August 4, 2022 – Peace Corps Worldwide

RPCV Jon Ebeling Dies From Heart Attack (Ethiopia)

Aug 04 2022

Dr. Jon Sutton Ebeling, Professor Emeritus in Political Science, CSU Chico, passed on July 25, 2022, in Napa, California, after a long struggle to recover from a heart attack during May. Dr. Ebeling grew up in southern California with the surfers who gave the Beach Boys something to sing about. There was a movie about one of his fellow surfers, Gidget, based upon a book that her father wrote. Long after he left Santa Monica Jon occasionally ran into some of his beach friends including Gidget and Tom McBribe. Jon was born in Queens, New York in 1938 to Beatrice Coulbourne Ebeling and William Ebeling. After his father passed away in 1939, Jon’s mother brought him and his older brother, Peter, across the U.S., stopping in Arizona first, before finding work as a bookkeeper in Los Angeles. His high school counselors thought that Jon would make a good sheet . . .

Doing the Blitz Peace Corps Recruitment in the ’60s

Aug 04 2022

To Preserve and to Learn by Hal Fleming (Staff: PC/W 1966–68; CD Cote d’Ivoire 1968–72) first published in 2008 at PeaceCorpsWriters.org IN 1966, I CAME DOWN TO WASHINGTON from New York. It was a time in our country when the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War divided the nation. I had been tapped to work as a staff member in the Public Affairs and Recruiting office for the Peace Corps. On my very first work day in Peace Corps/Washington, I was told to join Warren Wiggins, the Deputy Director of the Agency, in his government car for a one-hour ride to a conference for new campus recruiters at Tidewater Inn in Easton, Maryland. Wiggins, preoccupied with his opening speech to the conclave, said very little to me except to read out a phrase or two of buzz-word laden prose, mostly unintelligible to me as the new guy, and . . .

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