Phillips Academy’s motto, non sibi (“not for oneself”), epitomizes the essence of Peace Corps service. This motto was invoked in 1967 by the first awarding of the highest honor at Andover, the Claude Moore Fuess Award, bestowed upon graduates who had served in the Peace Corps.
Note
The compiler of this 2022 compendium is Randy Hobler, Phillips Academy class of 1964, who, after Princeton, was a Peace Corps volunteer in Libya 1968-1969. He wrote a unique book—interviewing 101 of his fellow volunteers for a kaleidoscopic view of the country—entitled 101 Arabian Tales: How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya, edited by Bob Marshall, class of 1964, who was with him in Libya. His inspiration for the compendium was a simple question, “I wonder what Andover and Abbot grads were in the Peace Corps?” The research resulted in adding Andover faculty to the list and also uncovered precursors to the Peace Corps–Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy missionaries starting in the late 18th century-—whose sometimes amazing stories are captured at the end of the compendium.
This compendium includes stories and photographs of 161 Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy alumni who served in the Peace Corps in 69 countries from the class of 1939 through the class of 2015.
The sources of this compendium include Andover Magazine including class notes, the Pot Pourri (Phillips Academy yearbooks), articles and obituaries; public information online and at libraries; and emails and letters from alumni and their families provided specifically for this project. If, for any reason an alumna/us wishes to have any of her/his/their information, removed, they can contact Archives and Special Collections archives@andover.edu.
Acknowledgements: I am deeply indebted to Paige Roberts, Director of Archives and Special Collections at the Oliver Wendell Holmes Library, for uncovering troves of invaluable information and for providing scores of items of assistance. I am also very grateful to all the Class Secretaries for providing classmate information of various kinds.
Each alumna/us is listed (alphabetically) here with a link to more information (arranged chronologically by class year) below. Faculty who have served in the Peace Corps are included in this list with additional at the end of the alumni section of this compendium.
Abbott, Sam 1959
Abugov, Alex 2007
Adams, Joseph 2003
Alcantara, Jessica 2004
Alissa, Aysser Ben 2007
Allis, Nicholas 1960
Almquist, David 1960
Andersson, Allen 1962
Andrews, Duncan 1968
Archibald, John 1960
Arnold, John 1959
Aronson, Matthew 2001
Askew, Morgan 2011
Asplundh-Smith, Allegra 2004
Atewologon, Dorothy 2004
Atha, Henry 1959
Atkinson, Kim 1961
Austin, Anne 1992
Avrett, Sam 1983
Aylward, Bruce
Barton, Joseph 1960
Batsimm, Michael 1980
Bearden, Sarah Richardson
Bemis, John 1964
Bennett, Meridan 1945
Blackmer, Alan Jr. 1955
Bourne, Donald 1952
Boyd, Lisa 1982
Bramwell, Jerry 1996
Bridges, Chandler 1959
Broderick, Francis 1939
Brownrigg, Peter 1960
Burdeau, Zachary 2009
Burgess-Herbert, Sarah 1989
Burnett, Joyce 1982
Burridge, Sandra Moulton 1959
Butler, John 1961
Carmody, Robert 1954
Carr, John 1964
Cathcart, Pat 1964
Catledge, Nancy Grier-Moen 1954
Chayes, Sarah 1980
Cheatham, Jared 2007
Chessman, Robert 1964
Coffin, William Sloane 1942
Cohen, Andrew 1961
Cone III, Thomas E. biology instructor, 1966-2017
Corwith, Katherine 1999
Cutler, Thomas 1958
Danforth, Nicholas 1960
Deorocki, Brendan 2015
Dey, Charles, teaching fellow, 1956-1960
Doherty, Paul 1963
Edgerly, David 1960
Edwards, Bruce 1964
Edwards, Samuel 1960
Faggi, John 1963
Farrington, Brendan 1947
Fine, Paul 1958
Foster, Jerry, English instructor, 1969-1976
Foster, Whitney 1960
Fox, Thomas 1957
Gallagher, Colm 1994
Garrity, Jack 1964
Gihlstorf, Catherine 1981
Gosk, Stephanie 1990
Gottfried, Daniel 2012
Gould, Robert (Dave) 1955
Greenwood, Phebe Ann Prescott 1974
Guggenheim, Jennifer 1986
Haas, Alexis Olans 1997
Harris, King 1961
Harrison Jr., Edward Webb 1960
Haviland, William 1966
Healey, Todd 1968
Hearey, Clement 1972
Hilliard, Andrew 1979
Hobart, Ralph 1962
Hobler, Randy 1964
Holmes, Hank 1953
Hubbard, Erica 2001
Hughes, Alanna 2004
Hurley, Dorian 1997
Huvelle, Jeff 1964
Jacobi, Robert 1959
James, Jay 1965
Jones, Elizabeth Giblin 1965
Jones, Kirby 1959
Keeney, Robert 1962
King, Wendy 1973
Kingston III, William 1960
Kinsolving, Rachel Burns 1999
Koehler, Daniel 1996
Lamontagne, Ray 1953
Lawrence, Thomas 1955
Lawrence, William 1981
Leavitt-Carlson, Seth 1996
Lord, Ted 1979
MacMurray, Frank 1961
Makuku, Owiso (Lisa) 1986
Marshall, Robert 1964
Mason, David 1964
Mayers, Arthur 1963
McGraw, Kenneth 1962
McManus, Margaret Bottcher 1985
Messick III, Brinkley 1965
Miner III, Joshua L. instructor & administrator, 1952-1985
Moore, Michael 1956
Most, Stephen 1961
Mullen,Chris 1976
Munger, Mark 1961
Nichols, Michael 1962
Nuttall, Carol Laaff 1962
O’Brien, Mike 1960
Odusote, Gloria Oluwayayo 2009
O’Hearn, Erin 1991
O’Mahony, Lila Nichols 1990
Payne, Herb 1964
Peckham, Francis B. 1960
Pitts, Robert 1955
Potvin, Gregg 1944
Pryde, Kathleen, physics instructor, 1994-2013
Pryor, Sarah Linnemann 2006
Quezeugue, Chelsea Renee 2010
Rainville, Allison 1990
Rieffel, Alexis 1959
Robertz, Paul 1977
< ahref=”#Rodes”>Rodes, Clifton 1962
Roehrig, Matthew 1964
Rokous, Christopher 1980
Rowe, Charlotte Kendrick 1995
Rugen, Barbara 1963
Santoro, Katherine 2015
Schulz, Peter 1963
Schwartz, Charlie 1954
Scott, Henry 1947
Secundy, Gerald 1959
Shaw, Carolyn Dickinson 1962
Shaw, Cuyler 1959
Sims, Jonathan 2002
Sinclair, Thomas 1967
Slachta, Lara 1993
Smith Charles 1960
Smith, Dane 1958
Smith, Kim 1988
Stearns, Jonathan 1962
Stroker, Katherine 1992
Sullivan, Matthew 1992
Taub, Lolita 2004
Thomas Jr., Frederick 1946
Todd, Frederick 1960
Torbert, James 1964
Tracz, Evan 1991
Tung, Elizabeth 2000
Vanderwarker Jr., Carlton 1961
Walter, Mary Jasper Anderson 1963
Wardlaw, Frank 1962
Wetmore, Reagh chemistry instructor, 1950-1966
Williams, John 1967
Williams, Lawrence 1948
Wilson, Henry Donald 1941
Winter, Wally 1960
Wise III, Hugh 1960
Ziegler, Warren 1945
Zutt, Nicholas 2012
BRIEF HISTORICAL CONTEXT
Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy Peace Corps Precursors
Twenty-four Phillips Academy graduates from the classes of 1812 to 1881 and 45 Abbot alumnae served as overseas missionaries from 1830 to 1928 in places like India, South Africa, Ecuador, Sri Lanka, Persia, and Japan. They were driven by the evangelical fervor of the “Second Awakening” epitomized by the founding of Andover Theological Seminary in 1808.
The missionaries’ stories are colorful. For example, George Champion 1827, boarded the bark Burlington in December of 1834 on his way to South Africa. On board, he brought…a goat! The captain asked him why. He said “I need milk for my tea.” What did these missionaries have in common with the Peace Corps? Almost everything.
William Goodell, Phillips Academy class of 1818
To convey how tough Andover graduates were back in the day, getting to Andover his first time, Goodell walked 60 miles from his home in Templeton, Massachusetts. And he did this with a trunk on his back! After attending Dartmouth College and Andover Theological Seminary, Goodell sailed on his Christian mission to Turkey. Due to many trials and perils, he was compelled to move his family’s residence 33 times in 29 years. In addition to all his other duties, he managed to translate the entire Bible from English into Armeno-Turkish over 20 years. In all he served 43 years overseas.
Henrietta Hamlin, Abbot Academy class of 1830
Henrietta was born in 1811 in Dorset, Vermont. Her religious inclinations were evident at the age of five, when she declared, “O Lord, destroy all my sins!” In 1838 she and her husband sailed to Constantinople. On the ocean trip she was severely sick due to many turbulent storms that terrified her. They opened a seminary school there in 1840, eventually serving
47 students. Along the way, she learned Greek and Armenian fluently, and Turkish and German pretty well. She died there in 1850. Her epitaph read, PEACE PERFECT PEACE.
The Peace Corps Era
The years leading up to the Peace Corps could be characterized as a secular awakening of forces that combined and culminated in President-elect Kennedy’s famous, enthralling speech at the University of Michigan on October 14, 1960. Attended by 10,000, in this speech he exhorted the crowd, “How many of you who are going to be doctors are willing to spend your days in Ghana? Technicians or engineers: how many of you are willing to work in the Foreign Service and spend your lives traveling around the world?”
Earlier Than You’d Think Department
One would think the earliest Andover Peace Corps class would have been freshly scrubbed seniors from the class of 1957 (and thus finishing college in 1961 when the Peace Corps started) surging forth to faraway places. However, one would be mistaken. There were 17 Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy alumni from classes before 1961. The earliest was Frank Broderick ’39, who served as a country director in Ghana for the Peace Corps starting in 1964. And he was also the oldest to serve, at age 43.
164 Andover and Abbot alumni and faculty have served in the Peace Corps as of 2022 in 69 countries. The earliest to serve was Mike “Biggie” Moore, P.A.’56, in June of 1962. The class with the most Peace Corps volunteers was the class of 1960 with fifteen volunteers. As of 2022, the person to have spent the most time in country after the Peace Corps was Wendy King, Abbot ’73. She ended up spending 25 years total in Nepal. The first Phillips Academy staffer in the Peace Corps was Ray Lamontagne ’53, who reported directly to Sargent Shriver. The only P.A. ambassador to have served in the Peace Corps is Dane Smith ’58, a volunteer in Ethiopia, later ambassador to Guinea and Senegal.
One lifelong form of Peace Corps enrichment is the acquisition of languages. Some of the languages acquired by these alumni include Wolof, Kiswahili, Lingala, Sesotho, Amharic, Quechua, Aymara, Pashto, Berber, Hausa, Azerbaijani, and Cebuano. And how remiss would one be not to mention Andrew Cohen ’61’s thirteen languages!
PEACE CORPS VOLUNTEERS (listed by class year then alphabetically)
1939
Francis “Frank” Broderick, Phillips Academy class of 1939
At P.A., Frank was the managing editor of Pot Pourri, the president of Philo, on the Glee Club and on the Varsity Debating Team. As an undergrad at Princeton, Frank majored in History with high honors. He was chairman of the Daily Princetonian, a member of Whig-Clio and President of the Catholic Club. During the fall of 1942, while at work on his thesis, Broderick sought out African American thinkers like Paul Robeson and A. Philip Randolph and read Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois. His thesis, “They Too Sing America” reflected a deliberate effort to engage with African American history and diverse voices within the Black community. Whig-Clio held a debate on the question, “Should Negroes be admitted to Princeton?” on October 1, 1943, with Broderick and C. Powell Whitehead ’43 arguing the case that they should. As chairman of the Daily Princetonian during the 1942 school year, he spearheaded the movement to reverse Princeton’s unofficial ban on admitting black undergraduates. He went on to campaign widely for acceptance of negroes at Princeton, even winning the support of the governor of New Jersey, Charles Edison.
Broderick finished his degree under Princeton’s accelerated wartime program and soon began his service in the Army Air Corps in the Central Pacific theater. He became one of the first three Woodrow Wilson Scholars, 1945-1946. He earned his MA in History in 1947, got a law degree from Boston College, then finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1955. He then taught at Phillips Exeter Academy for seven years.
Frank was the country director for Peace Corps Ghana, 1964-1966. The volunteers there were teachers. The local term for “savior” was “osajifo”. The Peace Corps volunteers tagged Shriver as “osargifo”. Frank argued strongly against the Vietnam War but felt he had to defend the United States when he met a Russian spy and told the spy the Vietnam War was necessary for world peace. Frank was a teacher, and he enjoyed trips around the country to visit the volunteers.
In 1968 he was appointed the first chancellor of the new University of Massachusetts campus in Boston. He was Dean and History professor at Lawrence University. He wrote five books including Negro Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century. He died June 22, 1992.
1941
Henry Donald “Don” Wilson, P.A. ’41
At P.A. Don played varsity football, was on the skiing team, the Radio Club, and the Rifle Club. He went on to Yale, where he was the Andover Scholar in Mathematics. He was an editor
of the Yale Daily News and graduated with honors in international relations. During this time, after a night of partying, he and his best friend Lou Connick were found emerging naked from the waves on a Southampton, New York beach at dawn. The new civil defense beach patrol took one look at the tall blond young men and arrested them on suspicion of being Nazi spies landing in Long Island to invade the United States.
Don shipped out to the South Pacific in 1944 as a lieutenant junior grade on the USS Paul Hamilton. He served in seven battle campaigns including Leyte Gulf, Mindoro, and Iwo Jima. At Okinawa, he served as assistant gunnery officer through the longest shore bombardment in U.S. history. He took command of a medium-size landing craft in San Diego and sailed it through the Panama Canal and home to Charleston, South Carolina. He was also trained on early radar systems. He was discharged in June 1946.
He commuted to Columbia Law School by motorcycle daily from Scarsdale, New York, and his first job was with Sullivan and Cromwell. He resigned after one year to join the United World Federalists as an organizer because he was convinced another war was shaping up.
In 1955 he joined the law firm of Paul Weiss Rifkind Wharton & Garrison. As the popular magazine Saturday Review was one of his accounts, and he found a mentor in its editor Norman Cousins. In 1960 he left the law to work for management consulting firm Arthur D. Little and eventually became managing director of its New York office.
He was deeply interested in computers early on and thanks to his combination of business, legal, and computer experience, he helped devise a business plan that propelled Lexis Nexis to great success. He later advised many publishers on database businesses.
For 58 years, Wilson was the business partner of Arthur Lessac, an internationally known professor of voice based in Manhattan. Upset at being turned down by the Yale Glee Club, Wilson first sought out Lessac as a voice coach in the 1940s. Later, Wilson gave Lessac a desk, typewriter, and secretary to write The Use and Training of the Human Voice, now in its third edition. He also helped Lessac popularize this voice and body system. Lessac Technologies, Inc. was created in 2000 and developed computer software for text-to-speech technology. As chairman of the venture, Wilson worked with the CIO, his longtime associate, Gary A. Marple, to obtain several patents in the two years before his death at the age of 82.
In 1964 he was named director of the Peace Corps in Ethiopia and was there for two years, where he managed 700 volunteers He toured schools, clinics, road building projects, and the full range of Peace Corps projects. One of the volunteers and lifelong friends was Paul Tsongas, later a U.S. Representative in Congress.
He remained involved in international issues for the rest of his life. He advocated for the creation of a U.S. National Service program including the Peace Corps. As Chair of the World Federalists from 1970 to 1977, he worked with Margaret Mead, Father Theodore Hesburgh, Robert McNamara, Luther Evans, and James Grant to found New Directions, an ambitious attempt to create a citizens’ lobby on international issues. Using his corporate experience, Wilson was instrumental in introducing the use of opinion polling, public affairs advertising, direct mail marketing techniques, and focus group research (aided by his longtime friend Lester Wunderman, CEO of the largest direct marketing firm in the U.S.) to understand donor behavior to international issues.
He spoke Amharic, some Swahili, and French.
In 2006 at the age of 82, he died suddenly in front of his computer while sending an email and a voicemail about voice technology.
1942
William Sloane Coffin, Jr., P.A. ’42
Before Andover, Bill went to Deerfield Academy, then to the Ecole Internationale de Genève to study piano, under the same teacher as Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copeland. This cemented his fluency in French. He transferred to Andover because it had a better music program than Deerfield.
At Andover, (in the same class as George H.W. Bush), Bill was President of the Combined Musical Clubs, the President of the 8 ‘n 1 Octet; in the Choir, the Glee Club and played piano in the Orchestra. He performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C Major with the Andover Orchestra. He won the Piano Prize. He also was on the varsity track team. He was also in the Dramatic Club with Jack Lemmon. And he played the comic lead in the HMS Pinafore.
As president of 8 ‘n 1, he put an appreciable amount of time and energy into perfecting their performance, so much so that the first Saturday night they sang, “George Washington Hall was rocked to its foundations by an ovation which is not frequently heard on the Hill, the student body applauding long and loud until rewarded with an encore. And the second time the group of melodiers sang, the reception was even greater.” He was a concert-level piano player, a singer and also played guitar and clarinet.
One recollection of his from Andover, “In 1942, I was a senior at Andover studying American history in George Washington Hall under the direction of Dr. Arthur Darling. It was spring semester, and Dr. Darling was telling us about American foreign policy in the Caribbean. I think he thought we were not ‘taking it in’. Abruptly he stopped. ‘Mr. Coffin, you are president of the Glee Club. I want you to lead the class in the singing of the Marine Hymn. I take it you and the members of the class all know it.’ I started to profess embarrassment, but he cut me off. ‘Just do as I say.’ So, we all sang:
From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,
We fight our country’s battles on the land as on the sea.
First to fight for right and freedom and to keep our honor clean,
We are proud to claim the title of United States Marine.
During the singing, Dr. Darling, hands clasped behind his back, had moved to the window to watch the spring unfolding. After we stopping singing, there was a long pause. Then, without turning around, he said, ‘Gentlemen, what the hell were we doing there?’ And thus, 61 years ago, Dr. Darling planted in my mind the seed of an ever-growing conviction that United States of America is very imperialistic power.”
He joined the army in 1943. While there he was transferred into military intelligence at the famous Fort Ritchie, Maryland that trained more than 19,000 intelligence troops during World War II. He learned German there. When posted to Camp Wheeler he was shocked by the racism he saw. In October 1944 he sailed for Europe with specialists in German and French. He became an interpreter at Army Headquarters in Paris. Along the way, he learned Russian, urged on by a Russian girlfriend, becoming fluent. He learned judo.
Besides the war itself, he was steel-tested by confronted by the difficult post-war issue of dealing with Russians who had served in the Nazi Army. They were facing such hard choices, of repatriation, that many of them committed suicide rather than going back to Russia.
