our President AND government need to take a year or two before they can get to increasing the number of volunteers in the field. We barely have enough money to function since Bush just cut the budget and food prices are rising and volunteers are barely making it. It seems as if everyone expects the president to perform a couple miracles which include the home base concerns of unemployment, home ownership, income, the economy, the education system, bringing our soldiers home, and the list goes on. While I know Peace Corps volunteers make significant impact in the countries they serve we are usually not sent to (in this era) countries at war or those that even are too unstable so I dont see how we will be helping certain countries in the middle east when we have these regulations. I’m very upset about the budget cuts but if you come into a job and someone has emptied the bank account you cant make money appear to make all your changes happen. In case no one sent the bulletin to the American people WE ARE BROKE as a country and we need to dig ourselves out of debt. What that means is that any change that is made means a cut somewhere or everywhere which means someone is always going to be unhappy until we can get back on our feet with a decent budget to handle all of our needs. Until then everyone is going to have to grit and bear because the wound of debt needs to heal before we can start increasing budgets and functioning adequately. I have also learned that 2 years is hardly enough time for me to really turn over a high yielding product with my projects, usually it takes at least 2 follow up volunteers before a project is sustainably successful. If thats how it is for us on a grassroots small initiative level what can 3 months really be for a nation trying to turn things around nationally AND internationally? Problems will have to be attacked in an orderly and strategic basis and I have already seen a lot of initiatives that were promised in action. Actually I just applied for a grant for my community from USAID whom just sent out applications for funding for development projects thanks to the new mandate for more international aid funds. Good and sustainable progress takes time not frenzy disorganized demands, we got enough of those with the Bush administration. I dont even have a T.V. but I traveled 5 hours and heard a speech where President Obama said ‘I will do my best to fulfill all my promises during my campaign, we may not get it done this year, or even in this term, but we will get it done’. The fact of the matter is to dig us out of 8 years of mess (or more for Peace Corpst) it might take 8 more years of hard work. If you dont learn anything else in Peace Corps you learn patience and you learn that things dont happen as fast as you want them to or even how you want them to but you know that it can be done. Maybe because I have stepped out of the microwave world of the U.S. for so long I forget how quickly everyone expects things at home. I hope President Obama takes his time to look closely at the Peace Corps budget and is able to give Peace Corps the budget increases it so desprately needs to function well with the number of volunteers currently in the field. THEN I think it would be a great idea to look into additional countries, an increase in volunteers worldwide, and other advances but I understand that all of that may take a back seat to the fact that job fairs have a turn out of over 2,000 people for a mere 200 jobs or that more people in the world (and my own pueblo) are starving because basic food like rice has gone up dramatically; and this might take more than 3 months or even 2 years to get a handle on.

On October 14, Kennedy flew into Michigan from New York, where he had just completed his third debate with Nixon. He had agreed to say a few words to the students at the university. Ten thousand students waited for him until 2 am, and they chanted his name as he climbed the steps of the student union building.
     Kennedy launched into an extemporaneous address. He challenged them, asking how many would be prepared to give years of their lives working in Asia, Africa and Latin America?
     The audience went wild. (I know, because at the time I was a new graduate student over in Kalamazoo. I was also working part time as a news reporter for WKLZ and had gone to cover the event.)
     According to Sargent Shriver, “No one is sure why Kennedy raised the question in the middle of the night at the university.” Possibly Kennedy thought of the Peace Corps at Michigan because someone reminded him that Professor Sam Hayes taught at the university’s International Studies Department. Samuel Hayes was an early advocate of the “Peace Corps idea,” and had been asked by Kennedy to prepare position papers on the idea of a national volunteer organization.
      Harris Wofford thinks that Kennedy’s remarks were a counterattack to a criticism that Nixon had made during the debate earlier in the evening. Nixon had said that the Democrats were the “war party.” In his book, Of Kennedys and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties, Wofford writes: “Stung by Nixon’s words, Kennedy may have remembered the idea of a Peace Corps and spoken as he did in order to counteract the image of a Democratic war party.”
     After that speech - the next day, in fact - Chester Bowles, former governor of Connecticut and an advisor to Kennedy who would later become Kennedy’s Ambassador to India, gave a long talk on the same theme. (A day later in Kalamazoo I was part of the press that interviewed Bowles, who was following after Kennedy on this tour through the Midwest. What I remember most about this event was that in responding to my question of what area of the world would be most interesting in the next decade, Bowles said Africa, where vast changes would occur because of the end of colonial rule.)

We’ve added a new feature to Peace Corps Worldwide — a poll. It appears in the left column of the front page just under the list of blogs. Let us hear what you think about this question — and many more to come.

