Miscellany

Below is a poem I wrote about that occasion, trying to capture how it was for us, my family.  My father was a pastor exiled after a disastrous personal and professional failure in an inner city church to a remote rural parish in Coshocton County, Ohio.  We were placed in a drafty, beat-up old parsonage in a godforsaken little burg cruelly named Blissfield.  My 23-year-old sister was troubled and miserable and living with us even though she was engaged to be married to a rather strange little man in another town.  My mother took to her bed most days and was in rampaging change-of-life. Then JFK got killed. Even though we were Republicans and had opposed his election, it affected us deeply in that already desperately gloomy time.  I was taking the school bus every day into a small high school in Warsaw, Ohio, where I actually enjoyed myself — . . .

Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy At 2:00 a.m. on October 14, 1960, Senator John F. Kennedy addressed students on the steps of the University of Michigan Union. In his speech, he challenged the students to give two years of their lives to help people in countries of the developing world. The following is an excerpt of his short address to the students that night. I come here tonight delighted to have the opportunity to say one or two words about this  campaign that is coming into the last three weeks… How many of you who are going to be doctors, are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers, how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world? On your willingness to do that, not merely to serve one year or two years in the service, . . .

JFK Library Invites Public to Participate in Online Tribute to JFK AnIdeaLivesOn.org Puts a Modern Face on the Enduring Impact of America’s 35th President Boston, MA – The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Foundation today announced the launch of AnIdeaLivesOn.org, an online tribute to President John F. Kennedy that aims to create a multigenerational conversation about the many ways in which the legacy of our nation’s 35th president lives on today. Named for President Kennedy’s poignant observation that, “A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on,” the project invites the public to participate in the creation of an interactive documentary, putting a modern, human face on the enduring impact of John F. Kennedy. Stories from Congressman John Lewis, comedian Conan O’Brien, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy, actor Martin Sheen, House Leader Nancy Pelosi, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, journalist Luke Russert, and inaugural poet . . .

This Friday, November 22, 2013, as part of his remembrances surrounding the assassination of JFK, President Obama will meet  privately at the White House with the Peace Corps Staff and Volunteers from the Peace Corps. Have you been invited?

JFK was assassinated within a few weeks of our arrival in Nepal. I was posted with two other PCVs in a small, remote town in Nepal’s Himalayan mid-hills. We first heard the news early on Saturday morning (Friday night in the USA). Saturdays were government holidays, and most of the civil servants who worked in our town, the district headquarters, were at home for the weekend. For some of them, home was several hours walk away over the hills. But, to our astonishment, many of them showed up at our doorstep with the shocking news, expressing their grief. At the sound of loud knocking on our door, I opened it to a frantic villager shouting in Nepali that someone had shot Kennedy. We were dumbfounded. He was quickly followed by others. We I turned on our Zenith Transoceanic shortwave radio, but could find only one VOA station through the static, transmitting from . . .

November 22 is a sacred day of remembrance for me. It was on this day fifty years ago that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. Even after all these years, I feel the dramatic events of that day as if they occurred yesterday. When this day comes and I think about how the life of our president was brought to a tragic end by an assassin’s bullets, I cannot hold back my tears. Like everyone else who was alive at that time, I can remember clearly where I was and what I was doing when I heard the news that the president had been shot. I was eighteen years old at the time and struggling with my first semester of college at Wichita State University. I worked and lived at a mortuary-ambulance company. The job had kept me up all night and early on the November 22 I . . .

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 . . .

From The Peace Corps Press Office: WASHINGTON, D.C., Nov. 14, 2013 – In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan, the Peace Corps would like to thank all of the individuals and organizations that have expressed interest in working with the agency to offer support to those affected by this devastating storm. The Peace Corps and the Philippines have a long history. More than 8,700 volunteers have served in the Philippines since the Peace Corps was established in 1961 – more than any other country in the world. Below find ways you can support relief efforts to help those in need in the Philippines. The Peace Corps Philippines Country Fund helps fund volunteer and community projects through the  Contributing to this fund supports long-term development efforts throughout the country. One hundred percent of all contributions to the Philippines Country Fund are allocated to approved PCPP development projects that meet Peace Corps small . . .