After the war, Coffin went back to Yale to finish his studies. He became a member of Skull and Bones and was president of the Yale Glee Club. He studied and thought deeply about religious issues. His senior year, he was recruited by the new CIA. He turned them down to go to Union Theological Seminary where his hero. Reinhold Niebuhr, taught. After one year at the seminary, the Korean War broke out at which point he did join the CIA. In 1951 he was made a case officer in Munich to recruit Russian emigrés as U.S. spies in the USSR. After this, he quit the CIA and enrolled in Yale Divinity School, where he studied from 1953 to 1956. He was known as a dashing man with panache who rode a motorcycle. One of his key studies was of chaplaincy. In 1956 he married Eva Rubinstein, an actress and ballet dancer who performed on Broadway. She was the daughter of the world-famous pianist Arthur Rubinstein.
After his ordination as a Presbyterian minister, he taught summer school at Andover, giving daily sermons at the chapel. He stirred up the campus with the spirit he brought to the chapel. At Andover, he “made fast friends and quick enemies.” One fast friend was Josh Miner, a teacher and admissions officer. When a student had carried a breakfast tray to a table, and five students got up and moved away, he was incensed. His next chaplaincy was at Williams College, where he protested about the fraternities that discriminated against Jews and Blacks. As a result, two cherry bombs and one shotgun blast were set outside his home. He served as chaplain at Yale from 1958 to 1975, starting at the young age of 33, where he became the best-known college chaplain of the 1960s.
While he was Yale chaplain, Coffin gave a speech at Andover, a mere three months before the Peace Corps was announced. The previous summer he led a group of American students to Guinea under the auspices of Operation Crossroads, a precursor to the Peace Corps. He described how they were warmly greeted by thousands of cheering and dancing Guineans at the airport. After describing the inroads that the USSR was making in Africa, he concluded with a plea to the students to assume a personal role in the aid of Guinea and other emerging African countries. “Why don’t you go over and join those doctors? he asked. “Every one of you, when you finish college, will be qualified to teach something. Why not spend two years teaching in Africa after you graduate? You are desperately needed and it would be the greatest experience of your life.” He couldn’t have been more prescient.
Joining the civil rights Freedom Rides brought him to national prominence. He was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama with ten others by the sheriff.
surrounded by hostile white residents and protected by the National Guard
He was everywhere in the media. He was controversial. But to those who labeled him an “agitator” he calmly pushed back that he was following both Jesus and the constitution. After his arrest, trial and conviction, he appealed and won in the Supreme Court.
In 1961 he was made a member of the Peace Corps Advisory Council. Shriver then asked Coffin to take a four-month leave from Yale and set up the very first Peace Corps training camp in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. There, he worked closely with Josh Miner and Ray Lamontagne ’53 who was on the Peace Corps staff. Andover chemistry teacher and varsity swim coach Reagh Wetmore was there leading the physical activities. One participant, in training to go to Nigeria, was Alan Blackmer, PA class of 1955.
In 1962, when President Kennedy got an honorary degree from Yale, Coffin gave a memorable, original prayer on love. A proponent of Martin Luther King Jr.’s peaceful non-violence, in 1963 he was arrested in a Freedom Ride in Baltimore and again in St. Augustine, Florida.
In a commencement speech at Wesleyan in 1966 he preached, “Keep us on the stony, long, and lonely road that leads to peace. O God, may we think for peace, battle for peace, suffer for peace.” Another favorite quote was “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth, and too small for anything but love.” Another, “There are two major biblical imperatives: pursue justice and seek peace.” His sermons were condensed, poetic, and pointed. He was a widely heard voice of peace. Many were inspired by him to join the Peace Corps. He spoke evil as “a world awash with weapons.”
By 1967, he was very much against the Vietnam War. The federal government brought Coffin, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and three others to trial (for urging young men to resist the draft) to intimidate them, but Coffin and the others won. In May 1973 he received the prestigious Edwin T. Dahlberg Peace Prize of the American Baptist Churches. After Yale, starting in 1977, he continued his national pulpit at the flagship church of America, the Riverside Church in New York City. During the 1980s he promoted peace to churches and synagogues across America. He hosted the largest march in U.S. history on June 12, 1982. One million people rallied against the nuclear arms race in Central Park in New York City. For years, starting in 1987, he was president of SANE/Freeze a peace and social justice group. Over the years, he was given 25 honorary degrees. Yale Divinity School annually gives out William Sloane Coffin ’56 Award for Peace and Justice.
In 2004, as he entered the Cochran Chapel with a walking stick to accept the 23rd Claude Fuess Award at Andover, he received a standing ovation. In his remarks, he said “”To me the robust, nonconformist patriots are those who love their country too much not to address its flaws.”
He spoke French, Russian, German, and Spanish.
Coffin passed away in Strafford, Vermont on April 12, 2006.
1945
Meridan “Med” Bennett, P.A. ’45
Med was born in Deephaven, Minnesota, April 23, 1927. When he was five, his father purchased the Shoderee Ranch in Alberta and moved the family there. Med studied in a one-room schoolhouse. His early life encompassed the hard work and pleasures of ranching life. His father taught everyone in the family to ski. He enrolled in the Blake School and played violin
At Andover, also nicknamed “The Count,” Med was in the Rifle Club, the Orchestra, the Choir and Glee Club, and played All-Club hockey. After Phillips Academy, he enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Upon discharge, he went to Yale, where he majored in geology. He was captain of the ski team, sang in the Glee Club, and played violin in a hillbilly band called the Sowbelly Seven. Then he did graduate work at Montana State Agricultural College in Bozeman, studying range management.
He married Cynthia “Petie” Mealy in 1952, and they moved to Alberta, Canada. However, three years of crop failures and calf losses took their toll, and Petie and Med decided to return to Jackson Hole. Their old friend Betty Woolsey offered them jobs and a place to stay at Trail Creek Ranch. In 1956 they traveled to Italy with some of their Jackson Hole friends to attend the Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, after which they traveled Europe and lived in Geneva while Med worked on his novel. They returned to the U.S. in 1957 and settled in Missoula, Montana, where Med continued to write and worked part-time in road construction and driving a bookmobile for the Montana State Library.
He served in the Peace Corps in Cyprus as country director in 1962. After less than a year there, a revolution broke out, and Med and his family were evacuated. Upon return, they lived in Washington, D.C. Med became a staff evaluator for the Peace Corps, traveling to Nigeria, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Nepal, and Pakistan. In 1965 they returned to Montana. In 1967 he was one of the recipients of the Claude Fuess Award at Andover for his Peace Corps service.
In 1968, he co-wrote Peace Corps Book, Agents of Change: A Close Look at the Peace Corps. 
Later he wrote a novel.
In 1970, they moved to Jackson Hole for good, initially living on the banks of Fish Creek in Wilson. Two years later they bought an old log cabin. That home and land sustained them for the rest of their lives. They put up hay, kept a few cows, chickens, turkeys, and even had a milk cow for a while. Among his civic activities were the Wyoming Outdoor Council, the Jackson Hole Alliance for Outdoor Planning, ENACT and the Teton Science School.
In the early 1980s, Petie and Med took up master’s-level Nordic cross-country ski racing and spent more than 14 years training year-round and traveling to compete all over the world in national and world masters events. They came out of those years with a respectable number of world gold medals in their age class, but most importantly that phase of their lives gave Petie many great moments of friendship and camaraderie with her fellow racers. Toward the end of that joyful period in Petie’s life, Med began to show signs of Alzheimer’s disease.
Warren must have been quite popular as he had a number of catchy nicknames: “Zieg,” “Ziggy,” “Monk,” and “Ape.” He was on the varsity wrestling team and played All-Club Lacrosse. He was in the Choir and Glee Club. He performed in The Pirates of Penzance, was in Orchestra and Band, and in the Pot Pourri he’s listed as Navy Submarines.
Warren attended the University of Chicago where he got his BA in 1948 and then earned a Masters in Social Science in 1951.
He served in the Peace Corps as a regional director in Nigeria. He was once given a live turkey as a present. It was kept in the family’s garage.
After the Peace Corps, he was the director of manpower development at USAID, then he went to Syracuse and was the director of the Educational Policy Research Center. He edited a book of essays on the future of continuing education worldwide. Known and beloved for his passion for peace and social justice and for his dedication and vision in the human spirit, he founded Future’s Invention and authored numerous books on the human spirit. He found joy in caring for pets of all kinds, hiking in the Rocky Mountains, and in classical music.
He died on October 14, 2004.
1946
Frederick Thomas, Jr., P.A. ’46
Fred was the editor-in-chief of the Phillipian, was on the board of the Pot Pourri, and on the art board of The Mirror. He was on varsity track, played All-Club baseball, was in the Rifle Club, the Society of Inquiry, the Glee Club and, most importantly, a member of the P.A. Police.
He joined the Marines and served from April 1946 to December 1947. Then he went to Harvard on the GI bill, 1948-1952, majoring in government and learned Arabic along the way. In 1952 he studied in Cairo, Egypt on a Fulbright Scholarship. He then went to the London School of Economics, 1953-1955, and earned a doctorate in anthropology. This included field trip for his thesis, by Jeep to Sudan and Chad.
Fred started with Mobil Oil in 1956, initially in the New York office. He then moved to Libya, doing public relations there in 1959-1960.
He joined the Peace Corps in Washington, travel to various African countries to set up Peace Corps from 1961 to 1962. He was then country director in Morocco and in Somalia, finishing up in 1965. Off next to USAID in Washington and Jordan, then the United Nations Development Program in Saudi Arabia followed by five years in Haiti. As a writer, he wrote freelance assignments especially about India and Bangladesh.
He wrote several books. Fred passed away in September 2015.
1947
At Andover, Hank went by a number of nicknames: “Scotty,” “Ginky Poo,” and “Hingrie.”
He was on varsity track, captain of the lacrosse team, President of the Upper Class, a member of 8-in-1 Octet, the Flying Club, the Tea Dance Committee, the Student Council, and the Glee Club. After Andover he went to Stanford, class of 1950, with an AB in Biological Sciences. In 1951 he earned a masters in education at Stanford, and later, in 1963, he earned credits toward, but did not get, a Ph.D. in Education at Stanford. From approximately 1957 to 1963, Hank was in the biology department of San Francisco State College.
In 1963, Hank was in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, acting as deputy director.
Upon his return to the States, he resumed teaching and became dean of students and professor of biology at SUNY Old Westbury. Moving west, he joined the faculty at California Institute for the Arts in Valencia. His next move brought him to Menlo Park, where he was executive director of Hidden Villa’s environmental education program. He later became a teacher at Peninsula School and served on its board of directors.
He died of cancer on July 6, 2003 in Petaluma, California, at the age of 74.
1948
At P.A., Larry was a cheerleader, varsity wrestler, played junior varsity (JV) football and J.V. lacrosse and was a member of the P.A. Police. Larry didn’t finish Andover but went on to the Gunnery School (now the Frederick Gunn School). After Gunnery, he went to Yale and played on the freshman lacrosse team, graduating in 1952 with a bachelors in American studies.
Starting in 1954, he worked in USIA in Algeria and and France. He met his future wife, Inge, in Algeria, and they were married in the city hall of Algiers. In 1959, he earned an MBA at University of California Berkeley.
In 1961, he joined Peace Corps headquarters in its first year, as assistant chief of the French-speaking Africa division. He served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon as country director starting in 1963. He subsequently worked at the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Teacher Corps, Common Cause, and Family Healthcare, Inc. In 1981 he became Deputy Director at VISTA. In 1983 he became a Vice President of Volunteers in Technical Assistance. In 1984 he was arrested and jailed as a “mercenary” in Cameroon and came home with a broken leg. In 1989, went into Afghanistan, via Peshawar, Pakistan. In 1990, Larry worked in the Department of Health and Human Services as a director. He loved working in Africa and spent his career in international development.
Larry was fluent in French. He died April 13, 2008.
1952
Don was on the Phillips Society Executive Committee, the Student Congress, the P. A. Police, the Glee Club, on the editorial board of the Phillipian, in the Spanish Club and played in the show Sons of Betsy. He also played JV lacrosse. After P.A., Don went to Harvard.
Don is mentioned various times in book The Fish and Rice Chronicles: My Extraordinary Adventures in Palau. He trained a Peace Corps group in Palau in 1967-1969. “There was nothing we could teach Micronesians about fishing, after all the Japanese—superb fishermen—had been their occupiers for years. The best to be hoped for was a little American-style organization in how to make a few bucks out of it in local co-ops. For several of the Peace Corps volunteers the qualification for this work was that they’d been surfers. One day, a delegation came from Japan, when I was visiting a volunteer in Peleliu. They were the first Japanese allowed back since World War II. They were there to repatriate bones from that hideous and strategically unnecessary battle.”
Later he got an MS in Marine Biology at University of Guam Marine Laboratory.
1953
At Andover, Hank was on varsity soccer, squash and tennis. He was a member of the Phillips Society, the Choir, the Glee Club, and Open Door. After P.A. Hank went to Harvard, class of 1957. He earned a masters in teaching at Wesleyan in 1962. From 1962 to 1965, Hank served in the nongovernmental organization (NGO) International Voluntary Services in Laos during its secret war and the open war in nearby Vietnam.
“In 1965 I became a training officer in the Peace Corps based in Washington DC, and later in Hawaii looking after 5 to 10 different training programs at a time. Later my bosses let me be the cross-cultural coordinator for Peace Corps’ first public health program in South Korea, the training for which was held in New Mexico among Indian reservations for field work. Between 1966 and 1968 I served as the Peace Corps’ training officer for all Hawaii programs for volunteers headed for Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Nepal, Micronesia.”
He earned a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts in 1973.
He spent 37 years in Thailand working with managers in enterprises led by both Thais and expatriates. In 1997 he co-wrote a book, Working with the Thais: A Guide to Managing in Thailand. In 2012 Hank co wrote a follow-on book, Leading Multi-Cultural Teams in Thailand: Lessons from Thai, Japanese, and Western Managers. He still lives in Thailand and speaks Thai, French, Lao, and Spanish.
1953
Ray’s stories are so remarkable; they begin before Andover. His father was a blue-collar Catholic French Canadian from a small town outside Quebec. He and his family, including Ray, moved to Manchester, New Hampshire. After working in the mills and delivering ice for Manchester Coal and Ice, he became a professional boxer and, with money made from boxing, he opened the Red Arrow restaurant, which became an iconic restaurant in Manchester, which is just north of the Massachusetts border, 33 miles from Andover.
While his father insisted he do blue-collar work, his mother wanted him to get a higher-level education. In the 1948-1949 timeframe, playing baseball for his elementary school team, it turned out on one occasion, that the varsity and junior varsity Andover teams were playing away and his team was allowed to play on the Andover varsity field, the likes of which blew young Ray away. He didn’t know anything about Phillips Academy, but he was amazed at this huge, tidy baseball field.
During this time, Spike Adriance, the Andover admissions director, conferring with the faculty, suggested “We need more diversity in our student body. Like having Catholics, more Jews, more blacks.” While he got push-back, he was persuasive and for the upcoming year, the faculty approved the initiative.
Also thinking ahead, Ray’s mother suggested he go to a good nearby secondary school and arranged for him to interview at Andover. Very quickly during Ray’s interview with Spike Adriance did the admissions director realize he had a real, live Catholic in his office, moving his acceptance forward.
Ray started P.A. as a Junior and lived in Rockwell House. Unfortunately, in his first semester, he flunked all five courses. The faculty met and decided to flunk him out. But Adriance objected saying, “Hey, we went to all the trouble of recruiting him, now we’re just going to throw him overboard? Come on! Let’s give him one more chance.” They agreed. They assigned Latin teacher Richard Sears to handle this problem. Luckily he had a practical turn of mine, and knowing that kids don’t listen to authority figures, he needed some indirect way to reach Ray. Without badgering him at all about his grades, Sears rather asked about what was important to him. Ray told Sears he was very interested in baseball and that he idolized the seniors on the baseball team. Sears approached some of these senior baseball players and told them how helpful it would be if they could help this lowly junior who was in trouble. Ray was lucky again in how the seniors dealt with this. While on the lookout for Ray, one day, when these jocks were playing touch football on the field between Bancroft and Bishop, they spied Ray walking nearby. One of them said, “Hey, kid, we need an extra man come play with us!” Ray was so happy to be included. After the game, one of the seniors took him aside, and he, too, wisely framed it. He said, “Hey, Ray, wouldn’t you like to be like us?” Ray nodded his head vigorously.’ The senior then told him that in addition to how important sports were to them, school work was even more important and that to be like them meant that Ray needed to really work hard on his courses. This worked like a charm and was, in effect the big bang of his life.
Just ten years later, he was playing tennis with Jay Rockefeller (who became a life-long friend), Bobby Kennedy, and General Maxwell Taylor; became close with Sargent Shriver; attended numerous White House galas and lounged about the Honey Fitz &Yacht with John F. Kennedy and his crowd.
At Andover, Ray (whose inspired nickname was “Razor” and the less inspired name “Frenchman”) was in the Phillips Society, Student Congress, French Club, Spanish Club, Rifle Club, and performed in Mother Liked the Trees. In sports was on varsity football, varsity baseball and varsity winter track. He won the Baseball Coaches Cup. He was the running back on the undefeated 1952 football team that beat Exeter 59-0. In baseball, he played center field and won the Coach’s Award, given to the most valuable player.
Ray studied at Yale, 1953-1957. He concentrated on baseball at Yale, where he again won the “most valuable player award” and was offered a major league baseball contract upon graduation. He gave up a $50,000 bonus to accept a Yale Bachelor scholarship at New Asia College in Kowloon, Hong Kong from 1957-1959. While there, he got married in Vietnam. Sometime in 1959 or 1960, while working on an Andover capital campaign on the P.A. campus, he met the Reverend James Robinson, whose Crossroads Africa organization was a prime model for the Peace Corps.
Robinson recruited Ray to be a group leader of students to help build a school outside of Libreville, Gabon. While there, he went to Lambarene to meet Dr. Albert Schweitzer, who toured him around his hospital.
On February 18, 1960, Ray gave a talk in George Washington Hall, in Assembly, about Asia. During his far-ranging talk, he had an ugly American story. While standing on a Hong Kong street corner, a tourist from the U.S. asked him for directions to “Chinatown.” As a result of this talk, “It led to PA establishing a course on the Far East. I asked if I could start an informal course on Asia and was told that no one would be interested. After thirty or so students signed up, the faculty decided to add a course on Asia to the curriculum.”