JFK’s first direct association with the Peace Corps came on February 21, 1960. He was on a college television show called “College News Conference” and someone asked about the “Point Four Youth Corps.” Kennedy said he didn’t know what the legislative proposal was. Afterwards, he told aide Richard Goodwin to research the idea. Goodwin, who was the Kennedy link with the “brain trust” at Harvard, wrote to Archibald Cox at the university’s law school about the idea.
    Then in April and May of 1960, when Kennedy was running against Humphrey for the nomination, the idea was discussed further. Humphrey introduced his bill for a “Peace Corps” in the Senate in June, but after Kennedy won the nomination in July, Humphrey transferred all his research files to Kennedy’s office. The Cow Palace speech made by Kennedy right before the election, which revealed his growing commitment to the “Peace Corps” concept, owed a great deal to Humphrey’s ideas.
     In early September, Kennedy asked both Congressman Reuss, and  Professor Sam Hayes at the University of Michigan, to prepare position papers on a national youth service program.
     On September 22nd, at the University of Nebraska, Lyndon Johnson, the Vice Presidential candidate, called for a “Volunteers for Peace and Humanity” program and got a great campus response. He called Kennedy that night and told him that such a volunteer program would be a “great political asset.”
     In October, during the debates with Nixon, Kennedy discussed the Third World, the Communist threat, and the need for new foreign policy initiatives, but never mentioned a “Youth Peace Corps.”

One of the most important books of the late 1950s was the novel, The Ugly American,by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick. The book’s hero was Homer Atkins, a skilled technician committed to helping at a grassroots level by building water pumps, digging roads, and building bridges. He was called the “ugly American” only because of his grotesque physical appearance. He lived and worked with the local people and, by the end of the novel, was beloved and admired by them.
The bitter message of the novel, however, was that American diplomats were, by and large, neither competent nor effective; and the implication was that the more the United States relied on them, the more its influence would wane. The book was published in July 1958. It was Book-of-the-Month Club selection in October; by November it had gone through twenty printings. It was so influential that in later paperback editions its cover proclaimed that “President Kennedy’s Peace Corps is the answer to the problem raised in this book.”
The authors summed up in a factual epilogue what should be done to improve the U.S. foreign service:
“Whatever the reasons, our overseas services attract far too few of our      brightest and best-qualified college graduates . . . . What we need is a small force of well-trained, well-chosen, hard-working and dedicated professionals. They must be willing to risk their comforts and - in some lands - their health. They must go equipped to apply a positive policy promulgated by a clear-thinking government. They must speak the language of the land of their assignment and they must be more expert in its problems than are the natives.”
The Cow Palace Speech
Six days before the 1960 election on November 2nd, Kennedy gave a speech at the Cow Palace in San Francisco - a speech written by Ted Sorensen, Richard Goodwin, and Archibald Cox. Referring to the charges in The Ugly American, Kennedy pointed out that 70 percent of all new Foreign Service officers had no foreign language skills whatsoever; only three of the forty-four Americans in the embassy in Belgrade spoke Yugoslavian; not a single American in New Delhi could speak Indian dialects, and only two of the nine ambassadors in the Middle East spoke Arabic. Kennedy also pointed out that there were only twenty-six black officers in the entire Foreign Service corps, less than 1 percent.

There was also, as there has always been, a search for a new frontier. That feeling was loose in America. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner has written about how America has continued to grow because of this search for another frontier. The Peace Corps gave all these young people a New Frontier.
A new generation
The Baby Boom had struck. 50 percent of the population was under 25 in 1960. For the first time a college education was within the grasp of the majority of young people. Unprecedented material wealth freed this new generation to heed their consciences and pursue their ideals. This spirit of generosity and participation had been sorely missed under Eisenhower. As one Peace Corps administrator puts it in Gerry Rice’s book: “The 1950s made ancient mariners of us all - becalmed, waiting and a little parched in the throat. Then we picked up momentum on the winds of change that Kennedy brought in - the New Frontier, the fresh faces in government, the vigorous, hopeful speeches, the Peace Corps.”
Founding Fathers
Two key people in Congress, Henry Reuss and Hubert Humphrey, both proposed the idea of the Peace Corps in the late 1950s.
Reuss voiced it in 1957 when he was a member of the Joint Economic Committee and traveled to Southeast Asia. He, by chance, came upon a UNESCO team of young teachers from America and other countries who were working at the village level. For three years after that, Congressman Reuss talked to student conferences about establishing a “Point Four Youth Corps” and wrote articles about it in magazines. In January of 1960, Reuss introduced in the House of Representatives the first Peace Corps-type legislation. It sought a study of “the advisability and practicability to the establishment of a Point Four Youth Corps.”
In the Senate, Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota was a member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In the late 1950s, he, too, suggested the enlistment of talented young men and women in an overseas operation for education, health care, vocational training, and community development. The idea was liked in the Senate, but the State Department was against it. Humphrey began to research the possibilities of such a program with his staff and realized there was a groundswell of popular support for the idea which he advocated during his unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in the spring of 1960.
In June of 1960, Humphrey introduced in the Senate a bill to send “young men to assist the peoples of the underdeveloped areas of the world to combat poverty, disease, illiteracy and hunger.”
What’s important here is this bill - Senate S. 3675 - was the first to use the specific name “Peace Corps.”
Now it was too late in the session for his proposal to have any hope of passing into legislation, but he wanted the bill to be printed and appropriately referred so as to focus the Congress and the public on the Peace Corps idea at a critical moment - just before the presidential election of 1960.
Meanwhile, Reuss’s bill was added as a rider to the Mutual Security Act which authorized $10,000 for a study of a Point Four Youth Corps.
Also in 1960, several other people were expressing support: General James Gavin; Chester Bowles, former governor of Connecticut and ambassador to India; William Douglas, associate justice of the Supreme Count; James Reston of the New York Times; Milton Shapp, from Philadelphia; Walt Rostow of MIT; and Senator Jacob Javits of New York, who urged Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon to adopt the idea. Nixon refused.