Peace Corps staff

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The Peace Corps staff member who became the first Peace Corps photographer | Rowland Scherman
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THE PANDEMIC PROPHET about early Peace Corps CD Reginald E. Petty
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Rowland Sherman (PC first photographer) exhibit at Provincetown gallery
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School to use iconic ’60s photos by Rowland Scherman (PC staff) to educate students about race
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Norm Rush (Botswana) — MATING at thirty years

The Peace Corps staff member who became the first Peace Corps photographer | Rowland Scherman

This Profile benefited greatly from a Peace Corps WorldWide publication. by Jeremiah Norris (Colombia 1963-65) • Rowland Scherman writes: Like so many others, I was thrilled by JFKs inaugural speech. Although I wasn’t a professional photographer, I made a few dollars doing portraits out of a makeshift studio or ‘on location’ on the streets of New York City. I shared a crappy little darkroom with a friend. But JFKs words made me think that I could do something more, and could reach a higher potential if I volunteered my work, and myself to the betterment of my country, instead of simply chasing a buck. I thought my services just might somehow be useful to the new administration.” Rowland took a bus to Washington, D. C. to seek work with the Peace Corps, announcing his potential availability as an official photographer. He went to Peace Corps headquarters, then a jumble of . . .

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THE PANDEMIC PROPHET about early Peace Corps CD Reginald E. Petty

  Left Bank Books  at 399 N. Euclid Street, St. Louis, presents St. Louis author Jaye P. Willis, with Reginald E. Petty in our store on November 21st at 6 p.m. Join us in the store or on YouTube Live Page. This is a poetic and prose praise song to Mr. Reginald E. Petty. He is from a small town in Southern Illinois called East St. Louis. It is now considered an economically deprived city, but it never stopped his drive and passion to make it better, as well as himself. The book speaks to his upbringing and what makes him a legend to not only the citizens of his hometown, but throughout the world — particularly in Africa. Mr. Petty was one of the first African American Peace Corps Country Directors, appointed by the U.S. President John F. Kennedy. He served in several African nations and went on to . . .

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Rowland Sherman (PC first photographer) exhibit at Provincetown gallery

  “Spirit of the 60’s” Provincetown Art Association Museum 13 May to June something.   Forever Young; Rowland Scherman – Profile Of An Iconic 1960s Photographer The article (above) in the March 15 issue of  Cape Cod Wave  carries the story by Brian Tracy of photographer Rowland Sherman (PC staff) from the time he was 9 and met Babe Ruth, through his years with the Peace Corps, and up to the opening of the show of his work at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum opening on May 24th. And it’s filled with great shots and stories including the famous blue Bob Dylan halo photo that ended up on his Greatest Hits album.    

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School to use iconic ’60s photos by Rowland Scherman (PC staff) to educate students about race

The Cape Cod Chronicle 3 February 2021 by Susanna Graham-Pye     HARWICH – Educators at the Cape Cod Lighthouse Charter School are eagerly exploring ways to use a recent gift of photographs, many depicting iconic moments from the civil rights movement. In one photo, the leaders and organizers of the August 1963 March on Washington sit at the feet of the sculpture of Abraham Lincoln in his memorial; in another Marlon Brando stands with his arm slung over James Baldwin’s shoulder, as the pair looks out over the National Mall on that same day. Faces from the crowd fill other photos: of volunteers at workstations, of college students painting signs and children earnestly watching it all. Pictures show Jackie Robinson at the march, hugging his son David, and Harry Belafonte speaking; Peter Paul and Mary singing and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. flanked by Floyd McKissick, Matthew Ahmann and Reverend Eugene . . .

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Norm Rush (Botswana) — MATING at thirty years

Thanks for the ‘heads up’ from Bill Preston (Thailand 1977–80)   Incorporate Everything, Understand Everything Norman Rush’s Mating Scott Sherman The Point Magazine • “In Africa, you want more, I think.” With that laconic affirmation begins one of the strangest and most sublime American novels of the last half-century. The protracted monologue of a 32-year-old Stanford University anthropologist who is adrift and loveless in Botswana at the dawn of the Reagan era, Mating was published by Knopf in 1991 and went on to win the National Book Award for fiction. John Updike, writing in the New Yorker, hailed it as “rather aggressively brilliant.” It was Norman Rush’s (CD Botswana 1978-83) first novel. He was 58 when it appeared. All through the 1960s and 1970s, Rush, who was born in San Francisco in 1933, had written experimental fiction with negligible success. In 1978, he and his wife Elsa moved from Rockland County, New York, where he . . .

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