He attended Yale Law School beginning in 1960. Because his last name was difficult to pronounce, he found that the law professors didn’t call on him. Then, in 1961, “I was in my first year, attending a lecture by Professor MacDougall. All of a sudden, there was a knock at the door. An assistant opened the door and said ‘the Dean of the Law School is sorry, professor, to interrupt your class, but the White House is calling.’ So, MacDougall said, ‘Excuse me, class but I need to take this call from the White House.’ The assistant said, ‘Mr. MacDougall, sorry, the call is not for you. It’s for Mr. Ray Montagne.’ MacDougall was stunned. I thought ‘Oh my God, I’m screwed!’ Everyone in the room was cracking up and laughing. As I walked down the corridor to get the call, I thought that a friend of mine with whom I used to play pranks was pulling one on me. I picked up the phone. It was Sargent Shriver! He said ‘Ray, I’ve already sent a ticket to you to come down to Washington to be interviewed because I want people like you who’ve served in a Peace-Corps-like program to help me get the Peace Corps launched.’ I told him I’d already left Yale Law once to do something else and couldn’t leave again. Shriver said, ‘Ray, I’ve heard you are an athlete. Come on down and we’ll play some touch football and some tennis and we’ll talk about it.’ I thought ‘You can’t say no to the brother-in-law of the president’, so I flew down. By the end of the weekend, I’d signed on. Sarge was the damndest best salesman you ever met. He was very persuasive. I then took a leave of absence from Yale Law.” Shriver was very persuasive to hundreds of people who dropped everything in their lives to join the Peace Corps.
Ray helped to establish the first training camp in the jungles of Arecibo, Puerto Rico to train the first group of volunteers being sent to Tanganyika (now Tanzania). This was also the first of many “toughening up” Peace Corps programs that Shriver persuaded Andover’s Josh Miner to deploy with his Outward Bound program. Josh Miner, Andover’s physics teacher, was there, as was William Sloane Coffin, Jr. ’42 who was assigned by Shriver to head up the program in Arecibo. Ray then became a training officer and escorted the first group of volunteers to the Philippines, then set up other training programs including postings in Sarawak and Borneo.
Back in Peace Corps headquarters in Washington, D.C., 26-year-old Ray would regularly be sent to meetings at the direction of Shriver. At one point he was sent to a meeting of Bill Haddad, a key senior member of Shriver’s team. Haddad glared at him and said “What are you doing here?” “I was fortunate to become a close friend of Sarge and spent many weekends with him at his home outside Washington and at the Cape.”
One weekend, at Shriver’s estate, Timberlawn, in Virginia, Shriver paired him up with Jay Rockefeller to play tennis against Bobby Kennedy and General Maxwell Taylor in doubles. “While I played very little tennis, Jay was pretty good so we ended up winning. Eunice Shriver came up to me and said, “Ray come with me I want to introduce you to my mother, Rose Kennedy (who had watched the match.) She said, “Mom, this is Ray Lamontagne. He is all heart and no strokes.”
Ray finally went back to finish at Yale Law, while continuing to be an advisor to the Peace Corps. He then took a full-time job with John D. Rockefeller III, replacing another Andover graduate, Donald McLean ’28, who was president of the board at P.A. and also a Yale Law graduate.
“Serving in the Peace Corps was one of the highlights of my life and I have carried lessons learned from the experience into everything I have had the privilege to be a part of.”
In 2009, Ray was inducted into the Andover Athletic Hall of Honor.
Jay Rockefeller had gone to Harvard and had done a stint in the Harvard-in-Japan. At some point in Washington, D.C. the two of them were meeting with General Maxwell Taylor. Taylor said to them, “You know, I’m setting up a new unit called ‘Special Forces’, and with your experiences overseas and credentials, you should sign up.” Ray and Jay went straight to a military recruiting van outside the White House. They told the recruiter that they had been explicitly sent to sign up. The recruiter beamed, not just happy to fulfill his monthly quota, but to have snagged two prestigious recruits.
However, going through the process, it turned out that Jay could not join. He was 6’ 5” tall and the maximum allowable height was 6’ 4”. Then, there was a snag for Ray as well. At that point he was six months too old to go. Oh, well.
Once, many years later, in his capacity as an advisor to the Peace Corps, Ray was treated to a tour of the new JFK Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He noted that there was not a single exhibit dedicated to the Peace Corps, and he took a staff member aside to point out how historically central the Peace Corps was to President Kennedy’s legacy.
In his subsequent career, Ray has served on many non-profit boards such as the Roosevelt Library and the Dyson Foundation. He has served on the P.A. board as an alumni trustee, as head of the Alumni Council, and has chaired the boards of the New York City Center for the Performing Arts, the Serious Fun Network, Lapham’s Quarterly, and chair of The Hole in the Wall Gang, a camp for seriously ill children, he founded with Paul Newman. The setting is one inspired by the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. As of 2011 there were already more than 30,000 children served in camps and programs on every continent.
Ray speaks French and has studied enough Chinese to get by.
1954
Robert Carmody, Jr., P.A. ’54
Before Andover, Robert was a Navy brat. His father was naval surgeon who moved frequently. Robert and his family happened to be in Hawaii in 1941, and he distinctly remembered the attack on Pearl Harbor, seeing the Japanese planes.
Due to his family’s various travels, it appears he attended Andover, but ended up graduating from Bladensburg High School, in Maryland. Robert then went to Stanford. He then earned a masters at Stanford in 1959 then a law degree there in 1962.
After Stanford, he worked for the defense department, then joined the Peace Corps at the headquarters location as a Director of Program Development, around 1963. In this position, he was able to travel to many countries. He was also a teacher and an expert in government contract fraud. For some time he was vice president at Quinnipiac College in Connecticut.
He died June 10, 2006 at the age of 69 in Washington, DC.
Dr. Nancy Grier-Moen Catledge, Abbot Academy class of 1954
At Abbot Academy Nancy-Jean was on varsity lacrosse, the yearbook staff, chair of the Day Student Dance, a “Posture Marker,” and a day student proctor. After Abbot, she went to Hollins, class of 1958 then the Sorbonne followed by the University of Pennsylvania and Marymount College. She earned a Ph.D. in psychology from Southeastern University of New Orleans. Was there time in there for the Peace Corps?
She was well known as an occupational therapist in private practice for handicapped children.
She died March 25, 2017 in Bedford, Virginia.
At Andover, Chuck was quite active. He was on the Business Board of the Mirror, in the Dramatics Club, Marching Band, Stage Crew, French Club, Paul Revere Press, Radio Club, Sailing Club, Science Club, played JV football, all-club lacrosse, and JV hockey. After Andover, he went to Tufts, graduating in 1958. After NYU Medical school, he became a psychiatrist.
In 1966, Chuck joined the Peace Corps out of Washington, but he soon was traveling the world to tend to the emotional lives of volunteers in many countries including Ecuador, Tunisia, Morocco, Venezuela, India, the Caribbean, Micronesia, Panama, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Micronesia, and so many more that his widow Sheila can’t remember them all.
He also gave lectures in these countries. He took individual care of volunteers who had psychological problems. He had a particular gripe with Peace Corps headquarters, which had a policy that if a single female volunteer got pregnant, she was forced to leave her service and Peace Corps would not fund her return to the U.S. Chuck went out of his way to escort these women back. His stint lasted two years.
He passed away April 24, 2014.
1955
At P.A. Al was Vice President of the French Club, member of the Rifle Club, Blue Key Society, co-chairman of the Ushers, played All-Club Tennis and was on varsity squash. “I knew Josh and Phoebe Miner from my days at Andover.” After P.A., Al went to Harvard. He taught English for one year at a Colorado private school. Then earned his master of arts in teaching at Harvard.
“I was part of Nigeria 7 in the Peace Corps from May 1963 to 1965. About thirty of us were in a special pre-training group sent to Puerto Rico for a month-long Outward Bound experience just before our training started at Barnard/Columbia in New York City in the summer of 1963. (Sargent Shriver came to visit them). This program was an experiment by the Peace Corps, a very valuable one.
Al said there were three survival events they underwent in Arecibo. One was a solo. They drop you off in the middle of nowhere for three days, with nothing but a notebook, a pencil, some matches and some water. You are on your own with neither knife nor food. They instructed each volunteer on basic helpful hints on how to survive in the jungle. For example, the snails that live in banana trees are safe to eat. “I used the matches to boil the snails. They tasted awful. I had to hold my nose to eat them.” The first night he used fronds from banana trees as shelter. After three days, he came upon a local who led him half an hour to his little hut in the middle of the jungle. Al was wondrous that on the wall were a painting of Jesus and, underneath it, a photograph of John F. Kennedy. His wife cooked him a couple of fried eggs.
When leaving Arecibo, the Peace Corps staff instructed him to take some cash–$40,000!—back to the states to the Peace Corps training department. They told him not to declare it on the plane. Needless to say, he was quite relieved to drop that off!
Al taught at a Catholic Mission school in the bush of Nigeria. The curriculum was classical British: English and history. “I found it rather impractical to find myself teaching Nigerian kids about Hittites.
One night, Al was afflicted by what he thought was yellow fever. His stomach hurt so badly, he couldn’t even walk the 200 yards to his principal’s home. He had to crawl through an area that had poisonous snakes nearby. He banged on the door. The principal’s houseboy came running out brandishing a machete, shouting “Thief! Thief!” Al said, “Rafael, it’s me!” The principal proceeded to drive him in an old VW van, replete with bad springs, to the nearest hospital, which was sixty miles away at 2:00 o’clock in the morning. There were no doctors there, just nurses. They said the doctors would not be there for days, and they refused to give Al any pain medication because “If you’ve been given pain medication, the doctors can’t properly diagnose your problem.” So Al had to struggle back into the van. The principal then drove him another two hours to a Catholic Mission hospital. By then it was 4:00am, and Al continued to be in deep pain. The doctor examined him and said, “Your appendix is about to explode. We need to operate immediately.” He was given a local anesthetic and watched the operation from a mirror above the operating table. He said, “When they extracted the appendix, it looked like a sausage that had been in the sun for days.” He spent one month sweltering in the hospital, but his stomach wasn’t healing; in fact, it was still oozing. So, he got on an airplane, telling the airline that the Peace Corps would pay his fare, and fly to a cooler part of Nigeria. After one week, the stomach healed, helped by eating vegetables and fruit.
On one occasion the priest told him he had to run the whole school while he was gone. One day, he was given one week’s notice that there would be an “inspection.” Because he had no idea how to prepare for the inspection, he drove to other Catholic mission schools for advice. Some of them loaned him books and laboratory equipment that they said would impress the inspectors. They also clued him in on how it was necessary to bribe the inspectors by filling the trunk of their car with food. While they were doing the inspecting (where they were very impressed with the books and new equipment), Al stuffed a bunch of vegetables into the inspector’s trunk as well as six live ducks. Later, he returned all the equipment.
“The Peace Corps provided me with the readiness and willingness to take on a variety of challenges. The Puerto Rico training provided me with physical challenges and the value of teamwork. Living in Nigeria provided me with mental and emotional challenges. I also kept with me, for my whole life, the feeling that I had done my piece for serving my country.”
Later in life, Al was in elementary and secondary school education. He also sold advertising and ran a business library in New York City for ten years. Along the way, he prepped himself by going to library school.
At Andover, Dave was President of the Camera Club, on the Pot Pourri and Philippian photographic boards, Press Club, marching band, and the Phillips Society. Not surprisingly, he provided a magnificent photograph of himself in Peru. After Andover, Dave went to University of Colorado ’60.
“I spent a three-month tour of active duty with the U.S. Army. In the spring of 1961 I went to work for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in their one-year rotational training program for recently minted civil engineering grads. In early 1962, while on rotation to the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, I became convinced that the recently created U.S. Peace Corps was likely to be a viable organization. Because I had studied Spanish at Andover with Don Merriam, I figured South America should be my logical region of choice, so I started negotiations with Washington to join one of the new groups that would soon be assigned there.
“I was offered a place in the fourth group going to Peru which would begin training in Puerto Rico in June. Since the timing would be right, I accepted. About then, political difficulties occurred in Peru that led the Peace Corp high command to delay departure of the first three groups until the situation could be clarified, with the result that all four groups arrived in the country in September, almost simultaneously. Shortly afterwards I was called to Lima to work for the U.S. Bureau of Public Roads liaison officer to the Ministry of Public Works. Despite spending a fair amount of time behind a desk, I was frequently out in the field, traveling around the country to inspect community road-building projects. I had lots of fun and a chance to try out pretty much every mode of transportation there was, ranging from a reed boat on Lake Titicaca to a light plane over the high jungle of the Apurimac valley.
After completing two years of service, I returned home in August 1964. All told, the Peace Corps was an absolutely wonderful experience!
My experience in the Peace Corps completely changed the plans I had for the future course of my professional life. I had originally expected to return to the Bureau of Reclamation, so shortly after arriving in the States in August 1964 I starting grad school with that in mind. However, it quickly became clear to me that I had totally lost interest in pursuing such a career path.
My work in Peru had pointed me firmly toward the interface between transportation and economic development, and at Stanford I discovered a joint program between the civil engineering and the economics departments that seemed to be exactly what I was looking for. After receiving a couple of degrees I found a job with SRI International, which gradually led me back to Peru.
Unfortunately, complications arose in the project that forced me to cast about for an alternative. I soon landed a position with the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, based in Santiago, Chile, and have been here ever since. I retired from the UN in 1996, and my wife and I settled down in Santiago.”
At P.A. Tom (aka “Yogi” and “Yoge”), was in the Press Club, editorial boards of the Pot Pourri and the Phillipian, Dramatic Club, (performing in The Taming of the Shrew and Hamlet), Philo, Spanish Club, Bridge Club, on the Athletic Advisory Board, and was manager of varsity squash.
He went on to Northwestern. Thomas served in the Peace Corps in Togo, teaching in secondary schools.
One might conclude from his Pot Pourri entries that Bob was hyperactive. He was the managing editor of the Phillipian, sports editor of the Pot Pourri, a member of the student congress, on the Advisory Board, a Student Deacon, in Blue Key, a member of Choir and the 8 ‘n 1, in the Phillips Society, Philo, the Outing Club, the Rifle Club, played in The Taming of the Shrew, was co-captain of the varsity cross-country team, on varsity lacrosse and wrestling, and on the Athletic Advisory Board.
Bob served in the Peace Corps in Thailand, teaching university physics.
Michael “Biggie” Moore, P.A. ’56
At Andover, Biggie, too, was hyperactive: a member of the student congress, a Clement House proctor, in the P.A. Police, head cheerleader, Blue Key, Philo, Chorus, Outing Club, 8 ‘n 1, Band, Brass Choir, Phillips Society, Varsity skiing, crew and football and performed in three musicals: H.M. S. Pinafore, Mikado, and the Student Prince. He then attended Yale.
Biggie and his wife Ann joined the Peace Corps in 1962, making him the first Andover overseas Peace Corps volunteer. He was an English teacher, and they were married just before their assignment to the tiny African nation of Togo. Ann served as a pediatric nurse.
There they observed the African tradition of “baby wearing,” women carrying infants in a fabric sling providing both freedom of movement for the mother and close body contact for the infant.
Back home, Ann and her mother worked to create a similar garment. Ann carried their youngest daughter, Mande, in an early version in the civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery. After several iterations they perfected the “Snugli” and patented it in 1969.
Their breakthrough idea was timely, a powerful compliment to the emerging recognition of the shared physical and emotional benefits of constant warm physical contact between mother and child. Skip forward to 2017 and the opening of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibit, Items: Is Fashion Modern? The exhibit featured 111 iconic examples of fashion art, all described as “Paragons of design.” There, along with a Rolex watch, a biker’s jacket, little black dresses, and a Wonderbra, is a Snugli. The Snugli was one of sixty items chosen to continue in a permanent Museum of Modern Art exhibit. Curatorial Assistant Michelle Miller Fisher said, “We chose the very best items, those combining elegance with economy, serving a real need while simultaneously opening up new possibilities. The Snugli fits this description perfectly.”
during a 1999 Innovative Lives presentation at the National
Museum of American History. Smithsonian Institution photo.
1957
At P.A., Tom was in the French Club, Chorus, the Student Congress, Blue Key, the P.A. Police, and the Advisory Board. He played varsity soccer and won the Sullivan Improvement Prize. After P.A. Tom went to Williams College.
He was a teacher for four years before joining the Peace Corps. After a two-year stint in Togo, he became Regional Director for two more years. He traveled a lot then spent two more years at Peace Corps headquarters.
1958
At Andover, Tom, was on varsity baseball, JV tennis and JV basketball. He was a member of the Phillips Society, the Film Society, Chorus, the French Club, the Spanish Club, the Outing Club and 8 ‘n 1. “In 1957, Andover hired a temporary replacement for its long-time chaplain, Graham Baldwin, who was taking a sabbatical. The new person was named William Sloane Coffin and he strongly impressed me and the student body with his youthful energy and persuasive personality.”
After Andover, he went to Yale. “In the spring of 1962, I was a senior and ready to take up a position at Episcopal High School (a prep school outside of D.C.) teaching English. However, in early March, I was in a discussion group with a few other seniors and our guest speaker/discussion leader was William Sloane Coffin, now the Chaplain at Yale.. He asked the seniors what their tentative career goals were and heard the words ‘banking,’ ‘ investment banking,’ ‘accounting,’ and ‘plastics,’ to which he responded with a bit of scorn. He said ‘Have any of you heard of President Kennedy’s new project, the Peace Corps which offers you a chance to travel internationally, be of service to a new country and your own country and learn a new language?’ I was hooked by the idea and applied. I was told I was to be assigned to be a teacher in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. I quickly got out an atlas and looked for Ethiopia in South America, probably next to Colombia and Bolivia. I finally found it over there in eastern Africa, and, after a six-week training period in Georgetown University, began a wonderful two-year stint as a teacher… the first year in Addis and the second up in a small village in Eritrea.
One year, I and three other PCVs (Peace Corps Volunteers) formed a quartet singing old English carols. Near Christmas Day, the American community sang carols for his majesty Emperor Haile Selassie outside of Jubilee Palace. He invited all 100 of us into the ballroom where our quartet was asked to sing him a song. We did this and he seemed quite pleased.
The following year, also at Christmastime, I and the four PCVs assigned to the large town of Keren decided to go on a camping trip to the shore of the Red Sea. Having somehow arranged to borrow camping gear and a Peace Corps Land Rover, we embarked with a map of sorts showing a trail to follow. Unfortunately, we got off the trail and onto another one which ran north parallel to the Red Sea rather than to it. Then we had a flat tire but found the tire patch kit was defective. So, one of the guys, Terry and I began a trek back to a village we had come through before. Two days and sixty miles later, and accompanied by a few vultures who looked down upon us as dinner, we got to the village which in turn got word to Peace Corps staff and help was sent some hours later. All was well that ended well.
In 1995 I was the Senior Dean and teacher and squash coach and college counselor at Poly Prep Country Day School in Brooklyn. Surprise, who does our Headmaster ask to come for a working visit as Artist in Residence but William Sloane Coffin. My wife and I hosted Bill for a dinner, and I was able to then thank him having provided the impetus for me to become a teacher and hopefully a role model of sorts for quite a few young men and women over the years–and it all started in the Peace Corps.”
At Andover, Paul was on varsity soccer, varsity wrestling, JV soccer, JV lacrosse.
After P.A. he went to Princeton. “I dropped out of Princeton three times: in 1958-1959 to work on a ranch in Nevada and travel, including hitch-hiking to Alaska, just as it was becoming a state. Again in 1961-1962 I left to work on a ranch in Montana and travel. And in 1963-1964 I left to join the Peace Corps in Morocco. I ultimately graduated from Princeton in 1966 with a Zoology/Pre-med major.”
