Miscellany

As Carrie says, “PCVs and RPVCs make friends everywhere  we go.”

John Coyne (Ethiopia 1962-64) Send me your jpeg photo of you in your Peace Corps years on a camel, elephant, horse, donkey, mule, etc. and we’ll all vote on the most outrageous photo for an award to be given at the NPCA conference this coming June at Berkeley. (You don’t have to be there to win.) You’ll  win real $$$ and a prize! Send the jpeg photo with your name and country and years to me and I’ll post them on our site: www.peacecorpsworldwide.org. Winners will be selected by the votes sent in from the community of viewers. So send your own photo and vote for your favorite photo. Good luck! p.s. I’m on the one on the right in this photo taken by Mike McCaskey (Ethiopia 1965-67) and I’m not a candidate in the contest.

Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) is in touch with the Gorkha Foundation that is working to get relief supplies and services to communities at the Nepal Earthuake epicenter. Here is a link to that site: April 28 2015 Friends, Many villagers in Nepal are under siege, struggling to survive from the earthquake and aftershocks that have struck the Himalayas. Most of the media and relief attention, so far, has been centered on Kathmandu Valley and Mt Everest… But it is now very clear that remote mountain communities at the epicenter – the Gorkha region, including both Gorkha and Lamjung Districts – have equally if not more serious issues. Whole villages have been devastated and recent and ongoing rains have triggered destructive landslides and threaten of more danger to health and habitation. The Director of a Nepalese NGO (non-governmental organization), The Gorkha Foundation (of which I am an advisory board member), is . . .

Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation About PCCF In January 2014, the United States Congress authorized the Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation to establish a commemorative work on Federal land in Washington, D.C. Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation is the public name of the Peace Corps Foundation, a District of Columbia 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation. The Design Competition The Peace Corps Commemorative Foundation (PCCF) is sponsoring a two-stage, national design competition to select an artistically exceptional design concept for a permanent commemorative work in the heart of Washington, DC. This competition will provide designers from all across the United States an opportunity to create a compelling work of public art that will be bold and inspirational. The design should focus on and express American ideals and values that are the essence of the Peace Corps and Peace Corps service. It should be about America and our aspirations as a people, and about the Peace Corps . . .

Don Messerschmidt (Nepal 1963-65) who has a long history of working for his host country has sent me the following link which is the official Nepal Peace Corps link, and updated since the earthquake, for those who wish to know the situation and help the victims. Thanks, Don. http://www.peacecorps.gov/resources/faf/nepal/

As he announced Warren Weinstein’s death Thursday, U.S. President Barack Obama praised what he said was Weinstein’s lifelong dedication to service, first as a Peace Corps volunteer and later as a USAID contractor. Weinstein, Obama said, was someone who “willingly left the comforts of home to help the people of Pakistan,” focusing his work on helping families escape poverty to give their children a better life. “This was a man who basically dedicated his life to service, to people in general, but especially to people in a country where the standard of living was low and difficult. … It’s tragic that he was killed the way he was,” former U.S. Ambassador Dan Simpson said. In a letter to the Washington Post, however, Weinstein said he had been a country director in Togo and Ivory Coast but did not mention being a PCV.

RUTH MacKENZIE SAXE, Deputy Director of the Peace Corps under Carolyn Payton in the early ’70s, and a long time Washington resident, died at The Washington Home on March 15, 2015 at the age of 86. The cause of her death was complications from a series of strokes. A divorcee with two small children, she drove across the country from Minnesota, arriving in Washington on August 28, 1963, the day of Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech” on the National Mall and worked for the Peace Corps as a program office in the Caribbean-area region until 1970, yet another Washington staffer to break Shriver’s famous 5-year-rule. In 1970 Saxe became the first Director of Volunteers at the citizens’ lobby Common Cause where she helped originate “The Washington Connection” linking DC area volunteers to the 435 congressional districts. She later served in a number of other positions at that . . .

The Man Who Made the Masters This is the first in a series on Clifford Roberts, the co-founder of Augusta National Golf Club and the chairman of the Masters Tournament from 1934 to 1976. By John Coyne FROM THE HILLSIDE AT AUGUSTA NATIONAL one looks into a natural amphitheater and across a landscape of interlacing fairways and greens, golden sand and blue-green stately pines. The old Berckman’s nursery fills smooth valleys and soft hills to the far edges of Amen Corner with a maze of color: azalea, dogwood, and redbud. In so many ways, this ancient acreage and southern plantation club house still has the look, code and culture of those antebellum times. It is, also, a very modern golf course, as architect Robert Trent Jones defined it in The Complete Golfer. Jones wrote, “The Augusta National is the epitome of the type of course which appeals most keenly to the . . .

The Man Who Made the Masters, Part II This is the second part of a series on Clifford Roberts, the co-founder of Augusta National Golf Club and the chairman of the Masters Tournament from 1934 to 1976. By John Coyne CLIFFORD ROBERTS WAS BORN IN MORNING SUN, Iowa, in 1894 and reared in small towns in Iowa and Texas. He never attended college and didn’t graduate from high school. He left in the ninth grade after a fight with the principal. His family life was troubled; his father couldn’t keep a job; his mother was suicidal. And yet Roberts became one of the most iconic figures in the world of golf. At the age of 19, Roberts, a traveling salesman of men’s suits, was on the road in the Midwest when he heard his mother had taken her own life. “It was a tragic event,” writes Steve Eubanks in his . . .

The Man Who Made the Masters, Part III By John Coyne CLIFFORD ROBERTS IS OFTEN REMEMBERED (and quoted) for saying about Augusta National Golf Club and the Masters Tournament, “As long as I’m alive, golfers will be white and caddies will be black.” Today, however, it is difficult to find an African-American caddie looping at the Masters as all the pros (and amateurs) bring their own caddies, and they are, almost exclusively, Caucasian. (The first full-time white Augusta National caddie, around 1986, was Tripp Bowden who writes about it in his book Freddie & Me, Augusta National Legendary Caddy Master). In a 1997 article in Sports Illustrated  Rick Reilly would write, “Someday Eldrick (Tiger) Woods, a mixed-race kid with a middle-class background who grew up on a municipal course in the sprawl of Los Angeles, may be hailed as the greatest golfer who ever lived, but it’s likely that his . . .