The Peace Corps

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 . . .

On September 30, 1963, Associate Director Nancy McNulty arrived in Bogota from Lima, Peru, where she had served as an Associate Director for six months. She brought with her a specialty, and expertise in the techniques of teaching English as a foreign language. These techniques would be employed by those community development Volunteers who teach English in their spare time. They would also be used by the Volunteers specifically assigned to education programs, both at the second school and university level, who went to work about the time that the number of Volunteers in Colombia passed the 600 mark. scene of the largest Peace Corps effort. The extent of the program required further staff additions. Associate Director Betty Hutchinson arrived in Bogota on January 20, 1964. Although she was born in Rosario, Argentina’s second city, Betty compelled high school in Lincoln, Neb., in 1938. Four years later, she received her . . .

WASHINGTON – Peace Corps Director Jody Olsen released the following statement on the passing of President George H.W. Bush.  https://www.peacecorps.gov/news/library/statement-peace-corps-director-jody-olsen-passing-president-george-hw-bush/ “As we pause for a National Day of Mourning today, we send our deepest condolences to the Bush family. We also express our tremendous gratitude for President Bush, for his leadership, his kindness and his lifetime of serving others. In 1985, as vice president, George H. W. Bush and his wife Barbara joined then-Peace Corps Director Loret Miller Ruppe on a visit to Mali, where they met with Peace Corps volunteers working on projects in agriculture, energy conservation and rural development. Later, as president, he stated, “The United States Peace Corps built its reputation the old-fashioned way, step by step, village by village, family by family, bringing the world a bit closer one friendship at a time.” “George Bush was a steadfast friend to the Peace Corps and we will . . .

John Ross Winnie was named an Associate Director in Colombia to head the educational television project scheduled for that nation, the first such activity to be undertaken by the Peace Corps anywhere in the world. Born in Clear Lake, Iowa, Winnie was named to Phi Beta Kappa at Cornell of Iowa where he graduated in 1936 with a degree in English. In 1941, he obtained the degree Master of Fine Arts at the University of Iowa. His specialty was the theater, and he became director successively of the St. Paul Little Theater, the Belfry Summer Theater at Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and the Youngstown Playhouse in Youngstown, Ohio, which included a children’s theater school. In May, 1943, he enlisted in the Navy, was sent through the Naval School of Photography in Pensacola, Florida, and spent the next two years as an aerial photographer. In June, 1950, he became an associate professor . . .

In April, 1962, Sheldon was joined by his Deputy Director, Ted Banks, who thereby became the first overseas administrator to be transferred by the Peace Corps from one country to another (in his case, from Chile to Colombia.) On July 25, 1963, Banks was named the first Peace Corps Director in Uruguay. By then, the program in Colombia had become the second largest in the world with 561 Volunteers overseas and in training, and enough additional programs had been negotiated to raise the strength of the effort in Colombia beyond that in the Philippines, which had been first. A second group of 31 rural community development workers arrived in Colombia on May 18, 1962. On November 12 of the same year, the third group – consisting of 69 urban community development workers all of whom had taken training in the slums of New York – arrived in Bogota. Just before . . .