“In the Peace Corps, I was first a forestry surveyor in Morocco, in the Middle-Atlas Mountains. There was a long delay in my getting a theodolite/transit instrument so the Peace Corps ultimately ordered one from the USA. But, of course, it had angular measure in degrees, not grad (which was the French metric system angular measure) and it proved very difficult to teach with this, as every bearing had to be converted from degrees to grad so the Moroccans could do the calculations (all with 5-place log tables of course) So the surveying was not going very well.
I spent my down-time collecting beetles (an old hobby), and it happened that the Peace Corps doctor found this out. And he just happened to know that there was a Pied-Noir French beetle specialist at the national scientific centre in Rabat (the Institut Scientifique Cherifien).So he arranged a visit and I took my collection to Rabat and met Colonel Kocher who was delighted not only with the collection (including a new species which he named after me: Alphasida finei!).
This led to my introduction Mme le Dr Choumara, the entomologist with the WHO (World Health Organization) Malaria Eradication Program. Then ultimately to my spending my second year in Morocco with the malaria program, doing mosquito surveys throughout the country. This was my introduction to public health and led to my career, ultimately as Professor of Communicable Disease Epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
The Peace Corps certainly changed my life trajectory. I ended up in international health and have been based at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine since 1976. Morocco was a wonderful and formative experience for me in many ways.
He’s currently Professor of Communicable Diseases.
Dane was known as “Smitty” at Andover, where he was on the executive board of the Pot Pourri, in Chorus, the Phillips Society, Blue Key, and the French Club. He won honorable mention for the Valpey and the Catlett Prize and won the Augusta Porter Thompson Scholarship and was cum laude. After P.A. he went to Harvard magna cum laude. He subsequently earned a Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts.
He served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia 1963-1965, assigned to Eritrea. “Our Ethiopia II group was received at the Jubilee Palace by the Emperor Haile Selassie, who shook hands with each Volunteer. (Ethiopians, by contrast, were expected to prostrate themselves before him.) Haile Selassie put great emphasis on expanding education, and for a time Peace Corps volunteers constituted about half the secondary school teachers in the country. The rapid expansion of education was certainly one of the factors leading to increasing radicalism and the violent overthrow of the regime in 1974.”
Later, he was U.S. Ambassador to Guinea 1990-1993, U.S. Ambassador to Senegal from 1996-1999 and from 1995 to 1996 was Special Presidential Envoy for Liberia, and again from 1999 to 2003 and Senior Advisor to the US Government for Darfur 2011-2012. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2014 and 2016 he was Visiting Professor of Peace Studies and International Relations at the Martin Luther King Evangelical University of Nicaragua in Managua. He taught a course in Spanish in Christian Models of Peacebuilding to theology students and lectured to students in the faculties of law and psychology.
Dane was president of the Peace Corps Association from 1999 to 2003 and has been executive director of the American Friends of the Episcopal Church of the Sudans. He authored, U.S. Peacefare: Organizing American Peacebuilding Operations (2010). He serves on the board of trustees of the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction and a lay preacher in the United Methodist Church.
1959
At P.A., Sam was the President of Philo, treasurer of the Phillips Society, secretary of the Student Congress, editor-in-chief of the Mirror, and on the Advisory Board. He played JV football. He was in Philo and varsity debating. He won the Robinson Prize twice and performed in Love’s Labor’s Lost. After PA, Sam went to Harvard.
Sam was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, 1963-1965.
“Teaching English as a second language was a task I was not prepared for, and I was a little snooty. Being an English major at Harvard College, I thought I was a crown jewel for any high school faculty to have. Reality hit hard, and I like to say that I dragged myself from incompetence to mediocrity in two years of hard work. But one satisfying moment was teaching “Macbeth” to the six formers. Why, you may ask, “Macbeth”? It wasn’t my choice but every year on the West African School Certificate exam there was a required Shakespeare play and that year it was “Macbeth.” How we labored, the sixth formers and I, over the Elizabethan language with me paraphrasing practically every line for them. But gradually it became clear to me that their culture was much closer to that of Macbeth’s than my own. They believed in the power of the weird sisters, and the Yoruba people particularly had a tradition of independent and enterprising women like Lady Macbeth. They also had room for ghosts in their worldview. The climax came when we had finished the play and I rented a film from the British Council of ‘Macbeth’ with Maurice Evans and Judith Anderson. It was filmed in Scotland in color. We showed it in the school dining room to an enraptured crowd. They shivered at the weird sisters, took alarm at Lady Macbeth, shrieked at Banquo’s ghost, and cheered MacDuff. What a reward for our hard work and what a triumph for the Bard of Avon across cultures and centuries!
When I arrived I found the heat and humidity depressing. I felt like I would. be stuck in July for two years. The work was hard. Nearby Peace Corps volunteers were friendly, but it was a lonely pull. At times I thought about going home. Then a reporter from the Boston Herald showed up, interviewing Peace Corps volunteers around the world. He took my photo with the school principal, Mother Peter, in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. It was perfect copy for the Herald: a Harvard graduate, son of a Protestant clergyman, teaching English at a high school run by Irish Roman Catholic nuns. I was even quoted as saying how warmly I had been welcomed and how I was looking forward to serving at Our Lady of Apostles Secondary School. The article ran on the front page of the Herald. After that there was no way I could return home short of finishing my tour.
The school library was a bare cupboard with but few books. Somehow, I secured a recommended reading list for adolescents put out by a United States library association. The books were mainly literature and history. I asked my parents if they would take the reading list and obtain donations. Within a few months they had obtained a thousand books from the reading list which were shipped to us in Nigeria by USAID free of charge. My parents wanted to give them in memory of Lewis Walling (Andover ’56) who was a good friend of ours, killed in Vietnam. He was a great reader and had lived internationally with his family. Bookplates were designed and inserted. My parents came over for the dedication and we secured a monsignor from the archdiocese, who came out to bless the books with prayers and holy water. Afterwards he revealed that, as he marched around, his eye had fallen on a copy of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire which, he said, is on the Index of Forbidden Books of the Church. ‘What did you do?’, I asked. ‘Oh, just gave it a little extra holy water.’
One of the things supplied to Peace Corps volunteers was a copy of the Manual of Tropical Diseases published by the World Health Organization. It had a page for each disease, and I used to read it on the toilet, one disease per bowel movement. A particularly dreadful disease is the Sudan black fly, which infests villages in the Upper Sudan and lays its eggs on people’s eyelids at night so that the larvae bore into the optic nerve causing 40% blindness in some areas. You can imagine how distressed I was to find a puncture on my eyelid shortly after reading the page. I was further dismayed to discover another puncture on the other eyelid. I rushed down to the Peace Corps doctor in Lagos, imagining that the eggs were already hatching, and my vision coming to an end. When I saw the doctor and described my symptoms, he smiled wearily and said, ‘Those are your tear ducts.’ But the joke was doubly on me as I came home from Nigeria with both amoebic dysentery and schistosomiasis.
The two years in Nigeria were life changing not because I made any real contribution to the English language competence of my students but because it gave me the experience of living outside my culture and being in a racial minority, both of which have been valuable. It also quieted my conscience about avoiding the draft. I viewed the Peace Corps years as a substitute in terms of, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’ ”
At Andover, Jack was chairman of the Infirmary Committee, was in the Phillips Society, the Student Congress and was proctor at Clement House. In athletics, he was captain of the boxing team and played varsity football and track. He went on to Stanford, where he majored in International Relations.
He served in the Peace Corps in Peru.
At Andover, Henry was in Philo, the Spanish Club, and won the Julia E. Drinkwater Scholarship. He participated in JV football, and JV swimming. He went on to Pomona College, majoring in zoology.
Henry served in the Peace Corps in Brazil, 1966-1968.
“I met my wife, Marilyn, still today, in initial training, but we both dropped out of that program. We married and I worked a year at NASA as a biochemist, and she worked as an registered nurse. Then we returned to Peace Corps training and went to Brazil in 1966. We were assigned to an interior town in Northeast Brazil, then one of the poorest areas in South America.
My job in the Peace Corps was rural community development specialist, but our real job was the nursing skills my wife had. She trained as a midwife. We were sent to a small rural town for her to assist the local doctor and develop and implement public health programs. She also delivered a lot of babies and treated a great deal of infant diarrhea. Toward end of our time, she helped the doctor in a nearby town start a rural labor union/Catholic Church hospital. I worked some with rural cooperatives and a little with agricultural—vegetable–development and taught English, but hers was the real work. She had the practical skills needed to do serious work.
After two years, we were picked to teach in and eventually organize and lead, in-Brazil training programs for new volunteers. We spent two years running training programs in health, agriculture, rural development, electric cooperatives, and commercial fishing wholesale cooperatives. It worked because it was closely linked to the Brazilian fishing development agency for that area; it had clear economic goals, and it was well structured and led by volunteers with serious business skills. In several towns the Brazilian program, helped by the volunteers, drastically improved the economic return to local fishing families.
Highlights: trying to speak Portuguese in those initial days, especially hard when you are there as a couple; learning to sleep and make love in a hammock; dimming lights in the entire town when my wife turned on a travel iron (town had electricity for two to three hours a night; seeing an old man lose his entire crop to flooding and then live for a year only because his neighbors provided food; seeing the roadside night fires that celebrate Dia de San Joao; helping neighbors remove the roof tiles, the most valuable part of their house, to save them when the house collapsed during a horribly slow but inexorable flood; using a couple of five cruzeiro notes for toilet paper ( I’m sure almost all of us made similar use of pages from Time Magazine, air mail edition. I think we taught that in training). Rowing a raft with a truck on it across a flooded river to get to our town. Big trucks were too heavy to row and had to be unloaded. One driver lied, said he was lightly loaded. He, the truck and the raft wound up way down stream, a long way from the road.
Finally, and seriously, the shock of seeing so many homeless and crippled beggars on the streets of the Recife, and other larger cities. Not something we saw much of in the U. S. Now I see it every day, here and in most of our major cities. Was it always here, just not visible? Was I blind to see it? Or has something really happened to make US a third world, underdeveloped country? I don’t know the answer; but, in that respect our city streets look more like Recife every day.”
After the Peace Corps he earned a masters in physiology from Washington State University.
Chandler went to Andover summer school before starting. Because he was from the deep south, with a pronounced accent, they shuttled him into a one-on-one phonetics class to brush up his accent. He then attended Andover and remembers being taught Greek by Alston Chase and was impressed that Chase had written a Greek textbook that was used in colleges. He struggled at Andover and was at the bottom of the class. His mother, however, chimed in for him saying it was an honor to be at the bottom. “Someone has to be at the bottom of the class!” He then left to finish high school at Grady High School in Atlanta. After Grady, Chandler went to Emory University ’63.
He served in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, 1963-1965. The first day was nerve-wracking for him. There were lots of spiders, cockroaches, and geckos. And that night, after he put up his mosquito netting, it was a full moon with a clear night with drums beating.
The villagers lived in mud huts with thatched roofs. “The worst thing was the bad water. While watching some kids playing in the water, I saw a worm go right across one kid’s eye. The typical family had seven children, and often only four of them lived.”
“Everyone had a bicycle, but I wanted a motorbike, so I got a 50cc one. I thought I was king cotton at the time.” With friends, he once went to hike up nearby, volcanic Mount Cameroon which is upwards of 13,000 feet high. But they didn’t reach it as even with thousands of feet to go, it was too cold.
“I taught English to high school level French speaking students, and also I started a several hundred book lending library, first and only one in the area. There was a crazy lady in town who used to come up and pinch me. The villagers tried to keep her away from me. Once I saw a dead lady in a ditch. I asked ‘Is someone going to do something about this?’ and they said ‘No, she’s dead.’
“I learned how to like warm beer. And I wished I had the wisdom to do more. But I was blessed by the Peace Corps.” After the Peace Corps, Chandler went to Emory Law School.
Chandler has held many roles in the legal community in Georgia: practicing lawyer in civil and criminal cases, Special Master in many cases, Arbitrator in 125 cases for FInRA (Financial Industry Regulatory Agency), he handled more than 1,000 deprived child cases in DeKalb juvenile Court and even served as Interim Sheriff of DeKalb County for a few months in 1995-1996. Hobbies and avocations involve photography, Bible Studies, and serving as a Sunday School Teacher.
Sandra Moulton Burridge, Abbot ’59
At Abbot, Sandy was in Fidelio, the Commencement Play, in Choir, and the Senior Dramatic Group. She played clarinet, harp, piano, and had a beautiful voice. Sandy went to Colby College with a degree in French.
Sandy served in the Peace Corps in Ghana from 1963 to 1965. Upon arrival, they were honored to meet Prime Minister Kwame Nkruma. She taught French there. For summer vacation in 1964, she, two Canadians and three fellow Peace Corps volunteers decided to go to Khartoum, Sudan. A distance of 3,000 miles in the rainy season by hitch-hiking. There was a problem, however. The borders of Ghana were closed. The workaround was a flight to Nigeria. They discovered they needed to starting hitching on “mammy wagons.” Five-ton trucks decked out in garish colors, driven by tough freewheelers known as “maulers” and stuffed to the gills with mammies wearing bright clothing, merchants, babies, calabashes, and live chickens.
In addition to hitching on Land Rovers, they traveled by train. They then traversed the surprisingly swampy terrain of Chad. At the Chad-Sudan border, in a Land Rover, they were unexpectedly stuck in the roiling waters of the Wadi Fira, (normally a dry riverbed) mercifully escaping. After a stay in Khartoum, they flew to Cairo, then finally flew back to Accra, Ghana.
Sandy earned Music Degree at McGill University, Montreal, Quebec (1970), which included studies at the Conservatoires in Grenoble and in Montreal. “I taught Music and French in schools and privately from 1966 to 1998; this included children in elementary and high schools.” Sandy speaks, of course, fluent French.
Bob, aka “Jake” at P.A., was in Chorus, the Phillips Society, the Outing Club, the Camera Club, the Rifle Club, and the German Club. He performed in Kiss Me Kate, was in All-Club swimming, JV track and JV lacrosse.
After Andover, he went to Swarthmore, class of 1964. He served in the Peace Corps in Peru from 1964 to 1966. Upon his return, Rob attended the University of Indiana and received a Master’s in Urban Economics in 1968. From 1974 to 1978 Rob taught an environmental design and planning course with a team of colleagues in the Conservation and Natural Resources Department at UC Berkeley. In 1979 he headed north to Humboldt County where he was a city planner for three small communities and served as city planner for Healdsburg, 1982-1983. He was a dedicated Rotarian and focused intently on developing and stewarding the Healdsburg Rotary Scholarship Program over many years and recently served on the Rotary Board as Director of Youth Services. Rob’s passion for the youth of the Healdsburg community made it possible for many students to fulfill their dreams of a higher education. Rob was a dedicated environmentalist, passionate about wilderness, conservation, and a defender of wildlife.
For more than 25 years he relished time regularly at home in Hanalei on the North Shore of Kauai where he loved to body board in the ocean. A passionate, intelligent, dedicated, generous, and kind man, Rob loved life and was so interested in people especially youth including his daughter and many nieces and nephews who he inspired.
Bob passed away August 29, 2015.
At P.A., Kirby was a senior editor of Pot Pourri, in the Phillips Society, the German Club, and the Outing Club; he was also a cheerleader, in JV soccer ,and captain of both the varsity squash and tennis teams. He went on to the University of North Carolina, studying political science and graduating in 1962.
Kirby served in the Peace Corps in Santo Domingo (now the Dominican Republic) from 1963 to 1965.
“The Peace Corps simply changed my life. I entered in 1963 as one person and exited in 1965 as another. Not just because the living conditions in the barrios of Santo Domingo were so different–we lived with no indoor water or plumbing, part time electricity at best not just because the experience radicalized me politically when I personally witnessed my government lying about the actions of 30,000 troops (more than US had in Vietnam at the time) sent by President Johnson to stop a revolution in which I, along with many other volunteers, supported the rebels in very direct ways. We even protested publicly to President Johnson (Bob Hope visited the troops with his schtick and announced that all Americans were welcomed at his show except Peace Corps Volunteers).” It was a scary situation, with tanks, machine guns and 30 RPCVs caught up in it all. Since the volunteers had been working with locals in hospitals, they were protected by the rebels and allowed to stay in their part of the city.
“More importantly the efforts we made and started worked and still exist in the barrio today; a once vacant lot has a three-story elementary school and a medical clinic started by a couple of us Peace Corps Volunteers 55+ years ago. It has changed thousands of lives. And that I cannot say about anything else I have ever done. And I thank Andover’s William Sloane Coffin, with whom I became good friends later, who opened the Peace Corps door.
From 1965 to 1967 Kirby was Latin American Desk Officer, Peace Corps. In 1968 he was a staff member, Robert F. Kennedy for President Campaign. From 1971 to 1972 he was Press Secretary, George McGovern for President Campaign. And in 1974 he was a Special Correspondent for CBS. This is where his life got interesting.
He had requested an interview with Fidel Castro. Before going he coordinated with political operative Frank Mankiewicz, who was in close contact with then Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. In a meeting he had with Mankiewicz and Kissinger, Kissinger asked them to give Fidel a letter, hand-written, and unsigned, making them secret emissaries. Kissinger told them, this methodology created plausible deniability in tracing any official connection between himself and Castro and that it was this methodology that he used in his secret negotiations to open up relations with China, which resulted in a major achievement for Nixon.
In the meeting with Castro, the Cuban president gave Kirby and Frank his own handwritten, unsigned letter for Kissinger. While there was no diplomatic breakthrough, since Kissinger never told Nixon about the overture, no feathers were ruffled. Kirby continued to make many trips to Cuba to visit with Castro. At one point he took Sargent Shriver and his wife Eunice Kennedy Shriver to visit Castro. Sargent Shriver told Castro that Eunice was a female version of John F. Kennedy. As the fly on the wall, Kirby was entranced to hear that both Castro, Eunice and Sargent knew Charles DeGaulle. At one point, Eunice said, “I have to tell you a story.” She said that back when, her mother, Rose Kennedy was trying to decide what to give Jack for his birthday. Eunice said, “Why not give him a book from world leader that is signed?” She ended up getting a book from Nikita Khrushchev. Kennedy thanked Rose for the book, but said, “Eunice, next time, let me know ahead of time when you contacting world leaders.”
On a later occasion, Fidel Castro gave a book to Eunice about José Marti, famous for his role of the liberation of Cuba from Spain. He said, “This is the book I would have given to Kennedy.”
Kirby ended up traveling to Cuba about 100 times. Part of what he did over all those years was to introduce Fortune 500 CEOs interested in doing business in Cuba once the embargo was lifted, to secretly meet with Fidel Castro.
Kirby was president of Alamar. Kirby’s papers at the JFK Library comprise about 11,000 documents.
Alexis “Lex” Rieffel, P.A. ’59
At Andover, Lex was in the band, French Club, International Committee of the Phillips Society, and played All-Club soccer. After P.A. Lex went to Princeton, where he majored in Economics.
