Archive - September 23, 2018

Bill Kruse, who flew into Addis Ababa on August 5, 1962, was born in Chicago and raised in Des Plaines, Illinois. He was a student at the University of Illinois in 1944 when he became a flight engineer with the Army Air Corps and was shipped off to Puerto Rico and the Caribbean Defense Command, where he became the founder and editor of the Caribbean Defense Command News Digest. After his army discharge, he returned to the University of Illinois and before earning his B.A. in English in 1949, he knocked off one semester to hitch-hike with a friend through the South and back to Chicago working as common laborers on the way. For a few years after his graduation he moved from job to job—to the steel mills of South Chicago, to Marshall Field’s furniture department, to the stockyards, a trucking firm. In June, 1953, he became a copywriter . . .