The Peace Corps

By the time John Todd arrived in November to conduct a school survey of the Eastern Region, the Michelmore incident was closed. Born in Austin, Texas, raised in Memphis, Tenn., Todd graduated from McKinley Technical High School in Washington, D.C. in 1940, just in time for the war. Trained in Texas as an aerial navigator, he flew 36 combat missions over Europe before he was sent back to Texas an athletic officer for the Central Flying Training Command, before he returned to Europe as squadron navigator for the 33rd Fighter Group (P-51s). He married his childhood sweetheart, Frances Atkinson of Washington. “The war was over. I was young with no particular plans. They were asking people to extend their terms of service so I just stayed in for another year—at Neubiberg air base outside Munich.” Later he would serve in Korea and when after that war, in 1956, he received . . .

William E. Hintz of Milwaukee, Wis., was the first overseas staffer ever hired by the Peace Corps. On April 17. 1961, Hintz received a telephone call from John Alexander, a former ICA colleague who was then Peace Corps Regional Director for Africa. Alexander wanted to know if Hintz could be in Nigeria four days hence to carry out a school survey. “Can I think it over?” Hintz asked. “Sure Alexander replied, “for about 30 seconds.” Hintz later reported that “I didn’t actually make it to Nigeria until the 28th of April. But I did the survey.” On May 26, Brent Ashabranner was designated Acting Representative in Nigeria, and Hintz became Acting Deputy Representative. On July 15, he returned to Milwaukee to wind up his affairs and to welcome an adopted daughter, Joy, a Korean orphan, obtained through the famed auspices of Oregon farmer Harry Holt. Four days later, at 10 . . .

In reading the recent Peace Corps Writers article about Lee St. Lawrence I discovered that Lee was a Peace Corps guy.  He had never mentioned this background in all the time I knew him.  We were among a tiny handful of ex-patriots in Ahwaz, Iran, where he was the top adviser to the Iranian Director of the Khuzistan Water and Power Authority (KWPA) and one of the last foreign nationals involved in this project.  I met Lee during the first couple of weeks after I arrived in Ahwaz when my Peace Corps assignment had not yet solidified.  He invited me and the three other PCVs in Ahwaz to come to the KWPA housing compound where he lived whenever we needed a break.  The residents of the 50 or so KWPA-owned western style houses had access to a swimming pool, a cinema, a library holding English books and a club (“cloob” . . .

If you’re in the DC area, please join us for a special tribute to Senator Harris Wofford on Monday, December 17, 2018 at the Embassy of Malawi. You can view the invitation here, and purchase tickets by making a donation to CorpsAfrica, here. Hope to see you there! Liz Fanning Founder and Executive Director, CorpsAfrica Morocco RPCV 1993-95 Mobile: (212) 831-5457 Email: lfanning@corpsafrica.org Skype: lizfanning Mailing address: P.O. Box 5414 – Washington, DC 20016 Website: www.corpsafrica.org

His own flourishing electronics company handled such fascinating assignments as the design and construction of the atomic reactor controls for the first atom-powered U.S. merchant ship, the Savannah. For Dick Graham personally it was probably just as important that the firm offered him a constructive outlet for his skills as a high lever tinkerer. From atomic controls engineering to Peace Corps recruiting might seem as first glance to compose a disconnected journey. Not so, Graham insists, explaining that the nature of his duties with his company made his transition to the Peace Corps perfectly natural. “I was my own advertising manager—writing releases, holding sales meetings, editing the house organ—all the kinds of things one does in recruiting.” Here in Washington, he admits to “no regrets about leaving the company,” and insists that he doesn’t want to “hear any nonsense about financial sacrifice. In the Peace Corps, I am doing exactly . . .

The Malawi program, originally explored by Harris Wofford and later negotiated by Bob Hellawell in August 1962, eventually brought 112 Volunteers to the new nation, to teach in secondary schools and a teacher training institute. It also re-directed the services of scholar-athlete Robert Poole, who had originally been scheduled to go to Addis Ababa. Born in Wilmington, Del., and raised in Saylesville, R.I. and Litchfield, Conn., Poole attended Yale on a four-year Northwestern Connecticut Alumni Scholarship. He was middleweight boxing champion of Yale in 1953. He played basketball and baseball I the college intramural league. He participated in hockey and swimming and as a rugby player, participated in the Rug y Week tournaments in Bermuda for three years. (This was a result of the fact that spring football practice was banned when he was a sophomore—all the football players turned to rugby in the spring.) Before he received his degree . . .

World War II and the Army sent Lee St. Lawrence into combat duty in Europe. Somehow or other, he didn’t get to the United States again for 17 years. Born in Brockton, Mass., on January 2, 1923, St. Lawrence worked his way through high school as a gandy dancer on the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad. He received a classical education in Greek and Latin at a Redemptorist Fathers junior college in Pennsylvania. After his war service, he took advantages of the GI. Bill and went on with his studies—overseas. He earned extra money while at Oxford University with a job piling mail sacks in London’s Paddington Station. After additional work at Dublin’s Trinity Collee and the Institute de Science Politique in Paris, he launched a career as a free-lance writer for British newspapers. Six months of traveling with gypsies in Spain yielded a Sunday feature series. Another . . .

His 18th birthday arrived in 1944, in the middle of World War II, so David Boubion left Los Angeles, where he was born, by signing aboard the wartime Navy. He served aboard a destroyer in the campaigns at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. Discharged in 1946, he went home to resume the social work that he had become involved in before the war as an off-shoot of his work as a camp counsellor and camps director. Enrolled in night classes at East Los Angeles Junior College, he organized a teenage group of Mexican-Americans in his neighborhood and got 60 to 80 members meeting once a week to participate in social and recreational activities. “I thought to myself, ‘This is a lot of nonsense—doing this kind of work on my own and for nothing. I might as well make a living at it.” He went to work for the Catholic Youth Organization . . .