After college, Lex joined the Peace Corps in Uttar Pradesh, India and served from 1965 to 1967.
“The most remarkable part of my Peace Corps service was spending five weeks in Israel because of a border war between India and Pakistan just as we were ready to fly to New Delhi to begin our work.
The most incredible thing that happened was discovering that the head of the Air France office in New Delhi had my same last name. He happened to be well acquainted with the only aunt on my (French) father’s side. And he happened to be a close friend of a senior Air France manager who was married to Charlotte Perriand, who designed the interiors for many of architect Le Corbusier’s buildings, including those at the new capital of the state of Punjab at Chandigarh. This office head selected me to be the guide to Mme. Perriand’s lovely daughter on a visit to Chandigarh where we were treated like royalty.
I was trained to promote modern poultry keeping in India and was assigned to a site in an industrial suburb of New Delhi. The most ridiculous thing I did in pursuit of this work was to help a family build a large chicken coop on the flat roof of their relatively large house. This poultry operation did not last a year past my departure, but the family in question have been lifelong friends. In fact, I was visiting them in late February last year, just days before the covid-19 pandemic was declared.
Uttar Pradesh, India
I can’t say my Peace Corps service was transformational as it has been for many if not most volunteers. It was a fantastically positive experience due to three people. Felix Knauth was the head of the Northern Regional Office. He was able to persuade the Fletcher School at Tufts University to reverse their decision to make me re-apply after my Peace Corps service despite having granted me deferred admission for my Peace Corps service. Harris Berman was the Peace Corps doctor in India. He ‘saved my life’ because I contracted triple pneumonia that was only beaten because he was able to get a high-powered antibiotic that had not yet been publicly released in the USA. Harris Wofford [who was a key player in the creation of the Peace Corps] was the architect of my training program at St. Johns College in Annapolis, Maryland and was instrumental in arranging for my group to go to Israel when we were blocked from going to India. Harris much later played a key role in the policy research related to international volunteer service that I carried out at the Brookings Institution in 2003-2006. Until his death, he remained the ‘godfather’ of my India XVI Peace Corps group and participated in some of our reunions.”
Lex is currently at the Brookings Institution. Lex has also become an inaugural member of the Board of Trustees of Parami University in Myanmar/Burma, which is becoming Myanmar’s first private nonprofit liberal arts college, modeled on Bard College in the USA. Parami hopes to enroll the first class in the Fall of 2022. Among other things, he continues to teach, in this case online to students in Myanmar.
Gerald “Jerry” Secundy, P.A. ’59
At P.A., Jerry was in the student congress, the Chorus, Choir, French Club, and the Outing Club. He was on the Phillipian, swam varsity swimming, and was on All-Club Crew. After Andover, Jerry went to Harvard University, where he majored in government and minored in economics. He then went to Columbia Law School.
He served in the Peace Corps in Cuzco, Peru from 1967 to 1969.
“I and my then wife were assigned to Peru, our first choice. Our two months of training began in September and October of 1966. It took place in Jingo, Kansas. We were taught Spanish, the culture of Peru, and instructed on how to grow potatoes. The latter should have been a red flag since the Peruvians have been growing potatoes for thousands of years. In our hubris we thought we could improve their methods. Luckily, at the last minute because of my wife’s social work background we were assigned to create a youth center in Cuzco and hence no potato growing for us.
One of my best memories of the Peace Corps was how we were sent to our local assignments. We arrived in Lima and instead of taking a plane to Cuzco, which would have taken one and a half hours, the local director decided that we needed get to know the country and should travel by bus. It was a harrowing trip of five days and nights. The bus had no workable windows and the floor board did not exist in many places so that the road dusts permeated the interior. Rest stops consisted of stopping the bus by the side of the road, and the native women in their wide and voluminous skirts would just squat on the ground to relieve themselves. The female volunteers had all worn pants, so it was a shocking welcome to the country.
Lima is at sea level, and Cuzco is at 12,000 feet. The route was a series of up and down mountains and very narrow passages. The bus driver seemed to take delight in pointing out the bus from the previous week that had gone over the side and fell some thousand feet. He even stopped the bus so that we could all get out and see the remains far below. When we finally arrived in Cuzco one couple immediately quit and took the next plane home to the U.S.A. I managed to lose thirty-five pounds in the first thirty days due to amoebic dysentery.
I then spent the next two years renovating an old building with the help of the local army, to turn it into a ‘Centro’ for 300 local youths. I ran an after-school program in hope of enriching their lives. The Centro also provided the one nourishing meal that the children had all day. This was thanks to the generosity of the Alliance for Progress.
Of the fifty plus volunteers only about a half made it the full two years. Despite that introduction, the Peace Corps was a life-changing experience for me, and I have no regrets and would make that same choice any time. It taught me to appreciate a different culture, to learn a new language, to help make a number of lives better, and to make life-long friendships. I also learned the startling fact that the American way of doing things is not the only way, and not necessarily in all cases, the best way. I also learned to speak Spanish although some might would dispute that.”
At Andover, Cuy was a proctor in Williams Hall, was in varsity swimming, JV soccer, on the Phillipian, in the Phillips Society, the French Club, the Outing Club, and won honorable mention in the Massachusetts State Math Prize. After P.A., Cuy went to Yale.
He joined the Peace Corps in Malaysia.
“For someone who had never been west of the Hudson River, East Malaysia (on the northern coast of the island of Borneo) was indeed a different world. I taught high school (Forms 4 & 5) at a government school– all Muslim students–located across the river from the City of Kuching. I was awakened every morning pre-sunrise by the muezzin’s call to prayer, ‘showered’ with a dipper from a bucket of cold water, bicycled–monsoon or not–a couple of miles up the road to my school. Government schools at the time were still using the British Cambridge syllabus- all subjects were taught in English except for the Malay language.
In 1967 and 1968, Islam in Sarawak was a much more liberal and tolerant religion than is the case in Malaysia today. The girls could wear shorts in physical education class, jeans on the weekends and no headscarves. I did cross the line a few times–the headmaster shut down my English lit class on one occasion when I had two students–a boy and girl– cutting out the tomb scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in front of the class. School let out every day at noon–too hot to hold classes in the afternoon. Across the river was the City of Kuching with its many Malay, Indian and Chinese restaurants and six movie theaters showing five-hour Bollywood epics with Raj Kapoor, Shaw Brothers’ Kung Fu, vampire movies from Hong Kong, and even a regular fare of spaghetti westerns. It was a wonderful two years of cultural exchange–in both directions.”
He now works for Ashford and Wriston, LLP.
1960
At Andover, Nick was in the Chorus, the Phillips Society, and on the business board of Pot Pourri. With respect to athletics, he was on varsity swimming, varsity lacrosse, and varsity soccer. He was also cum laude.
Nick went on to Yale, where he majored in English. For the Peace Corps, “I started training in September 1964 because I was doing voter registration work in Mississippi during the summer. . My job in Warri, Nigeria, at that time part of what was named the Midwest region, was as a teacher coach in a secondary school started by a local chief of the Uhrobo tribe. I taught English, French, ancient and African history. I also started and taught a class after school near the market for working adults to learn English and learn how to read and write. Warri was an “urban” town at the edge of the Niger Delta. I had students from towns down in the delta accessible only by canoe/boat and I visited some of them and their families and little villages on weekends–a great adventure. Towards the end, members of the Ibo tribe fled into Warri to escape the massacres of Ibos in the North which eventually led to the Biafran war.
At Andover, David was in the Phillips Society, the Chess Club, the French Club, the Spanish Club, played JV golf and performed in the Happy Warrior. After P.A., David went to Yale, where he majored in English, and he earned a Masters in East Asian Regional Studies from Harvard.
“In Peace Corps Malaysia I was an English teacher for two years and a Public Health Overseer during the extra year I spent there. One member of the health committee was Haji Ahmad, a man of stature in the community. “Haji” meant he’d made the pilgrimage to Mecca. But before that, he had been an assassin. “Now, when anyone locally felt threatened by someone, they went to Haji Ahmad for protection.”
David said, “We went our days visiting the surrounding kampongs talking with farmers about putting in latrines. We also produced cement pour-flush toilets, a platform with a hole and a short pipe that formed a water trap. Any farmer could get one from us by trading a sack of cement. I also gave public health talks in Malay, using a flannel board for illustration at several mosques.”
On one occasion, when he was talking to the committee, he mentioned there was litter around the market area. One member jumped up and said “Ka pasar!” (“to the market”). At the market, Hadji Ahmad summoned a large Malay woman and asked him to talk to her. “Knowing that the way trash was usually disposed of locally, was to throw it in a hole, I said to the woman in Malay ‘You could dig a hole’. For some reason, what he said caused uproarious laughter. To this day he doesn’t know why. But there was an overkill reaction as later that afternoon “…the dirt flew around the marketplace as huge holes were dug, creating a much bigger health hazard than did the modest amounts of litter.”
The biggest thing I got from the experience was the realization that so much of what we see as normal or right behavior is simply our own American version of what’s right or appropriate. Other cultures have a different take.”
After the Peace Corps, David pursued a career in community work in the African American community in Albany, New York. He then did community work in North Cambridge, Massachusetts.
At Andover, Arch was on the Phillipian and the Pot Pourri as well as the Phillips Society, Press Club, Sailing Club, Outing Club, and the Camera Club. He was All-Club track and received a National Merit Certificate of Commendation. After Andover, Arch went to Harvard.
He served in the Peace Corps in Togo, 1964-1966, and taught English in a secondary school.
Afterwards, he got an MS in diplomacy at Georgetown then joined USIA in 1969 and served in Senegal, Ethiopia, Zaire, Argentina, Congo, Algeria, Paris, and Washington, D.C. (“my one hardship post”).
“I’m still active as president of a small foundation in Boston that supports the University of Liberia.”
At Andover, he was a member of the Newman Club, Spanish Club, and the Contemporary Fiction Club. He played varsity football and varsity lacrosse. After Andover, he went to Harvard.
He served in the Peace Corps in Colombia, first 1964-1966, then again during the 1970s.
His sister Annie remembers, “He was dedicated to helping people less fortunate, impoverished, and lacking access to education. Most of the time was spent amongst the people, with youth developing education, sports programs, and a lot more.”
After the Peace Corps “In general his mission was to stop the cycle of poverty which he pursued both in the Peace Corps and his early work in the Boston under Mayor Kevin White and as a patient advocate at Boston City Hospital where his fluent Spanish at that time was very helpful. After his death his wife and others, including me, established a non-profit that operated for 10 years that provided scholarships to young applicants who would otherwise have been unable to attend University, the Joseph Barton Memorial Fund. The program was very successful.”
At P.A., Peter was a proctor, was in the French Club, the Newman Club, and the Asia Society. He was in JV cross-country. He was a National Merit Scholarship Finalist, won the Marsh Prize and the Freeman Prize Scholarship. After Andover, he went to Princeton, where he majored in biology.
He was in the Peace Corps in Nigeria.
While Nicholas was not in the Peace Corps, he served in the most important predecessor to it: Operations Crossroads Africa. There are two other references in this compendium to this, for Ray Lamontagne ’53 and his visit to Gabon, and William Sloane Coffin, Jr. ’42’s visit to Guinea.
Nicholas went to Ghana, Cameroon, and Nigeria and reported on this in Andover Magazine and gave a speech at P.A. about it in 1961. He was amongst a group of high school seniors, 35 African Americans, a dozen Yale men, and other Americans. He described it as a form of “youth-to-youth diplomacy.”
He found it difficult to “smile at an African woman as he chewed the last of the fried termites which he had presented to him as a token of her friendship. Regardless of the variety of unexpected situations in which a Crossroader inevitably finds himself, he will soon discover an understanding of other people and of himself which can only come from giving up some of the habits and concepts which have dictated his life heretofore and replacing them with new, broadening points of view. This understanding is vital to each American and to the future of his country as well.”
At P.A., David was a proctor, a member of the Outing Club, the Press Club, Chorus, the P.A. Police, the French Club, and also performed in Kiss Me Kate. He was the captain of the ski team, was on varsity lacrosse, and played JV football. He went on to Brown, where he majored in history. After Brown, he served in the Peace Corps in Turkey.
“When my volunteer term was over, I spent a year in graduate school at Columbia and then returned to Turkey as Associate Country Director for another two years. The Peace Corps for me was rather a humbling experience because it became blindingly obvious after just a few weeks in Turkey that we, as young relatively unskilled Americans, had a hell of a lot more to learn than to teach. It was a well-meaning but ludicrous thought that you could scatter young American college graduates around the world and help bring concrete knowledge to ancient societies. I was glad to see that in later years the Peace Corps learned from this and started sending older people with much more relevant experience.
My first year I was teaching English in a high school in a coal-mining town on the Black Sea. I will never forget one of my 16-year-old students who without fail slept through all my classes. One day I confronted him and explained that I was well aware my classes were boring but that I would appreciate it if he could at least try to stay awake. He apologized deeply and said he just got off work when school began. Turns out he worked the night shift in one of the deep mines. His father had been killed in a mine collapse a couple of years previously and he was now the sole provider for his mother and five siblings. Foolishly, I said I would like to go with him one night. Without doubt the most frightening thing I have ever done. Around 10:00pm I joined him at the mine entrance, donned the miners’ overalls and helmet and started walking into the mine. At first it was easy. Then the tunnel got smaller and smaller and we were on hands and knees as we descended deeper and deeper. The fact that the tunnel was supported by what looked suspiciously like automobile jacks did not reassure me. After half an hour we came to another tunnel and were told to wait a minute. ‘What for?’ I asked nervously. My student just smiled and held up his hand. Then there was a loud explosion and dust and small rocks fell all over us. ‘Normal,’ the kid said calmly. ‘Just loosening the coal with dynamite.’ At this point I was a nervous wreck and gladly took the kid’s suggestion that I go topside with a supervisor. This involved lying flat on the narrow conveyor belt used for coal and basically hoping that 300 meters of stone didn’t suddenly descend on us before reaching the entrance 20 minutes later. The next day I brought a pillow to class for him and told him he was going to get an A grade even if he never spoke a word of English. I may have had some difficult moments at Andover but absolutely nothing to match that young man’s experience.
I returned to Turkey in 1990 and spent the next 20 years there working in financial companies throughout the Middle East with offices in Cairo, Amman, and Dubai. My Greek wife and I now split our time between London and Greece.” David speaks Turkish, German, Greek, and “Andover French.”
At P.A., Sam was in the Astronomy Club, the Science Club, the Phillips Society, the German Club, the band and was on the Phillipian. He won the Convers Prize and was on varsity spring track, JV swimming, and All-Club Soccer. After P.A. he went to Stanford where he majored in math, then mastered in science.
He served in the Peace Corps in Malaysia. “For my first two years I taught high school math at the Victoria Institution (VI), in the capital city of Kuala Lumpur. “VI” was (and probably still is) the finest secondary school in the country. The medium of instruction was English, and my students were all fluent. Several of them went on to universities in England. For my third year I taught (believe it or not) computer science at the University of Malaya.
His brother Len in back with white sweater.
My Peace Corps assignment was not at all typical; there were no teaching locals how to make water seal toilets. Instead, I taught computer science at the university’s computer center, which had an IBM 1130 computer, one of the few computers in the country at the time. And best of all, it was installed in an air-conditioned room. Besides teaching programming, I would give demonstrations to visiting big wigs; for many, it was the first time they had ever seen a computer. My most successful demo was to type the name of each visitor at the computer console, and the computer would print a greatly enlarged image of their name on the line printer. It never failed to impress.”
My time in Malaysia opened my eyes to the world beyond California. I became interested in the world and hungry to see more of it (I have since visited and lived in well over a hundred countries). It also made me much more critical of the United States government and its international dealings.”
At Andover, Upper year, Whitney roomed with Alex Browne ‘60 and Webb Harrison ’60 in Headmaster Kemper’s House. Perhaps this was no coincidence as the athletic bona fides of these three started with Whit (also known “Pooh”), who was on varsity football, varsity skiing, and varsity tennis; Alex was varsity football, varsity tennis, and later became captain of the varsity baseball team; and Webb was not only a star of the varsity football team, he was a member of the All-New England Prep School team; later co-captain of the hockey team, was outstanding on varsity baseball team, and won the Yale Bowl for best student-athlete. Whit was president of the student congress, on the Advisory Board, in the French Club, was co-president of Chorus, in Blue Key, and was a Deacon. After Andover, Whit went to Dartmouth, where he played squash, became the president of the Theta Delta Chi fraternity, served on Green Key and Paleopitus. In his later years, he interviewed prospective Dartmouth students for a decade.
Whit then joined the Peace Corps in Nigeria, where he was a teacher and aided with the sports program.
Remembrances from Phil Peek: “Given Whit’s love of sports, he decided that the students of St. Michaels’ Teachers Training College needed to be introduced to basketball. After using virtually all the extra lumber at the college to build two hurricane-proof backboards, we started the training program. But we quickly learned that the students, given their background in football (what we call soccer), would much rather kick the ball down the court and then shoot for the basket.
Whit was appointed the “History Master” of the school. He not only taught various history courses but started research on local history which he used to complete his MA at UCLA.
Because the College was a Church Missionary Society (i.e., Anglican) institution, we all had to lead services for the students. As an agnostic, I finally got out of that duty, but Whit, with his proper New England background as a Congregationalist, felt he had to stay the course.
We garnered an article of praise in the regional Daily Times newspaper when, soon after leaving a local bar, we “helped” during the huge market fire in the neighboring town of Warri.
Among the highlights of our time in the Peace Corps was attending the New Year School in Accra, Ghana which had been established by Kwame Nkrumah, then President of Ghana, for any teachers from West Africa. Not only did we meet with famous Ghanaian scholars and artists but many socialist speakers from London’s Hyde Part Speakers’ corner.
One last quick note about Whit’s ongoing battles with health over our two years in the Niger Delta. While I managed to stay relatively healthy at 6’ and 130 pounds, Whit had a seriously harder time and was quite ill from malaria several times. Nevertheless, we not only survived but prospered! After returning to the States, when each of us got married, we were each other’s best man. I miss him.”
Whit then completed a master’s in African Studies at UCLA, served as associate director of Peace Corps Ghana for three years followed by two years in Morocco in the same position. He spent many years working at the United Nations Development Program with postings in Tunisia, New York, and Southern Sudan. Then he worked for the World Bank, focusing on francophone Africa, especially Rwanda and Niger. He also found time to work privately with the Agha Khan Foundation. Wally Winter ’60, writes “A Quaker friend of mine who served in the Peace Corps in Morocco in the 1970s told me that when Whit was the deputy director of her Peace Corps program there, he was universally liked and admired.”
Whit’s long career in promoting social and economic development in Africa was the quintessential embodiment of non sibi on a stage covering virtually the entire African continent.
Whit passed away March 24, 2018.
Edward Webb Harrison, Jr., P.A. ’60
As a child, Webb and his sister Anne developed their own special language. And, once, as they lived very close to the Institute for Advanced Study, they were sitting on a curb outside their house, fiddling with a bugle. Who should come along but Albert Einstein. After chatting a bit, Einstein, who was famous for his violin, of course, asked if he could play their bugle. While he was doing so, with great expertise, Webb’s mother called out from her kitchen window, “Hey, Webb and Anne! Who’s that playing your bugle?”