I was in the Atlantic Ocean, sailing on a ship back to Africa, and I was nine years old. Back in the day, when people asked each other where they were when Kennedy was shot, you heard riveting tales of mass hysteria, school shutdowns, weeping teachers, and long family vigils in front of the television as Walter Cronkite fought back tears while removing those stone-age black glasses as he officially announced to America that it was over. Some years later, when I would ask folks where they were when Kennedy was shot, there were two reactions: 1)  Ted Kennedy was shot? 2)  Uh…I wasn’t even born till 20 years later. Flash forward, and President Kennedy is to the Twitter generation what President Lincoln was to us: history! But back to that ship.  Ours was a nomadic Foreign Service family with my father serving in the U.S. Embassy in Ghana.  That . . .

On November 22, 1963, I was in the middle of pre-deployment training at UCLA as a member of Nigeria IX. My wife and I were going to be English teachers. That morning our group was listening to a British professor lecture on something historical or cross-cultural when someone came to the back of the hall and called in that JFK had just been shot. After a brief moment to take in this shocking news the lecturer went on. A few minutes later someone again called in from the door at the rear of the lecture hall to tell us that the president was dead. For a minute we just sat there. The professor said something or other about what a terrible thing it was and then said he thought the best thing was to continue the lecture. (He was from the British stiff-upper-lip school.) But within a few minutes individual . . .

The noontime news on my car radio reported that the President was in Dallas, Texas. Any mention of JFK boosted my adrenalin and brought back memories; my connection to the President was personal. In September 1961 my Peace Corps group (Colombia I) met with JFK in the East Room of the White House. And, several months later, he and Jackie were welcomed by millions of Colombians and two-dozen volunteers in Bogotá. The love affair between Colombians and our Catholic President was pervasive and mystical. His picture was posted on mud walls of huts throughout the country. Volunteers in Colombia and all of Latin America were referred to in the press and radio as los hijos de Kennedy – Kennedy’s children. The connection opened hearts, doors and countless bottles of beer. In 1963 in the USA, the Peace Corps was expanding; up to 100,000 a year was a number kicked around. . . .

I saw this film last night. It is great! I had the opportunity to relive my Twenties. A large section of it is film from the Peace Corps 50th Anniversary, events as well as the March to Arlington. Rowland Scherman went around the world for the Peace Corps in the fall of ’62 and there are photographs from that era, as well as great images and stories about Bob Dylon, The Beatles, Arthur Ashe, Joni Mitchell, Judy Collins, all the Kennedys and Shrivers, and maybe you! Check it out. Thursday Night Nov. 14. 7:30pm Cape Ann Community Cinema 21 Main Street Gloucester, MA http://vimeo.com/ondemand/eyeonthe60s/66046480

I was on a Peace Corps recruiting blitz at University of Pennsylvania sitting at a table in the student union handing out brochures for “the toughest job you’ll ever love,” jawboning students to take the plunge, having just returned from two years as a PCV in Nigeria. Word of JFK’s assassination circulated through the union with a shocked buzz. The sudden death of our young president seemed unreal. The recruiting team immediately headed back to DC by van. At the recruiting table with us was a relative of LBJ, who had been foisted on the PC staff. I thought she was going to break a leg in her rush to get back to Washington. Peace Corps headquarters, then across Lafayette Park from the White House, was a stricken place. Everyone, including me, felt like royalty had been assassinated. Many early PCVs shared the feeling that JFK had personally empowered us, . . .

RPCV Jason Carter (South Africa 1997-99) the grandson of former President Jimmy Carter has decided to run for governor of Georgia. President Carter says Georgia faces serious challenges and would “greatly benefit from a smart and fresh leader focused on improving our schools, creating opportunities for a more prosperous middle class and restoring a sense of trust and transparency back to state government.” Carter’s decision shakes up the 2014 race. Republican Gov. Nathan Deal already faces two primary opponents and now will deal with the prospect of a Carter campaign that will likely be well-financed. Jason’s great-grandmother, Lillian Carter (India 1967-69) published Away From Home: Letters to my Family, in 1977. Jason’s book on his tour in Lochiel, South Africa, where he taught, was published by National Geographic in 2003. It is entitled, Power Lines, and details the racial divides he experienced in South Africa while living near the Swaziland . . .