Archive - October 19, 2016

Richard Wiley (Korea 1967-69) is the author of several novels including Soldiers in Hiding, winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and Ahmed’s Revenge, winner of Peace Corps Writers Maria Thomas Fiction Award. He is professor emeritus at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and now lives in Tacoma, Washington. His new book–just published–is entitled Bob Stevenson and has just been published by Bellevue Literary Press. It is the story of a Dr. Ruby Okada who meets a charming man with a Scottish accent in the elevator of her psychiatric hospital. Unaware that he is an escaping patient, she falls under his spell, and her life and his are changed forever by the time they get to the street. Who is the mysterious man? Is he Archie B. Billingsly, suffering from dissociative identity disorder and subject to brilliant flights of fancy and bizarre, violent fits? Or is he the reincarnation of Robert . . .

One of the early staff  of the Peace Corps that I spoke to about the post card incident was Warren Wiggins, then the Associate Director for the Office of Program Development and Operations, and later to be the Deputy Director. Wiggins told me that the staff in 1961 were waiting for something to happen overseas with the Volunteers. Too many young people were overseas, he said, and there “had to be” an incident of some kind. On the afternoon of October 15, 1961, they got their incident when word reached Washington about Marjorie Michelmore and her postcard. Gathering at HQ on that October Sunday afternoon, the senior staff was initially worried about Marjorie’s life, as well as the lives of the other Volunteers. Wiggins also realized that “The Peace Corps could be thrown out at any moment. It could be the domino theory–first we’re kicked out of Nigeria, then out of Ghana, . . .