Webb was a remarkable athlete and scholar throughout his school years. At Princeton Country Day School (PCD), he played football, (known as a “speedster”), hockey and baseball (as pitcher and shortstop, and one year simultaneously played tennis!) He was lionized by the students. “He was the best athlete I ever was associated with,” says former PCD teacher Bud Tibbals, who coached Harrison in three sports. “He could excel at any sport he turned to. His attitude was tops.” He was co-captain of the football team, shared high scorer honors in ice hockey, and was captain of the baseball team. At graduation, he won the Athletic Cup for the “best all-around athlete” and was one of two winners of the Headmaster’s Cup for leadership. From schoolmate Bob Dorf: “I remember that he was always the top of his class academically, but more impressive to me was his unbelievable athletic prowess.” David Smoyer, who went on to varsity athletics at Dartmouth said of Webb, “He was the best athlete I have ever known.”
During summers, he played tennis. In July 1957 at the age of 15, Webb came in third in the national Boys 15-and-under U.S. Junior Chamber of Commerce Junior and Boys Tournament at Lincoln Park, Santa Monica, California.
At PCD, he walked away with prizes for his accomplishments in Mathematics (the Murch Cup), English, Ancient History, Latin, French, and the Sixth Form scholarship prize. He won the Headmasters’ Cup, given to the senior who has rendered the highest service that can be rendered the school by leadership in character.” In 2000 he was posthumously awarded the school’s Athletic Hall of Fame prize. According to long-time friend Joe Wright, “To watch him run was a joy. The most well- coordinated person I ever met.”
At Andover, Webb was the golden boy of the class, the starting tailback on the football team was just a part of it. He scored the winning touchdown against Exeter. In that same game, he kicked one punt that dropped the ball dead on the Exeter two yard-line. On another punt, he dropped one dead on the Exeter six yard-line. He was awarded first string on the All-New England Prep School Team. The Andover team was undefeated that year. He co-captained the hockey team; was the starting shortstop and star on the baseball team with “a baseball swing that matched Ted Williams’.” That team went 11-1 that year. In fact, Ted Williams was his hero, and he emulated his swing and spent much time practicing his swing. Close friend Wally Winter said, “He hit the hell out of the ball and was a fast runner.”
He was on the First Honor Roll once and the second honor roll twice. He was awarded the Yale Bowl “to that member of the senior class who has attained the highest proficiency in scholarship and athletics.” He was also a recipient of the Interwoven Sweater Award. Webb and Whit Foster and
Alex Browne lived at the home of John Kemper, the headmaster, their junior year, chosen out of 238 classmates. Kemper was very fond of all three of them.
The summer of 1960, he traipsed off to Europe as a Winant Volunteer, in settlement houses on the city’s east side. He then traveled to Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway.
At Princeton, Webb majored in English. Having never played soccer, he made the varsity team and lettered for three years and was named All-Ivy. His senior year he was high scorer. He played varsity hockey. At the last minute decided against playing varsity baseball and took up lacrosse for the first time. He was named All-Ivy goalie. In his junior year, in 1962, he was playing in the championship game against Cornell which Princeton ended up winning 16-5. Princeton lacrosse in those days was at the very top level of play of Division I, winning the Ivy League every year from 1957 to 1963. His father, mother, and his sister Anne (whose nickname was “Puck”) were watching the game. After blocking a shot, Mr. Harrison noticed an aggressive glint in Webb’s eyes. He said, “Watch him, Puck, he’s going to score.” He ran the length of the field to score, bringing down the house because a goalie running the length of the field is virtually unheard of in lacrosse, much less at this top level. Anne remembers it was “Absolutely extraordinary.” At graduation, he won a Scholar/Athlete Award.
After Princeton, he served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, 1964-1966, teaching high school. While there, he contracted malaria. He slept under netting every night. One night he was awakened by a possum sleeping on his chest. According to his sister, “Webb always wanted to do well by doing good with others.”
He didn’t flaunt it his erudition. He didn’t even speak very much. He observed. He’d stand back and watch. The Peace Corps had an enormous influence on him, inspiring him to become a doctor. Because he had not studied pre-med, he decided to take double pre-med courses simultaneously at Cornell and Columbia, putting enormous pressure on himself, compounded by mental illness. He gained his MD degree at Columbia, then took a residency at Rockland State Hospital in psychiatry.
He passed away in 1975.
William Kingston III, P.A. ’60
At P.A. Bill was in the Press Club, the P.A. Police played football, varsity cross country, varsity basketball, varsity tennis, and JV baseball. He went on to Princeton University, where he was a member of the great Bill Bradley basketball team that went to the Final Four.
Bill served in the Peace Corps in Tunisia. “While in Kasserine, Tunisia, from June 1965 to June 1967, I taught English to 8th and 9th graders. During my two years there I also founded a club basketball team which rose to the first division level after I left.
In terms of long-term impact, I feel I gained a greater appreciation for citizens of the world, became more aware of the challenges facing Arabs in the Middle East, and gained more sensitivity to the obstacles facing Islamic residents in the US.”
Mike O’Brien, P.A. ’60
At P.A., Mike worked on The Mirror, was active in the French, Russian, Rifle and Design Clubs, played club soccer and JV track,
He went to Pomona College. “My wife Vana and I met at Pomona, married after graduation in 1964, and served together in the Peace Corps Ethiopia VIII group, 1967-1969. Our training was at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City along with Diné kids in Blanding, Utah.
“We were part of a Peace Corps experiment in Ethiopia, to locate married couples in remote, difficult to reach areas of the country. Our town was Grawa, a mountain village south of the Rift Valley, surrounded by coffee plantations at 9,200-foot elevation. I taught 8th grade math and science, and Vana taught English to 3rd, 7th and 8th grades. I also created a science club to discuss interests our students had that weren’t covered in their curriculum.
Our students worked very hard. Most of them walked for miles every day to get to school, after they had done their home and farm chores. The kids were struggling. Long story short, at the end of that year almost all the 8th graders passed the baccalaureate exam, and there was much celebrating among their families. So, I don’t know how much they actually learned, but they got an important chance in life.
The Science Club on our first bird watching expedition. We trooped out along the cliffs below our town, laughing and chatting noisily, so we didn’t see any of the many charismatic species of local birds like the handsome Egyptian vultures, rainbow-colored Tacazze sunbirds, or blue rollers, but we did get this nice class portrait.
Our first morning in Grawa, our Peace Corps staffer was driving us through a rainstorm when the car seemed to float off the road and overturned. A Jerry can of gasoline broke open, but he turned off the ignition before anything caught fire. We climbed out over each other, unhurt, and sent a hitchhiker we had picked up into Grawa, a couple miles further on, to ask for help. We waited as a pack of hyenas encircled us in the rain, laughing and feinting. Finally, a police car arrived and took us to town, where we spent the rest of the night in the jail. Next morning, the police wondered how the car had so suddenly slid off the road, suspecting us of hanky-panky with a woman on board, but we cleared up that suspicion and they helped us right the Land Rover.
In the Peace Corps, I learned how to simplify complex information and to communicate it in forms that my students, who were bright and hard-working but had limited English, could understand and apply. I think that skill helped me to persuade people in our Pacific Northwest region building industry to understand and incorporate innovations they might otherwise have resisted. For example, I had over 10,000 participants in workshops on designing and building more energy efficient homes, which I believe helped transform our region’s building practices.”
Francis B. Peckham, Jr., P.A. ’60
Barry was in the student congress, the P.A. Police, on varsity baseball, and JV football.
After P.A. he went to Trinity College. Following Trinity, he joined the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.
At P.A., Charlie was in the student congress, the Blue Key ,and played varsity soccer and JV wrestling. After Andover, he attended Oberlin College.
He served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.
At Andover, Todd was in the Phillips Society, the Outing Club, the Spanish Club, in Aces, played JV football, varsity winter track, and varsity spring track.
After P.A. he went to the University of Wisconsin. “During my junior year, the Carnegie Foundation funded sending 17 undergrads from UW to India for a year of study. When I came back to Wisconsin for my senior year, I continued with Indian sociology and language course work. I was in an Indian language class (Urdu) when we heard that President Kennedy had been shot. In the aftermath of that, my then girlfriend and I decided to go in the Peace Corps.
We decided to get married and went together to India. We trained as teachers of English as a second language. We were initially sent to a very posh private school. We spent a school year teaching English to young men who were already fluent and lobbied the Peace Corps to transfer us to something more challenging. They did, and we ended up in a rural school where we did a variety of jobs: teaching carpentry, working with a women’s cooperative to market sewing projects, and working with an experimental rural development institute of the Indian government.
During summer break from school, I helped out with another Peace Corps project: poultry raising. I met trains coming into Delhi with eggs, and peddled a bicycle rickshaw load to the distribution point. If you don’t think a young American driving a bicycle rickshaw through the city attracts attention…Quite a sensation!
It was a transformative experience, learning to operate in a different culture, to listen and learn, and to celebrate diversity. I returned to the US to work as an urban planner, doing development work inspired by the community development people I worked with in India; my wife went on to become a psychotherapist.”
He speaks Hindi-Urdu.
At Andover, Wally was on the Phillipian, the student congress, the advisory board, the Phillips Society executive committee, the Press Club, was President of Blue Key, was on the Prom Committee, on P.A.Police, and played varsity baseball and JV football. He won the John Motley Moorehead Scholarship and the Grace Prize.
After P.A. Wally went to Yale, then the University of Virginia Law School. Perhaps his being a Quaker also motivated him towards the Peace Corps. He served in the Peace Corps in Brazil.
“I taught English and worked with a consumer cooperative that worked with small farmers in cooperatives to improve their agricultural and marketing practices. worked with farmers cooperatives in Pernambuco province.
A few years after I left, it was revealed that the Cooperative League of America (CLUSA) which had organized and funded the cooperatives to which our Peace Corps group had been assigned, had been a CIA front, unknown to the Peace Corps. During Carter’s administration Brazil asked the Peace Corps to leave Brazil, mainly because Carter was pressuring Brazil and Argentina not to develop nuclear weapons.”
He was chosen to play Joseph in Christmas pageant. But he only had just two lines… in Portuguese.
There were very dangerous bugs called chagas bugs. They nest in the cracks and holes of substandard housing, e.g. coming out of mud, in Brazilian thatched huts. They bite you on the mouth, injecting a parasite into your body that you could not get rid of. This earns them the moniker of “kissing bugs”.
Wally had outdoor privy. One day he was walking from the privy on his way back to his house when he stepped on a poisonous snake. He killed it. He felt like God had intervened.
He was the only volunteer in Brazil he knew of that tried a case. He was a lawyer but still had to bone up on Brazilian law. In the Brazilian system you are presumed guilty, for example. They needed to help to defend someone who slashed another man with a knife. His client had been provoked by the victim called him viado meaning “gay.” His client was acquitted.
His experience in the Peace Corps convinced him to do something of socially useful, and he became a poverty lawyer for the rest of his career. He worked in a federally funded legal services department in Chicago, specializing in national origin discrimination.
Hugh Wise, III, P.A. ’60
At P.A., Hugh was on the executive committee of the Phillips Society, the P.A. Police, the co-captain of the varsity hockey team, on varsity lacrosse, and played All-Club soccer and JV football.
After P.A., Hugh went to Princeton, where he also played hockey. Hugh served the Peace Corps in Brazil, 1964-1966. He did office work, setting up programs and sewer projects. “I was involved with setting up programs and sites for other volunteers. I was mostly stationed in Rio, living in a favela where I did some community development work in a slum in Rio de Janeiro. I also taught American History as a visiting professor in two universities.”
He later went to Penn Law School.
1961
He served in Peace Corps in Thailand.
Kim is currently Editor and Lecturer at the Siam Society and Silpakorn.
John was class treasurer, on the advisory board, president of the Student Congress, on the New England Student Government Association, president of Blue Key, a Proctor at Bishop South and was on the Athletic Advisory Board. He also was in the Band, Sour Grapes, was head Cheerleader, the varsity baseball manager, and on JV track and JV baseball. He was cum laude and on the first honor roll for seven terms, second honor roll for three terms, and a winner of the Aurelian Honor Society Prize.
John went on to Stanford, class of 1966.
He served in the Peace Corps in Huancayo, Peru from 1966 to 1969 as a volunteer and then as a Peace Corps trainer in Mexico. Initially he was sent—in the Peace Corps’ infinite wisdom—to teach family planning in Peru. What they hadn’t counted on was there is a Catholic Church in Peru. So, John switched to training the locals on raising guinea pigs. The level of raising guinea pigs he found was just letting them run around on the kitchen floor whacking them on the head.
One time he was taking the train from Lima to Huancayo. In a desolate place, the train suddenly stopped and the engine was uncoupled from the passenger cars and chugged off. John and the passengers were left stranded in a desolate place and worried that this might be some subterfuge with the Shining Path guerillas coming to rob or kill them all. After some hours, without any explanation, the engine finally came back, recoupled with the passenger cars and continued on to Huancayo.
During this period, his brother Bill was living in Germany and engaged to a German woman, Helga. On the day before their wedding, Helga’s father collapsed on the floor. Helga did mouth-to-mouth but to no avail. Needless to say, the wedding needed to be immediately called off, all plans canceled, all relatives and friends around the world informed. They decided, however, to go ahead with the planned wedding. Just before the wedding, Bill, Helga and her brothers were sitting around in the living room of Helga’s family home, mourning and wearing black. There was a knock at the door. It was John, carrying a guitar, and looking like a bedraggled vagabond. He had travelled all the way from Peru without informing the Peace Corps, which would not have given him leave for this purpose, to surprise Bill and Helga for the wedding. He brightened the mood immensely and played several civil rights songs for everyone to sing. He then accompanied them to the civil service ceremony, acting as Bill’s best man. As Bill recalls, “What a blessing his appearance was for us all!”
John trained Peace Corps volunteers in California and Mexico in 1969.
His Peace Corps service, which focused on the well-being of women and children, inspired the whole rest of his impactful, distinguished career.
He then earned a doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. From 1977 to 1979, he served as staff director of the Committee on Child Development, Research and Public Policy of the National Academy of Sciences.
From 1979 to 1981, he was the staff director of the Congressional Select Panel for the Promotion of Child Health, which resulted in a multi-volume report. In the 1986/1987 school year, he taught at the private Harvard prep school in North Hollywood, California. At the end of the school year, he was appointed Head of the Lower School. He was especially known as a prominent researcher in the field of education for handicapped children. Shortly thereafter, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and died in Cambridge, surrounded by his family, on November 25, 1988.
At P.A., Andy was in All-Club Soccer, in Pnyx, the Phillips Society, was president of the Jewish Student Group, head of the jazz band the Aces where he played trumpet was in marching band, the concert band, and the pit orchestra for Broadway musicals. He was also cum laude. “I filled many hours with sports, e.g., soccer, lacrosse, squash, ping pong and billiards.” Directly after graduating from Andover, I spent the summer in Bordeaux living with two families in the Experiment in International Living. I am still in contact with the first of those French families.
After Andover, Andrew went to Harvard, where he majored in French history and literature. “I was in what was called the Senior Year Program so after my junior year at Harvard, I was in an Outward Bound training camp in the rainforest of Puerto Rico. I then completed my training at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque the following summer, 1965.
He served in the Peace Corps in Bolivia and visited King Harris ’61 in Chile. “I served on the High Plains of Bolivia in rural community development from 1965 to 1967. I did rural community development. The first year I lived in a hacienda that had belonged to the patron. The second year I lived both in the town of Ancoraimes on Lake Titicaca and part of the time in the Methodist clinic house, where I helped with child births, tuberculosis control, and other things. I assisted a veterinarian with his work. I worked with USAID in some rural development projects, being assigned two local campesinos.”
While there, he translated an Aymara (native Bolivian language) grammar into English and translated a veterinary manual into Spanish for an American veterinarian working with the Methodists. “The Aymara paste eucalyptus leaves on their foreheads to stamp out headaches.” At one point he acquired a llama. “It cost me only $13.28, a full-grown, six-year-old white llama. I called him ‘Horace.” Unfortunately, it would not respond to me at all. Each time I took Horace out to pasture, he’d run away. He wouldn’t eat when I gave him food. He wouldn’t drink when I gave him water. I gave Horace away to a neighbor, who cooked him.”
“After I arrived at Sallcapampa, the captain of the community soccer team announced to me in front of the whole squad that I had been selected padrino of the soccer team. I was flattered beyond belief. Little was I to know that my honor was to be able to supply the entire soccer team with full uniforms including soccer shoes!”
The rains and dirt roads caused problems when there were flash floods. “…very unfavorable for biking. Enough mud between tire and fender eliminated all movement of the bicycle and you are forced to carry it.” Even in general when it’s dry, “I often spent five hours round-trip on a bicycle getting to a community for a 20-minute meeting.”
“In each community, one leader is elected each year to be the head or secretario general.” The problem is, “…one year as head is guaranteed to deplete a man’s funds. The reason is that he is called upon to furnish cane alcohol for community events such as the annual fiestas, national holidays, religious holidays, big market days, births, deaths, animal sales, settling of disputes and seasonal celebrations for planting and harvesting.”
Superstitions abound that get in the way of community development. For example, even though steel plows would cut down on labor hours, they reject steel plows. “People fear that the steel offends the goddess of the soil and so prevents proper crop growth.” Another superstition? “ No new work can be started on a Tuesday or a Friday.”
Cohen observes that the Bolivians have a passion for burlesque. And when someone is having a funny situation, they don’t help, they just watch. “Once, at the market, I had loaded my knapsack with ripe papaya melons and had strapped the knapsack to my back. An enormous bee started attacking my bag to get at the melons. I would have liked someone to help me brush the bee away. Instead, a crowd gathered to watch. They were all in hysterics. They saw the scene as most entertaining and enjoyed watching it through to its natural conclusion.”
There was a tragic episode driven by the Bolivian propensity to over-drink. “Once, a man who had been elected to an office in his community was feted for three days and nights by his cronies. He returned home and blasted buckshot through his wife’s vital organs. I watched this woman bleed to death in the Methodist clinic. No one would give blood (not even her brother-in-law, who was an employee at the clinic!) because Aymara believe that the loss of even a drop of blood severely debilitates you. There was no case made against him.”
Unfortunately, the Catholic Church itself encourages drinking by sponsoring fiesta dates like All Saints Day and Santa Lucia. “Apparently, my Peace Corps service was also a key cause of the multiple sclerosis (MS) I have had since the age of 55. I am now 77. During the second year my Peace Corps stay I got hepatitis and mononucleosis and was in the hospital for a month. The Epstein-Barr virus in mono can give someone MS. I have been pretty much in remission since I was diagnosed 12 years ago, but I do not have good balance and need walking aids to get about.
