Archive - April 8, 2010

While Doug Kiker might have a good claim to be ‘our’ first novelist at the Peace Corps, in my opinion, the finest writer was not all the hot-shots up on the 11th floor, in the Evaluation Division, or with the Public Information Office,  but it was William W. Warner, Executive Secretary for Shriver. Warner was one of those quiet guys who didn’t draw much attention. But in 1977, years after his Peace Corps job, Warner won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction for his first book, Beautiful Swimmers: Watermen, Crabs and the Chesapeake Bay, which was based on his experiences living and working among crab fishermen on the Chesapeake. In many ways, he represented the sheer ‘talent’ that came to the agency in those first years. He had a first class mind, had vast experience, and a wealth of knowledge. Here in somewhat short-hand detail is Warner’s history and training when he began to work for . . .

If there was one HQ staffer who could have walk straight onto the set of the current hit, Mad Men, is was Doug Kiker of Griffin, Georgia. Kiker was the original “mad man”  in his brief time at the Peace Corps during those early days when he was chief of the division of public information. He would leave the Peace Corps in 1963 for the New York Herald Tribune, and on his first week on that job, he was  riding in the press bus in the motorcade with JFK when the president was assassinated.  By 1966, he was with NBC News as an on-air reporter and he would remain with that network for the rest of his life. He died of a heart attack in 1991 at the age of 61. Kiker came from the south, from Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, majoring in English and wanting to be a writer. His first . . .