Archive - April 2009

1
How I Met Doug Kiker
2
Famous Peace Corps Staff Who Knew Me
3
When They Were Young And Having Fun In The Peace Corps
4
Living Off Advances
5
Establishing The Peace Corps:Women at HQ, Post 24
6
Establishing the Peace Corps: Executive Order 10924, Post 23
7
The Masters At Augusta National
8
RPCV David Taylor's Soul Of A People
9
JFK's Comments On The Peace Corps
10
What JFK Had To Say To Us On The White House Lawn
11
New Chicken Soup Book Has RPCV Writer
12
Establishing The Peace Corps: Tenor Of The Times, Post 22
13
A Peace Corps Book Is A Journey
14
Establishing The Peace Corps: Making Lemonade In The Maiatico Building, Post 21
15
Development is Down This Road

How I Met Doug Kiker

Doug Kiker was from Griffin, Georgia and had early success as a short story writer while still a student at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, majoring in English. There’s a story about how he wanted to get published and he picked up Martha Foley’s short stories collection, went to the rear of the book and found the list of short-story publishers, closed his eyes and punched in the dark. He hit the Yale Review, to which he promptly submitted a short story. And they accepted his story. While still in college he worked as a reporter, covering the Senate race between Strom Thurmond and Olin Johnston. After college he joined the navy and was commissioned an Ensign, serving in Korean War. Discharged, he returned to Atlanta and worked at the Atlanta Journal and covered the first sit-ins at lunch counters in North Carolina. Out of that experience came his . . .

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Famous Peace Corps Staff Who Knew Me

I had a email recently from a friend complaining that my blog is “all about JFK !” and I wrote back, okay, I’d do more items on golf. She quickly replied, “Well, then maybe you should stay with the early days of the Peace Corps.” There is a lot one can write about when it comes to the days  when the Peace Corps was attracting the best and the brightest. An early document of the agency said that the staff in D.C. and around the world was composed of “skiers, mountain climbers, big-game hunters, prizefighters, football players, polo players and enough Ph.D.’s [30] to staff a liberal arts college.” There were 18 attorneys, of whom only four continue to work strictly as attorneys in the General Counsel’s office, and the rest [including Sargent Shriver] did other jobs. Also, all of these employees were parents of some 272 children. In terms of . . .

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When They Were Young And Having Fun In The Peace Corps

Here’s a famous Peace Corps story from the early years that has been told and retold a couple thousand times, and is retold in the late Coates Redmon’s book Come As Your Are: The Peace Corps Story.[Coates was a a writer for the Peace Corps in the early days, later a speech writer for Rosalynn Carter, and later still, director of the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award.] It is a story [as all good Washington, D.C. do] that begins in Georgetown. It was a Sunday evening in the fall of 1961 and Dick Nelson, who was Bill Moyers’ assistant, and Blair Butterworth, whose father was ambassador to Canada, and who worked as a file clerk at PC/W, were living together at Two Pomander Walk in Georgetown. That Sunday, Moyers’ wife and kids were in Texas and he came over to see the two guys, who had been roommates at Princeton. . . .

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Living Off Advances

“Why is it,” Michael Meyer (China 1995-97) asks, “that writers who can’t recall their Social Security numbers can recite a rival’s advance to the penny?” Meyer answers that question (and a lot more!) in an entertaining and informative essay on the back page of the Book Section of the April 12, 2009, issue of The New York Times. In his piece, Meyer goes into “blockbuster advances” that came about in the early 1970s. He tells how Viking sold the paperback rights to The Day of the Jackal to Bantam for 36 times the $10,000 hardcover advance it had paid the author. If you are interested in what your next advance might be, take a look at Micheal’s piece in the Times.