My Peace Corps experience kickstarted my career in applied linguistics. I am a semi-retired professor focusing on second language studies, with an emphasis on language learner strategies and on pragmatics. After the Peace Corps I did a Linguistics Masters and PhD in International Development Education at Stanford. I taught in an MA TESOL Program for four years at UCLA, then 17 at the School of Education – Hebrew University in Jerusalem and finally 22 years in Second Language Studies at the University of Minnesota.”
Andrew speaks 13 languages although he breaks it down as follows: “The languages I have studied are English, Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Quechua, Aymara, German, Japanese, Chinese, Hebrew, and Arabic. I have given professional talks in English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and Hebrew.” As a professional linguist, he says some of these languages are, for him, “atrophied.”
Daniel Fitts, P.A. ’61
Dan was in the Press Club at Andover, also the French Cluband played JV hockey and All-Club Lacrosse.
He went on to Yale. He is the son of legendary Andover English teacher Dudley Fitts.
Dan served in the Peace Corps in Kenya.
Mark Foster, P.A. ’61
At Andover, Mark was on the advisory board, the Phillipian, in the Philomathean Society, was Commodore of the Sailing Club, was a New England Student Government Association Delegate, a member of the Contemporary Fiction Group and a proctor in Williams Hall.
Mark served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.
At Andover, King excelled scholastically, cum laude, capturing two terms on first honor roll and nine terms on second honor roll. He won the Webster Prize and the Valpey Latin Prize. He was on the editorial board of Pot Pourri, was in Philo and Pnyx, the Phillips Society, the Asia Society, the Spanish Club, the band, the Jewish Group and he played JV football. He was honored with three nicknames: “Kingfish,” “Seymour,” and “Wishbone,” which was one of his two middle names.
After Andover, King went to Harvard where he took a course in Economic Development taught by John Kenneth Galbraith.
“Leonard James, a history professor, at Andover created a special current affairs minor course for seniors, one that focused on world affairs. Class discussions focused on challenges we faced in the world and possible ways to confront them. We read Burdick and Lederer’s The Ugly American, which painted a less than flattering portrait of diplomats representing us in Southeast Asia. The message, in class, very Andover-like, was that we should do something about the situation described.”
For the Peace Corps in Chile, King arrived in October of 1965, and lived in Pueblo Hundido, a slum. The poorest homes were framed by both wood fragments and cardboard. The area he was in was solidly Communist. He helped organize a major drainage program. He secured new homes for many poor residents. He worked on sewage disposal, latrines, fly eradication, cupboard construction stove building and construction of a new basketball court. “Community development at its best is grueling. It takes a combination of salesman, sociologist, politician—armed with dedication, drive and stamina—to do well at this job.”
“On a strictly rational basis, walking is faster and cheaper than riding a bus here. At its maximum, the bus speeds at 20 miles per hour. Stops are so numerous there is no point in counting them. Whey, then, do Latinos ride the bus? Togetherness. Why be lonely if you can ride with others?”
“Last night, as I reflected on the state of my mind, I realized that, more than anything else, a lack of privacy has been bothering me. Privacy just does not exist here. Small and compact, Pueblo Hundido does not provide any opportunities for solitude. Ten kidsalways seem to be following me around. Even when I am inside my room, people are outside, making noise or trying to stare in. I could also mention the steady stream of visitors that Alipio (my family host) receives who really come to get a peek at my quarters. Sometimes I feel like taking a club and smashing all of them.”
He talks of the nearly total lack of medical assistance in his village. “Children walk around in the dirt with bleeding puncture wounds. Colds and pneumonia are discouragingly common and dentistry is confined to tooth extraction.”
The interviews—15—20 per day—he conducted daily were “deceptively grueling” due to having to listen alertly to Spanish hour after hour.”
“Heavy rainstorms would flood the room I lived in. While my bed, desk and suitcases were on a wooden platform, the water sloshed below.” “Cold water shaving and brushing my teeth with Coca-Cola (no cavities in 20 months!)”
“The same need to push and push hard I used to feel in Andover debating or Leverett sports at Harvard is present here. Let up for one week, and months of work may be ruined.”
A miner said to him “I always wondered what separated norteamericanos from Chilenos. Now I see. You people are not pure work directors; you get your hands dirty like everyone else.”
“I have countless new acquaintances and two adopted families.”
“Senator Robert Kennedy arrived in Conception for a visit. He spent part of the afternoon talking with Peace Corps volunteers, yours truly among them. The university was a hotbed of leftist thinking and anti-American feeling. Sure enough, Kennedy never got to speak in the university gymnasium. A large American flag was burned and a near-riot ensued. [Angry leftist students spat on Senator Robert F. Kennedy and threw eggs, rocks and money at him when he visited Concepcion University tonight. He had been warned by student leaders to stay away.] I pulled him aside and made a suggestion. Why not have the senator, just before he left the next day, visit the coal mines? No one in Chile would believe he would do it. Amazingly, Kennedy decided to do it. He arrived the next morning early at Lota, briefly visited the mine, got soot all over his face, and in the process, was pictured after he emerged. That picture made the front page of El Sur, the regional newspaper.”
“I got drunk today, roaring drunk. I had been told that once you stared to buy drinks for someone and they reciprocated, you just kept buying. Saying “No” was considered insulting and could lead to trouble.”
Observation: “Vietnam is thousands of miles away. Here we substitute housing and food for bullets. JFK has markedly influenced the course of my life and strengthened the ideas which keep me going in Chile. He was the spiritual symbol of one generation.”
“As a Harvard student, intellectually gifted and financially independent, I felt I was special. However, any tendency I might have had to puff up has long since been destroyed here in Chile. Between my inability to speak Spanish fluently and lack of cultural awareness, I manage to make a complete ass out of myself 50 times a day. Laughs, which used to come with witticisms now come with comical behavior. People cannot get over my stupidity. This sort of character castration can be bothersome or downright humiliating. Like all others serving in the Peace Corps, I have learned to accept ridicule as part of my job.”
“Where else can a recent college grad learn about co-ops, land reform, housing manpower retraining, community power structure and Latin American institutions in general in two short years?”
JFK quote from his inaugural address: “To those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required, not because the Communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.”
A quotation from Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (son of Sr. who went to Andover),“hangs on my wall and summarizes better than anything I know my reasons for being here. ‘A man should share the action and passion of his time or be judged not to have lived.’ “
King lost a bag at the airport. One year later, he found it at Santiago airport.
“We need more, not less, cross-cultural training experiences for talented future leaders. A summer internship abroad, a year off in a foreign country or an educational fellowship outside the United States all have value, but they are not a substitute for a hands-on two-year field experience like the Peace Corps offers.”
“My Peace Corps experience definitely impacted my worldview as I rose up the ranks of Pittway, becoming President in 1984 and President and CEO in 1987.” He became a senior executive with Chicago Metropolis, a civic organization, later a senior fellow at the Metropolitan Planning Council, then finally chair of the Illinois Housing Development Authority, a direct outgrowth of the housing work I did in the Peace Corps. He’s currently Chairman of Harris Holdings, Inc.
At P.A. Frank was in the Student Congress, the French Club, Blue Key, the Chorus, Sour Grapes, the 8 ‘n 1, the P.A. Police and the Invictas. He played varsity tennis and JV squash. Frank went on to Princeton, where he majored in history.
He went to the Peace Corps in Chile.
He is now a self-employed attorney.
At P.A., Steve was in Student Congress, Editor-in-Chief of The Mirror, in PNYX, the Asia Society and the French Club. He was captain of the boxing team and on the athletic advisory board.
After Andover, he went to Harvard, majoring in Social Relations.
In the Peace Corps in Peru, Steve was a community organizer.
“I worked in two barriadas, Esperanza and Florencia de Mora. In Esperanza I worked with community leaders on their water supply. Our goal was to restore a well and pump system that had provided free water until the Mayor of Trujillo shut it down, claiming it had broken. Members of his political party then sold water to residents by the bucket. We were planning to march on City Hall when the Prefect, who controlled the army, expressed to me his fear that the Mayor’s goons would attack the protestors and he would have to call out the troops.
In Florencia, working with members of a volleyball team, I created a theater company that performed outdoors to promote the construction and use of sanitary toilets. We also founded the first high school in Florencia de Mora, offering night classes at a private elementary school. Eventually, the state took it over, paid the instructors and built classrooms. Many years later I went back to the barriada with my son and goddaughter to show the school to them. That day, it so happened, the high school was celebrating its fortieth anniversary. The groundskeeper recognized me, and soon I was standing between my son and goddaughter on a platform in the schoolyard being serenaded by a brass band.
I loved the access to all levels of Peruvian society that I gained through the Peace Corps. I had political power and had to learn how to use it wisely, especially after I risked the safety of the Esperanza community by proposing they march on City Hall. And I felt a lasting sense of accomplishment in founding a high school. Ever since, wherever I’ve lived, I’ve taken on community organizing projects.”
Steve has been a filmmaker and a playwright.
At Andover, Mark was on the Phillipian, in the Phillips Society, in Philo, the French Club, the Rifle Club, Blue Key and performed in Finian’s Rainbow and Guys and Dolls. He played All-Club Soccer, was on varsity soccer and was the varsity lacrosse manager. After P.A., he went to Princeton, majoring in English.
He served in the Peace Corps in Nepal.
Julia Owen Rea, Abbot ’61
At Abbot, Julie was president of her class, played varsity lacrosse and varsity hockey, was in the “A” Society and did Sunday School Teaching.
Julie served in the Peace Corps in Senegal, where she met Sam Rea, Phillips Academy class of 1956. They subsequently married and served in USAID together.
John Page, P.A. ’61
At P.A., John, known as “Turtle”, was in the student congress, the Phillips Society, the Reception Committee, the Spanish Club, the Outing Club, the Band, and the Aces combo. He also participated in All-Club Swimming and the Judo Club. He went on to Brown where he majored in political science.
“I trained at UCLA where the Education Department gave us an amazing introduction to elementary school science teaching. Nigeria had virtually no science education as part of the new, post-colonial, universal free elementary education system. We worked in the Teacher Training Colleges in Southern Nigeria, a system that had no science curriculum. Our assignment was to develop curricula and teach ‘discovery method’ science at the teacher colleges in order to rapidly spread science education.
Niger Delta village life was a delight. Warm and welcoming students and staff at the college as well as friendly neighbors in the village who seemed amazed by the foreigners who lived in their village as teachers. We were welcomed at dozens of neighboring villages and homes with traditional welcoming ceremonies; residents were eager to share their lives, traditions, customs and never stopped asking questions about the world we represented.
Advances of rebel troops into the Niger Delta (the Biafran War) in mid-1967 led to mandatory evacuation from the village and the college. A jolting departure with no time for good-byes. When it became clear that we would not be returned to Nigeria as volunteers, I chose a transfer to Ethiopia.
My Ethiopia assignment was teaching science and math at a small, rural, elementary school in the southern mountains, a two-days walk to the nearest road, but near a grass landing strip where small planes landed twice weekly to pick up 100-pound. bags of raw, wild coffee beans. Omnipresent coffee gave residents an opportunity to move from self-sufficiency to the evolving cash economy.
I feel very fortunate to have had the opportunity to teach in two very different countries. There is no doubt about the value of these experiences in my life; hopefully Peace Corps service had value to the countries we eagerly served.”
Carlton Vanderwarker, Jr., P.A. ’61
At Andover, Tony was in Blue Key, on the Phillipian, in the Outing Club and the Spanish Club. He won Second Place in the New England Interscholastic Wrestling Association Championships in the 167-pound class. He was also on varsity football and varsity lacrosse. He went on to Yale.
He served in the Peace Corps in Guinea.
1962
According to his brother, Brandt Andersson, ’68, “Allen wasn’t at the Fuess Award ceremony, which Sargent Shriver emceed in 1967, because he was still in the Peace Corps in Honduras, but the day after the presentation, G.G. Benedict gave a talk in assembly, about a bad-boy-gone-good, about how my brother had been expelled from Andover but had gone on to M.I.T. and then on to the Peace Corps. That exposed a closely held family secret about Allen’s expulsion (for ‘an accumulation of offenses’), but it turned out I enjoyed a few days of notoriety as the brother of the guy who cut the bell ropes in the chapel and the campanile, repeatedly.
After he made his fortune in software, Allen established the Riecken Foundation to build libraries in villages in Honduras and Guatemala. They have changed thousands of lives not only in terms of literacy and knowledge of the wider world, but his libraries have been a source of grassroots activity on many fronts. Allen later bought a newspaper and radio station in Honduras that were responsible for exposing the oligarchy’s presidential candidate as a drug dealer and the primary despoiler of Honduras’ hardwood forests. That led to the election of the only non-autocrat President of Honduras in recent memory.”
He is currently Chairman of Paperboy Ventures, LLC.
At Andover, Hobie was on the P.A. Police, the student congress, the Phillips Society, the Co-Chairman of Open Door, was a member of the Outing Club, the Blue Key, and the Band. He was on the varsity ski team and JV football. He went on to Yale ’66, where he majored in English. After graduation he was convinced that the Vietnam War was wrong. According to his wife, Tami, “In order to protest this war, he chose to do something good and help people, so he chose the Peace Corps.
He served in the Peace Corps in Tunisia, 1967-1969, where he taught English at the Sfax School for boys. The locals welcomed Ralph and treat him like a king.
“I tried very hard to understand the differences in attitudes and outlook of the people who live in other lands.” Tami says “I think two years living, teaching, learning other countries’ culture stimulated him and opened his eyes. He told me he thought about ‘Life & Death’ more seriously because everything is so frail.”
“The Peace Corps had a tremendous influence on me. It opened my mind up to what I call ‘liberalism’. I’ve made a conscious effort to treat everyone—no matter what their background, language or culture—equally.”
After the Peace Corps, he was drafted into the Army and went to Vietnam, 1970, where he worked on personnel records. While there, on R&R in Japan, he met his future wife, Tami. “I told her many times, marrying her was the best thing I ever did in my life.”
For a brief period after Vietnam, Ralph was a ski instructor.
He founded the Elk Grove Village printing company SOS/Sets or Singles where he served as President/Owner.
He passed away at his home in Barrington, Illinois on May 17, 2005.
At Andover, Rob was on the Phillipian, was a member of the French, Spanish and Russian Clubs, and was in Chorus. He also was on the varsity boxing team.
He went on to Yale ’66, in History and Russian Studies and earned a diploma at Moscow State University in the Soviet Union as well as the Institute for the Study of USSR, Munich, Germany, 1966, and Columbia Business School in 1968.
After his MBA he did two years in the Peace Corps as an advisor to the Ministry of Tourism in Trabzon, Turkey on the Black Sea. He learned Turkish fluently and worked with the businesses and with the local Italian Capuchin Priest who had written two books on the history of Trabzon. He traveled all through Turkey. He also led two bus expeditions from London with Australians returning home through Turkey, into Iran to Tehran, Isfahan, across the desert and up to Quetta Pakistan, to Kandahar, Kabul, and the Bamiyan valley, camping out all the way.
“I lived in the Santa Maria Catholic Church in center of town which took in tourists We made our own wine; led tours around Turkey and Greece, traveled camping with two tourist bus loads throughout Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, & Afghanistan; with British professor and students explored ancient Greek, Byzantine, Kurdish, Ottoman Castles I also wrote histories of Sumela Monastery and Trebizonda; explored all of Turkey.
It was a great experience helping and protecting so many people; standing up to threats; absorbing culture, language, archaeology of Turkey and five other neighboring countries.”
He’s currently President of the Chevaliers de Tastevin Foundation. “The purpose of the Foundation of the Commanderie des Chevaliers du Tastevin is the development of a broader understanding and appreciation of the region of Burgundy, France, by the citizens of the United States and similar understanding and appreciation of the USA by citizens of Burgundy.
The Foundation has annually provided grants to send two masters graduate students of Viticulture & Oenology to spend the harvest and wine making season each with one of the great Burgundy houses.
Rob speaks Russian, Turkish, French, and Italian.
At Andover, Kenny was in the Outing Club and the Pembroke Conference on Religion in Independent Schools. He also played JV football and JV winter track. He went on to Washington & Lee University, where he majored in English.
“Tunisia has a beautiful Mediterranean coastline and a couple of idyllic islands. My assignment was a College Secondaire (high school) in Sidi Ali Ben Nasrallah.
Being the lone American in a small town was great for getting into the culture, but it was confining, so I looked forward to traveling on vacations and occasional weekends. An adventuresome and frequently rewarding mode of travel was hitchhiking. On one trip, a friend and I were picked up by an American tourist who told us he was the Dancing Bear on the Captain Kangaroo show.
On another quite memorable trip, a British VSO volunteer and I were literally in the middle of nowhere on a two-lane road hitch-hiking with night falling when a black Citroen roared past, then braked and came back for us. It was Dr. Mohd Fadhel al-Jamali, Prime Minister of the Iraqi monarchy that was overthrown in 1958. Sentenced to death, he was granted exile in Tunisia. His traveling companions were the ambassadors to Tunisia from Kuwait and Iran. They were on a Ramadan tour of and welcomed us along to tour Matamata, Sfax, and Gabes. The experience was fabulous. Later travel, mostly thumbing it, got me and a travel mate across Algeria to Morocco, and back.
My reflection is that I cannot imagine any American heading to the open road in North Africa the way we did in the 60s, an experience that was so much fun, adventuresome, and rewarding. I don’t think this is just old age and prudence saying that. A tremendous experience.
The Arab world—at least in North Africa—was so hospitable then, so laid back. Since 1996 Tunisia has not hosted Peace Corps volunteers. What a loss. For us all.”
At P.A., Mike was on the Pot Pourri, in the French Club, the Stamp Club, the Spanish Club, the Design Society, the Asia Society, the Sailing Club and was Co-Chairman of the Premedical Society. He performed in Hamlet, Richard II, and Twelfth Night. He was also on varsity track.
”I attended the University of California, Berkeley for both undergraduate (BA Anthropology 1966) and after the Peace Corps graduate studies (Ph.D. Linguistics 1974). My studies were cross-disciplinary and I was either a Linguistic Anthropologist or an Anthropological Linguist– your choice. My interests were regionally centered in Western North America and Southeast Asia with aboriginal cultures not maintaining their way against assimilation. There was a direct connection to my experiences in Thailand where I was posted in a Lao (Laotian, “Northeastern Thai”) speaking area with a significant Chinese and Vietnamese minority.
“I was in the Peace Corps teaching English in a village middle school in a Lao-speaking area of Northeast Thailand in 1966-1967. We were the most lengthily trained group I have ever heard of. We went to advance training before our last year of college, again after graduation, and then duplicated the latter in Bangkok. We were the first Thailand group to train in-country. It was a total surprise to all of us–especially when they deselected a few more of us afterwards.”
Carol Laaff Nuttall, Abbot ’62
At Abbot, Carol was in the class play, the modern dance group, the day student dance committee and the student initiation committee. She was in Numerals and Fidelio, was chair of the Bazaar Committee and a study hall proctor. She played varsity lacrosse.
