Archive - November 15, 2013

In June of ’63 I was so stoked by the President’s Peace Speech at American University that at my graduation from UCLA the following week, my fiancé and I submitted our applications to join the Peace Corps the Summer of ’64 when she graduated.  Peace was coming and I wanted to be a veteran of making peace. I had already served my time in the military years before arriving at UCLA. Upon graduating high school I had signed on with ATSF railroad as a switchman, albeit a grimy job it financed my college education and lots of adventuring.  The jobs offered me after I graduated from UCLA: Bank Mgmt. Trainee $395 and Supermarket Product Sales $495, were half of what I earned as a Santa Fe switchman, a union job. By the first week of November ’63 my buddies had convinced me I should take a White Collar job selling . . .

While Kennedy was being shot, I was at the movies in Addis Ababa.  It was Friday night in the Ethiopian capital, and I took in a flick at the Haile Selassie Theater, a mile or so from my house in Kirkos Kebele.  The movie was something in black and white with Vivien Leigh, but not one of her classic portrayals, Scarlett or Blanche.  It was the kind of grade-B British melodrama that turns up at 9 in the morning on TMC.  While I sat through this so-so episode of respectable sludge, barely paying attention, that little schmuck Oswald was murdering the man who got me to Ethiopia in the first place, the best thing that ever happened to me. Still innocent, I went home to my little pink and green house after the movie and didn’t turn on the radio.  I probably slept well.  It was a quiet neighborhood, down behind . . .