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Establishing The Peace Corps:Women at HQ, Post 24

Arriving for work on or before March 1, 1961, the day President Kennedy signed the executive order establishing the Peace Corps, were a number of women who would become famous during these early years at the agency. The majority of these women were well connected by family and friends to Shriver and the new administration and eagerly went to work at the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps was the ‘hot’ agency and everyone wanted to be connected to Kennedy–if they couldn’t be in the White House–they wanted to be with Shriver at the Peace Corps. Some of these noted women were: Maryann Orlando, Sally Bowles, Nancy Gore, Nan McEvoy, Diana MacArthur, Patricia Sullivan, Alice Gilbert, Betty Harris, Ruth Olson, Dorothy Mead Jacobsen. It is a long list, but nevertheless the agency was dominated by men. Looking at old black-and-white photos one is struck by two things: 1) the women are sitting behind the men . . .

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Establishing the Peace Corps: Executive Order 10924, Post 23

By 1960 two bills were introduced in Congress that were the direct forerunners of the Peace Corps. Representative Henry S. Reuss of Wisconsin proposed that the Government study the idea, and Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota asked for the establishment of a Peace Corps itself.  These bills were not likely to pass Congress at the time, but they caught the attention of then-Senator Kennedy for several important reasons.       According to several books on the beginnings of the agency, Kennedy foresaw a “New Frontier” inspired by Roosevelt’s New Deal. In foreign affairs, Kennedy viewed the Presidency as “the vital center of action in our whole scheme of government.”      Concerned by what was then perceived to be the global threat of communism, Kennedy was looking for economic aid to counter negative images of the “Ugly American” and Yankee imperialism. Between his election and inauguration, he asked Sarge to do a . . .

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The Masters At Augusta National

As many of you might know I play golf and I write novels about golf, and I’m a big Ben Hogan fan [What? You haven’t read The Caddie Who Knew Ben Hogan?] But more importantly, forty plus years ago this weekend Ben Hogan turned back the clock at the Masters in Georgia when he shot a back-nine 30 in the third round at Augusta National GC. It was one of the great rounds of golf ever played at Augusta. Hogan had won the Masters in ’51 and ’53 but in 1967 at the age of 54 he was back at the Masters for a final time. He still suffered from the 1949 car accident that nearly killed him. He had bad legs and a left shoulder plagued with bursitis, scar tissue and calcium deposits. Every morning he needed a cortisone shot just to be able to swing a club. In the . . .

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RPCV David Taylor's Soul Of A People

David Taylor (Mauritania 1983-85) author of the recently published Soul of a People: The WPA Writers’ Project Uncovers Depression America, will be part of a book discussion at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday, April 28, 2009, in the Mumford Room in the Madison Building of the Library of Congress. The discussion begins at 3 p.m. This is an important book by an important RPCV writer and this library event will include screening of scenes from the Soul of a People TV documentary, to be broadcast late this summer.

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JFK's Comments On The Peace Corps

Here are President Kennedy’s comments about founding of the Peace Corps given in his three State of the Union Addresses. From 1961 State of the Union Address: “An even more valuable national asset is our reservoir of dedicated men and women — not only on our college campuses but in every age group — who have indicated their desire to contribute their skills, their efforts, and a part of their lives to the fight for world order. We can mobilize this talent through the formation of a National Peace Corps, enlisting the services of all those with the desire and capacity to help foreign lands meet their urgent needs for trained personnel.” From 1962 State of the Union Address: “A newly conceived Peace Corps is winning friends and helping people in fourteen countries–supplying trained and dedicated young men and women, to give these new nations a hand in building a . . .

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What JFK Had To Say To Us On The White House Lawn

A police escort with sirens blaring led our dozen Peace Corps buses in one long continuous caravan through every downtown light in Washington, D.C. It was high noon in the District the summer  of 1962, less than a year after the famous postcard dropped by a PCV had been found on the Ibadan campus that almost doomed the Peace Corps and we–the 300 Ethiopia-bound Peace Corps Trainees at Georgetown University–were on our way to meet John F. Kennedy at the White House.      There were other Peace Corps Trainees as well meeting the President that afternoon. Peace Corps Trainees at Howard, American, Catholic, George Washington universities, and the University of Maryland, over 600 in all, gathered in the August heat and humidity on the great lawn below the Truman Balcony.      Arriving at the White House, I walked with the others up the slope with the Washington Monument behind me and the White . . .

