Archive - January 21, 2010

There are Advance Men and there are Advance Men, and then there was Michael Sher. I heard late yesterday that Michael Sher had passed away in his sleep early Wednesday morning in New York City. It is so unlike Michael to just “pass away in his sleep” for this was a guy who did not, as the poet Dylan Thomas wrote, “go gentle into that good night.” Now this is a true story, told to me in D.C. when I first back from Ethiopia in the summer of ’64. It was told to me on a recruitment trip with Bob Gale, the director of recruitment for the Peace Corps. Sher had not been a PCV, but he was working for Gale, who had developed the famous blitz recruitment system in the Peace Corps in the early days of the agency. Sher had gone to work for Gale without a salary. He was . . .