"Hi guys,
Have to make some corrections/elaborations to Danny's last blog.
I did not join the Peace Corps to avoid Vietnam. I had an M.A.T. [M.A.T. Master of Arts Teaching right?], with a likely career in teaching (as did mother and brother John), and teachers got draft deferments, as did Peace Corps Volunteers. When I got back from two years in the Peace Corps I taught for a year, with a deferment, and could have kept that deferment indefinitely. It's only when I left teaching to take a grant at the East West Center that I had an interesting adventure with my draft board. But that's another story.
I joined the Peace Corps in 1963 because I wanted to be of service. Kennedy was inspiring, as is Obama. The Peace Corps invited me to join a group for the Philippines. I accepted, even though I learned that the diet in the Philippines is fish and rice, and I was strictly meat and potatoes. When I returned from the Philippines in 1965 I weighed 128 lbs and looked like I had just left a concentration camp.
Our Peace Corps training consisted of about 3 months at San Francisco State University, followed by a week's leave at home and then two weeks on the Big Island, one of them in Waipio Valley. Conditions in Waipio were rather primitive (I was in the group living in the Borneo longhouse, with no beds and no mosquito nets). Psychiatrists lurked in the bushes, observing us to determine who was neurotic or psychotic enough to merit "deselection" (as we irreverently called it) [Today it would be called "voted off the island"]. Being peered at by half-concealed psychiatrists provokes either laughter or neuroses.
Our group was a teaching group. Having an M.A.T., (as well as a B.S. in biology) I was assigned to Leyte Normal School, a college which produces teachers. Others were assigned to elementary or secondary schools. I was charged with methods of teaching science and health. Two other volunteers had math and english. (Jon Curtis and Auntie Apple had math at different times). We would get the best students, who would spend three weeks, all day, just with one of us teachers on one subject, then rotate to the others. At the end of 9 weeks they would go into the field to student-teaching assignments, and we would go out to observe them. Your mother was a student in the second of three semesters I did there. We got interested in each other, but couldn't pursue anything personal until she had moved out of the class. One of my other students was Auntie Monina, who came back to Minnesota with me and got a four-year scholarship at St. Catherine's University. At least 5 other of my students eventually wound up in the U.S. They were a very bright group.
Besides my regular three semesters at L.N.S., I spent 2 summer sessions in Moro Country -- one at Mindanao State University in Marawi and one at an MSU program in Bongao (most people think of it as Tawi-Tawi). Everybody got along pretty well in those places in those days -- about 90% Muslim and 10% Christian. Now the place has a Muslim separatist movement, terrorist training camps, etc. A haole [Caucasian for you folks who've never heard the pidgin english term] like me would not be safe there nowadays.
After teaching a year in St. Paul, ('65-'66) I got the grant at the East-West Center. The program I was in involved getting a graduate degree at U.H., and I got mine in Public Health. Your mother got admitted to the Graduate School in Education. We both showed up in Honolulu in the summer of 1967. It was a coincidence that involved a bit of plotting and scheming, mail drops, Auntie Apple, etc. Nanay [My moms, mom - my grandma] guys would not have let your mother come if they had any idea that I was also going to be in Honolulu. But that's another story."
Pretty interesting... I hope he sends me more stories... How about your draft board and the East West Center?
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