The Peace Corps

  Regardless of what else might be said about the “Gale Method” it established two important elements for the Peace Corps. HQ staff now understood how recruitment was done, and they had acquired the skills that would make them effective recruiters. More importantly was that within the first years, the Peace Corps was established as part of campus life. Peace Corps Recruiters would be invited back every year, and would be welcomed, often with the same deference and cooperation shown in 1963. By now, and this was early in 1965, the Peace Corps was starting the “In, Up & Out” policy that Robert Textor had crafted in a memo for the agency, and Bob Gale was thinking of leaving. He didn’t want to be Director of Recruiting for Life, as Shriver had declared at the senior staff meeting in March 1963. Gale wanted to leave when the going was good. . . .

Lawrence Grobel (Ghana 1968-71) is the author of 32 books and hundreds of magazine articles. Among his honors are a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for his fiction; Special Achievement Awards from PEN for his Conversations with Capote, and Playboy for his interviews with Barbra Streisand, Marlon Brando and Robert De Niro; and the Prix Litteraire from The Syndicat Francais de la Critique de Cinema for his Al Pacino: In Conversation with Lawrence Grobel. He has been a Contributing Editor for Playboy, Movieline, World (New Zealand), and Trendy (Poland) and has been called “A legend among journalists” by Writer’s Digest, and “The Mozart of Interviewers” by Joyce Carol Oates. He served in the Peace Corps, teaching at the Ghana Institute of Journalism; created the M.F.A. in Professional Writing for Antioch University; and taught in the English and Honors Departments at UCLA. He has served as a jury member at . . .

In the third year of the Peace Corps–1963–a booklet was published by the agency entitled “Who’s Who in the Peace Corps Washington.” Here is one photo of the early Staff Meetings with Shriver at the head of the table.       A list of the top 40 employees are profiled in this booklet. Only three profiles, however, were of women: Alice Gilbert (Director of the Division of United Nations and International Agency Programs); Ruth Olson (Special Assistant to the Chief of the Division of Volunteer Field Support); Dorothy Mead Jacobsen (Chief of the Division of Personnel). There was also a list of “Charter Members” of the agency. They have a photo and a paragraph. A total of 21 employees were profiled. Of them 7 were women: Jean Hundley, a secretary; Nan Tucker McEvoy, Deputy Director of Africa Programs; Sally Bowles, daughter of Ambassador Chester Bowles; Helen Farrall, receptionist; Gloria Gaston, African Region; Nancy Gore, . . .

BOB GALE Bob Gale was six foot two, blue eyed, and owned a big personality.  He was an academic coming to the Peace Corps from being the vice president for development at Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, and a Humphrey supporter. Gale had decided he wanted to go to Washington with the New Frontier and work for the Peace Corps and got in touch with Hubert Humphrey, who he knew, and a meeting was arranged with Bill Haddad (another early Mad Man) who was already working at the agency. William F. Haddad was the Associate Director for the Office of Planning and Evaluation. (At the age of 14 in post-Pearl Harbor, he had enlisted in the Army Air Corps pilot training program and advanced to cadet squadron commander before his true age was discovered.) Haddad (who went on to become a Congressman from New York State) had come to the Peace Corps from being . . .

Taylor  Dibbert (Guatemala 2006-08)  is a writer, journalist, and poet in Washington, DC. He’s author of the Peace Corps memoir Fiesta of Sunset. Invictus, his debut poetry collection, is due out in January 2024, and he’s expected to have three other full-length collections published later that year. Taylor is a Program Director at the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ). Before joining the ICFJ team, he worked at the US Counsel on Sri Lanka, a DC-based advocacy organization. Prior to that, he worked for human rights NGOs in Sri Lanka and Zimbabwe. Taylor began his career as a Peace Corps volunteer in Guatemala. Over the years, his writing and journalism has appeared in a variety of outlets, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, World Politics Review and HuffPost. Taylor holds degrees from Columbia University and the University of Georgia. Fiesta of Sunset: The Peace Corps, Guatemala and . . .

I mentioned that in those early days of 1960s the agency was full of Mad Men (and a few Mad Women) who were living in a world-of-work atmosphere very much like the provocative AMC TV drama Mad Men. They were wonderful characters, some charming, many nice, and a few not very . . .  vOne terrific guy was Meridan Hunt “Med” Bennett. He was sort of a  ‘Peace Corps Jimmy Stewart.’ I met him in Ethiopia in, I think, 1965. He was totally unlike the smooth types that crowded Shriver’s big conference table back in D.C., but he was smarter than most, a writer, and a farmer who had grown up in the Canadian Rockies. It was so remote a farm, he said, that he had to ride three miles on a horse to attend a one-room schoolhouse. vHe farmed when haying was done with horses and a beaver slide stacker. He rode . . .

By 1970 most of the country desk officers had been Volunteers and APCDs in the field.  We were a noisy, can-do bunch, within the NANESA Region roughly half females. I was on the Nepal desk my second 30-month tour from mid-1970 through early ‘73. Don Hess was the Peace Corps Director, leading the formerly independent agency that was then part of ACTION. On my last day Hess called me to his office and asked me to contract to lead a team to revise the entire Peace Corps Manual. [It was not lost on me that the last gasp of a dying bureaucracy was to redo their rule book.] I did agree, provided I could hire an editor and an experienced typist. I also asked for someone from A&F to serve with me.  Hess agreed. Don Romine joined our little team. My first act was to visit the Peace Corps print . . .

Peace Corps Chronology 1961-2010 by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) iUniverse May 2011 120 pages $9,99 (Kindle); $12.60 (Paperback); $22.95 (Hardcover)   Peace Corps Bibliography by Lawrence F. Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) Create Space Publishing May 2018 76 pages $5.00 (Kindle); $9.99 (Paperback)     Here are two books by Lawrence Lihosit (Honduras 1975-77) full of valuable historical information about the early years of the agency. Lawrence’s travels and work has taken him from southwestern Alaska to Argentine Pampas. His studies have included master’s in urban planning at la Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in Mexico City, art and ccreative writing at Skyline College in San Bruno, California and education at. California State University Fresno. Now retired, he earned his living as an urban planner for many years, working in Honduras, Mexico, Alaska, Arizona and California. He is author of some twenty books.  

Early Peace Corps Women Staff Who Worked for the Mad Men  Helene Farrall The first face that a visitor saw at the Peace Corps Headquarters usually was receptionist Helene. Mrs. Farrall, who studied at the University of Maryland and recently had worked for the American Friends of the Middle East, was born and raised in Faulkner, Md., and she still lived there. Her dedication to the Peace Corps was shown by the fact that she undertook a daily commune of 45 miles in each direction.   Sally Bowles Sally Bowles, daughter of Ambassador Chester Bowles, was an honor graduate in history from Smith College where she was named editor of the college newspaper and was elected president of the student body. She had already traveled and lived in Southeast Asia, India, Mexico, Morocco, France and Spain. She was a legislative assistant to Congressman John Brademas (Dem-Ind) and as administrative assistant . . .