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New Chicken Soup Book Has RPCV Writer

Cristina T. Lopez – O’Keeffe ( Ukraine 2003-05) has an essay in the new Chicken Soup for the Soul:  Power Moms. These collection of  101 Stories “celebrate the power of choice for stay home, or work from home, while  raising their families.” These high-performing women are now called “Power Moms”! (We use to just call  them, ‘Mom.’) This latest book in the Chicken Soup series was published in March, 2009. RPCVs writers have had quite a few essays over the  years in this popular series. Perhaps all those writers should lobby for their own collection entitled, Chicken Soup For the Peace Corps Soul….just a thought.

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Establishing The Peace Corps: Tenor Of The Times, Post 22

What continues to surprise me is how few people–since that morning in the Mayflower Hotel–have read “A Towering Task.” It was the first draft of defining the Peace Corps; it was the bible of the Peace Corps. When I asked Warren Wiggins about this, he commented wryly, “It’s marvelous that nobody has read it because, you see, in most ways I didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. In some ways I was dead on, but I did recommend that we ship air-conditioned trailers to the Philippines to house the Volunteers. It’s a far cry from the theology of the Peace Corps that evolved, but then, those were the early days.”      What is clear now from the safety of time and distance is that being anti-establishment, amateurish, anti-professional was the reason for the success of the Peace Corps. This attitude permeated the whole organization and PCVs overseas expressed the same sort . . .

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A Peace Corps Book Is A Journey

A friend who is a successful writer/editor/creative writing professor has been reading my blogs sent me these wise words about what would-be Peace Corps writers should do and think about while writing their novels. Peace Corps writers should take writing courses from reputable instructors to learn the basics and to have the opportunity to workshop their writing among peers. They should also read lots of good How-To books on the craft. There are a gazillion of them out there. They should avoid at all costs: exclamation points, stereotyping, clichés, and all other proofs of lazy writing. They should plan on revising each chapter or piece at least ten times. Quality writing is all about revision. They should NOT confuse explicit, titillating, borderline-pornographic sex scenes with “intimacy” with the reader.  A writer of worthwhile prose must work harder and dig deeper to achieve emotional intimacy with his/her reader. I would add that a good . . .

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Establishing The Peace Corps: Making Lemonade In The Maiatico Building, Post 21

The third recommendation that Shriver made to Kennedy in his memorandum was the appointment of a Peace Corps Director. That is, someone besides himself. Shriver listed people he thought should be the Director. Included in this list where Eugene Rostow of Yale, Carroll Wilson of MIT, Gilbert White of the University of Chicago, and Clark Kerr of UCLA. All of these men had had experience with small overseas service programs involving the training or replacement of American students in the Third World. Kennedy rejected all of them. According to Gerard T. Rice in his book The Bold Experiment, Kennedy wanted “the Peace Corps to be an adventurous foreign policy initiative and he did not feel that a bookish type of leader would be consonant with that ethos.”      The Peace Corps in these heavy days was being covered closely by the press, especially by David Halberstam and Peter Braestrup of . . .

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Development is Down This Road

Since 1992 Peace Corps Writers has annually recognized the outstanding writing of Peace Corps Volunteers both returned and still in service. One of the awards is the Peace Corps Experience Award given to the writer of a short piece that best captures the experience of being a Peace Corps Volunteer. We will be sharing the past Peace Corps Experience Award winners with our Peace Corps Worldwide readers over the next few weeks and begin with the very first from 1992 by Abigail Calkins Aguirre. • • • Development Is Down This Road by Abigail Calkins Aguirre (Cameroon 1987–90) FEW RECOGNIZE ME without my trademark Suzuki. Now I have this red Yamaha DT they gave me to replace it. I’m still white, though, or so they keep insisting as I pass by the shouting voices trying to get me to stop to do a favor, chat, or taste the latest in . . .

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