After Abbot, Carol went to Bennett College. She was a Peace Corps volunteer from 1964 through 1968, serving in Niger and Chad as a bilingual secretary in the Peace Corps offices. She also helped teach English to Hamani Diori, the first President of the Republic of Niger. She met her future husband and love of her life, Dennis, while in Chad, and they made Newburyport, Massachusetts, their home for 33 years until retiring to Texas. She was an avid and merciless Scrabble player.
Carol died August 12, 2012 at the age of 68, after a nine-year battle with cancer.
At Andover, Clif won the Graves Prize, was cum laude, in the French and Russian Clubs, in the Asia Society, President of the African Club, in the Outing Club, the Phillips Society and the Société Honoraire de Français. He played All-Club soccer. Clif went on to Harvard.
He served in the Peace Corps in Liberia.
Carolyn “Lyn” Dickinson Shaw, Abbot ’62
At Abbot, Lyn was the W.U.S. Representative and in Cynosure. She attended Oberlin College.
She served in Kano, Nigeria between 1967 and 1969. “I taught English language skills to two separate groups of students. One was a group of secondary-age boys in the Kano Teacher Training College. The other was a group of men and women who had already been teaching English in elementary schools for years.
I’m on the back seat of a Honda 90. Avoiding the moving bicyclists and walkers, my husband is maneuvering through one of the seven gates in the ancient wall of the “old city” of Kano. I’m twenty-four years old and newly married. My husband has an appointment with the tailor who is making him a dashiki (shirt) with its complicated embroidery. I myself will give the first of several English lessons to the wives of the Emir (traditional Hausa ruler), led first through the dark maze of winding palace corridors into a room covered with soft Persian rugs.
We receive an invitation and then attend the Yoruba naming ceremony for Elisabeth and Samuel Awoleye’s infant daughter. The Awoleyes are among my most earnest, enthusiastic and promising students. While there I feel a strange new mixture of cultural distance and the appreciation of friends.
The Emir Sallah arrives. The annual ceremony when the Emir of Kano, carried on a throne under his golden parasol, is honored by all his retainers. Small boys run back and forth in front of the palace. We wait breathlessly in what seems to be organized pandemonium. Then, one by one, formally dressed riders on horseback charge diagonally across the huge courtyard. Each stops precipitously in front of the seated Emir, rears his horse back, yells and salutes. We don’t understand every word but admire the fierce loyalty.
At the end of our second year, living in our traditional compound of working class Tudun Wada, we have two visitors: a changeable chameleon on our one small tree and Comfort Noah, another of our promising students. Drinking tea in our open patio she gives me local herbs for a cold. Perhaps quietly this lovely woman, who has become a friend, is aware of my first pregnancy,
I’m still in contact with members of my group. In fact, after 9/11 we met every year for a long time and have now started reunions by Zoom.
Peace Corps work expands many a horizon. As I see it, we Peace Corps Volunteers give of ourselves to people from other cultures, but also learn much about being friends, being kind, being resourceful, and being ambassadors of our own country. And now that the world is so threatened by climate events, extinctions and the like, I cherish the quiet opportunities Peace Corps service gave me after I left college. Besides offering me the chance to rely on my own creativity the work made me more self-reliant. All coming to me in a package wrapped in the appreciative smiles of many students, people who became friends.”
At P.A., Jon was in the Africa, French, Russian and Outing Clubs. He went on to Tufts.
He served in Kenya in the Peace Corps.
Jonathan is currently a consultant.
At Andover, Pat was in the student congress, Philo, the Russian Club, the Asia Society, the Contemporary Fiction Club, Chorus and the Abbot Stevens House Council. After Andover, Pat went to Tulane.
“I did serve in Bangladesh, or East Pakistan as it was known in those days, from 1963 to 1965. I had only completed one year at Tulane at a time when the PC was requiring a grad degree for entry. I got into a Public Works Program on the basis of ‘construction experience’ (summer job). We ‘supervised’ the building of cyclone shelters in the far Southeast of Bangladesh. I lived in Cox’s Bazaar, precisely where the Ruhinga Muslim refugees currently have their refugee camp. It was a difficult service, but the shelters were subsequently used at times of the ever-recurring flooding there, and the experience pointed me into the U.S. Foreign Service where I later served for 26 years.”
1963
After Andover, Paul earned an A.B. in History at Georgetown in 1968.
“I taught English to 7th and 9th graders in Ethiopia 1968-1970 in the Peace Corps. I was a Foreign Service Officer with the State Department from 1981 to 2008. My daughter, Megan Doherty, is a Libya expert. My son, Sean, 41, is also a Foreign Service Officer specializing in Asia and he and his wife, also an officer, and our only grandchild, four-year-old Charlie, went to Taipei in August of 2020.”
During my time in Addis Ababa I saw the emperor, Haile Selassie, several times, usually when he was being driven in his maroon-colored Rolls Royce from and to his residence in Jubilee Palace. Although he was very short, about 5’2″, he reportedly had a booster put onto the back seat of the car that elevated him so that he appeared to be of normal height. I once saw him at very close range coming out of a church on a festival day. He was in his late 70s but, despite his age and short stature, he had deep, penetrating eyes that could wither you with just a glance and gave no doubt as to who was in charge in his world.
The Peace Corps was my introduction and stepping board to the world and other cultures. It got me started on a career teaching English abroad in Iran and Greece followed by a 27-year stint as a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. Department of State and assignments to Mexico (twice), Canada (twice), and Uruguay. Altogether, I have lived outside the U.S. for 23 years and have traveled extensively on every continent except Antarctica. I have studied and spoken six languages at different points in my life and I am still trilingual. What makes me very proud is that my two children both have careers in foreign affairs and they have spent considerable time overseas. I was married in Tehran, my son was born in Thessaloniki, and his son, my grandson, was born in Canberra, Australia. None of this would have happened had I not joined the Peace Corps in 1968.”
Paul speaks French and Spanish fluently. Also has experience in Amharic, Farsi and Greek.
At Andover, John had quite an impressive resume: seven terms on the second honor roll, varsity football, captain of the wrestling team, varsity lacrosse, the Athletic Advisory Board. And, Student Congress, Vice-President of the class, the Phillips Society, Chairman, Charities Drive Committee, Russian Club, Chairman of Student Deacons, Proctor in Williams Hall, Circulio, Senior Class Play. He won the Robert Henry Coleman Scholarship. Then there were the prizes: the Wells Prize, the Keyes Prize, the Webster History Prize (twice), and the Aurelian Honor Society Prize.
John went on to Princeton. “I majored in English and wrote my thesis on the influence of Dante on the later poetry of T.S. Eliot. Junior year I read Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original. Professor McCallister was great–and very tough.
John served in the Peace Corps in Korea. “I taught English, mostly language and composition (not much literature) at Korea University in Seoul from January 1969 to December 1970.
I’ll just say I was honored to get to know two brilliant professors at Korea University: Kim Jin Man, a Chaucerian scholar, and Kim Ji Gyu, an expert on T.S. Eliot. Both had done graduate work in England.
At P.A. Nick (also known as “Art”) was in the Outing Club and the Model Railroading Club. He went on to Antioch College where he majored in biology and oceanography.
He served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria, where he taught biology, math and English.
He’s a reporter at the Lincoln County Weekly.
At Abbot Barb was head of W.U.S., (discussion about world problems) was in the Current Events Club, in Fidelio, studied piano, and was in the Class Play. After P.A. she went to Smith College. She then earned a masters and Ph.D. at New York University in drama.
Her next job was as an instructor in theater at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She volunteered on a kibbutz where she met her future husband, embraced Israel as her home for seven years and had two children. She worked again at Hebrew University and later at the University of Haifa. Back in the states, she was hired by the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts. Later, she founded her own market research firm Audience Impact Research and retired in 2014. Her first marriage was dissolved back in the 1980s, and she has been married to Steve Link for more than 25 years.
She and Steve wanted to devote their retirement years to international service and opted for the Peace Corps. They served in Keetmanshoop, Namibia from 2014 to 2016. At the time in the 1990s when apartheid was still present in Namibia, one volunteer held parties for blacks and white together. While these were very popular, Barbara was disappointed that the local Peace Corps office put the kibosh on them as “too controversial”. Barbara was at retirement age, much older than the other volunteers and became a mother figure to them, and Steve became a father figure.
by Karas Huizen Crafts
Her village was in the southern area of a poor country that was assailed by AIDS, alcoholism and violence. A quite sad state of affairs. They worked as business advisors for would-be entrepreneurs and struggling businesses. One client was Karas Huisen Crafts, which employed women with HIV/AIDS or TB. These women created Namibian crafts, arts, jewelry and needlework that were sold around the world.
The Peace Corps was enormously rewarding for her. “Serving in Namibia, working with the oppressed and brutalized Nama tribe, I learned to respect cultural differences–not necessarily to agree with them, but to understand the values and traditions that can enable people such as the Nama to sustain each other and persevere. Once back in the US, I applied that respect to fighting for the rights of migrants suffering the humanitarian crisis at our borders. I spent a year studying courses relevant to asylum and refugee law and became a volunteer at the Immigrant and Refugee Law Center. I’m also on the board of a Namibian women’s health foundation.”
At Andover, Peter was blessed with multiple nicknames: “Ford C.”, “Oscar”, “Otto,” and “Dutch”. (“Dutch” due to his blond hair.) He played varsity football and JV lacrosse. He was in the French Club, Blue Key, he was Stickball Commissioner, on the Cooley House Committee, was in the Senior Class play, and won the Dean K. Webster History Prize. And in anticipation of the Peace Corps, he was in the Africa Club.
He went on to Harvard, majoring in History.
He was in the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. He enjoyed being abroad and being active in community service.
He spent his career as a banker in New York City, then worked as a private investment banker in Tucson. He was active in Republican and Harvard Club fund raising. He also was very supportive of his local Unitarian Church.
He passed away on August 8, 2004 in Pima, Arizona, as the result of an auto accident.
Mary Jasper Anderson Walter, Abbot ’63
At Abbot, Mare was in New Fidelio, the Senior Parlor Committee and the Social Committee. After Abbot, Mare attended Beloit College.
“It was the Sixties after all. College students were learning to protest. Our schools mandated regular meetings to instruct us on how to behave. There were to be no protests against our government. My school mandated a convocation in the chapel so that we could hear from some gentlemen from the State Department.
I taught math and science at Misikhu Girls Secondary School in Kenya, 1967—1968. I spent the rest of my working years raising money for non-profit schools and social service agencies.
They insisted that the presence of the United States military in Viet Nam was in a purely advisory role. One young man who was fresh back from his military service raised his hand and said, “Then how do you explain that I carried weapons and fired on individuals who were likely Viet Cong personnel?”
The speaker paused for a moment before saying, “Young man you are lying.” We were stunned. The student stood and left the chapel.
A year later, when I was newly arrived at my school assignment in western Kenya, one of the few pieces of correspondence I received from the State Department while in country was a letter reiterating that we were forbidden to protest against the US in any way, particularly by marching to the US embassy in Nairobi. And this addendum, which in my memory was in all caps and boldface: And if you do that, you will be sent home AT YOUR OWN EXPENSE!”
Arrival at my assigned school in Kimilili was by a long ride in an old British colonial train It stopped at sunset to let us off where there was no station, just a few miles from the Uganda border. Two men in tribal dress stood in the darkness next to an oil can with the only light, a fire burning.
We were handed off to the headmistress of our school, a Benedictine nun. I was to teach maths (sic) and physics, although I had never studied physics myself. Sister expressed confidence in my ability to accomplish that, because I could read the textbook, which my students could not.
On the first day of teaching as I stood at the slate blackboard, the floor began to shake and I was afraid my students were doing something to frighten me, only to learn that we were experiencing an earthquake.
My students were curious about the very tall buildings down the road. So, we took our first field trip and walked the two miles to see them. It turned out they were two-story buildings at Lugulu Girls Secondary School. They also asked why European women get pregnant sideways. They had seen old pictures of women with hoop skirts and thought they carried their babies on their hips.
We once rented a car and guns, then camped out in a tent on the Serengeti Plain, hunting for zebras and wildebeests. I woke very early one morning and took my .30-06 Springfield rifle out onto the plain. A steady wind blew as I lined up a shot on a small herd of zebras. At the last minute, I asked myself why on earth I would want to kill anything so beautiful. So, I turned around and returned to our campground to considerable criticism from my colleagues.
I attended the circumcision ceremony for my houseboy’s oldest son. I had my father buy the sacrificial calf, which was butchered to feed the attendees. The calf stayed overnight in the mud and wattle hut.
As we were packing up to leave the country, my houseboy, Wafula asked me who would be cooking for me in the United States, since clearly I was not a cook.
As our service neared the end, we planned an adventure. We bought a desert-equipped Land Rover. We’d planned to drive through Addis Ababa, Khartoum, Cairo and up to Gibraltar—3,700 miles. At the last minute we were told that to drive through the Sudan we’d have to pay three times the value of the vehicle. So, we had to sell the Land Rover and travel by plane to Addis Ababa, Khartoum, Cairo, on the France and home.
Kennedy’s famous speech location
“My career was spent raising money for private schools and social services in Detroit. Then I moved to Durham NC to raise money for the Duke University Eye Center. Large community of RPCVs in that state so I had good connections. In fact, Margaret Riley, one of the founders of the Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Association was about the first person I met here.
The Peace Corps gave me an incredible journey, the first of many that provided introductions to people, places and things that I could not have imagined. I am extremely grateful for those opportunities. The main impact my service had on me was the role of volunteering at whatever level was possible.
Mary learned Swahili in Kenya.
1964
At Andover, John played varsity soccer, hockey and lacrosse, was in the Phillips Society, Blue Key, and the P.A. Police. His nickname is listed in the Pot Pourri as “Beemer” and “Spider”. He went to Harvard, class of 1968.
John served the Peace Corps in Peru.
At P.A., John played JV lacrosse, All-Club Soccer and All-Club hockey. He was on the Phillipian, a senior editor of Pot Pourri, and on the Mirror. He was in the Phillips Society, was Chairman of the Infirmary Committee; in the French Club; the Newman Club; the Chorus; and most importantly, the Rabbit Pond Yacht Club. He also played in Macbeth and My Fair Lady.
After Andover, John went to Georgetown University. His junior year he spent abroad at at a school in Fribourg, Switzerland, in the French-speaking part of that country. The teachers there were great, but, he had been armed with the great French teachers at Andover, like Grew, Humphries and Whitney. While there, he and a buddy got motorcycles. They drove to France, Spain, then to Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia then on to Sicily, Brindisi, and Yugoslavia.
Having loved Tunisia, he joined the Peace Corps hoping to go there, but was assigned to the Ivory Coast teaching auto mechanics at a rural vocational school for one year, and then spent another year in Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) where his job was repairing Peace Corps volunteers’ vehicles, including working on wells and dams programs.
Later John put in two years as a Peace Corps recruiter (one year in southern California and one year in the Rocky Mountain states), a year and a half as a regional Peace Corps director in Zaire (driving across the whole country once) and then a year and a half as desk officer in DC for Chad, Benin, and Niger.)
Reflecting back on his experiences, John was inspired by the challenges he faced in the Peace Corps, dealing with the bureaucracies of both the U.S. government and those in African countries. He also tried to pay it back in his life, being involved in his local Chamber of Commerce and the local fire department. He also decided, once back in the states, to live in a place that was not easy, and chose northern Michigan.
At P.A. Pat was on varsity swimming, in the Phillips Society, the French Club, the Asia Society and played in Julius Caesar.
He went on to Stanford, where he admits, he was a middling student. After graduation, he applied for the Peace Corps and was assigned to Malaysia. “When I finished the training, I declined to go to Malaysia because I wanted to get married and needed to wait until my wife, Ruth finished at Stanford. A year behind me, she was majoring in French with a minor in linguistics.”
Once she finished school, they thought they were going to Thailand project but got notice to go to Iran.
“I spent the next nine months trying to avoid the draft. The draft board kept sending me notices to have a physical, first in Oakland California. I went to my draft board in Downey California and transferred the physical to Southern California. That required them to transfer the file from Oakland to Washington DC and then to Downey in Southern California. I got another notice two months later to have the physical in Downey. I went to the Oakland draft board and transferred the physical to Oakland. When the notice came for Oakland in January I then went to Downey and transferred it back to Downey. By then we were in Brattleboro, Vermont training for the Peace Corps and they gave me the Peace Corps deferment from the draft.”
They studied Farsi and Teaching English as a Foreign Language (TEFL, then spent six weeks in-country practice teaching at a summer school in Iran. They then had the choice to choose the smallest town in Iran, Tafresh, a beautiful place, especially so when snowed in, in the wintertime, that was the home of two Iranian prime ministers (one of whom was later assassinated). This special town had no less than five high schools, so that the number of students Pat and Ruth were teaching was only 15 per class.
During training, they’d been warned that the students could be mischievous and unruly and that they would have to exercise firm control. They soon learned that students sent to the principal were subject to harsh abuse including the slapping of faces and the administration of hard hits to the palms with sticks.
Pat’s class was on the ground floor, which meant there was only a three-foot drop from the window to the ground. In his very first week in class, one student started to make interruptive, snide comments. After three instances of this, Pat warned the student to stop, or he would throw him out the window. The student sneered at this and made another untoward comment. Pat grabbed the student by the scruff of the neck with one hand and by his body with the other and threw him out the window. There was never a problem again in that class for the rest of the year.
After the Peace Corps, Pat attended Hastings College of Law. Having been exposed to learn how to cope in a foreign country, how to survive, he had developed the imagination and determination to learn he had not had before. He did very well in law school. He then had the privilege of working for a federal judge. In retrospect Pat said, “Working for a federal judge was almost as exciting as being a judge.”
Indeed, Pat went on to be a judge, and as it fortuitously turns out, in an area of Los Angeles with many Iranians. “When I first had an Iranian couple in front of me in Family Court, I responded to some questions in a way, not in Farsi but in English, that demonstrated I understood what had been said. The lawyers asked my staff at the recess if I understood Farsi, and they told them I did. From that point on, the Iranian attorneys understood that I could understand what they were saying to their clients. At one point I even corrected testimony about an exhibit because they had misinterpreted the Farsi in the document, and I corrected them because I could read it. That was a fun moment.”
Post Script: In 1979 he and Ruth were divorced. She went on to earn a Ph.D. at Berkeley and became the Dean at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey.
At Andover, was in the Société Honoraire de Français, on varsity soccer, varsity lacrosse, on the P.A. Police, in the Phillips Society, the French Club, Blue Key, the Chorus, Sour Grapes, the Weevils and performed in My Fair Lady. After Andover, Bob went to Harvard.
“I taught English as a foreign language in northern Togo. There were some 40 local languages in Togo, but the official language was then and still is French. I went to an intensive immersion French language course at Dartmouth in the summer of 1968 before arriving in Togo to begin my teaching. At the end of two years, I “re-upped” for a third academic year of teaching. Then, with the approval of the Minister of Secondary Education, I stayed in Lome, the capital city, and wrote a text for first-year Togolese students of English and a teacher’s manual on how to teach the course. I returned to the United States in late November 1971.
On my way to Togo, we stopped overnight in Paris. We went to a restaurant and I ordered food in what I thought was my near-perfect French. The waiter looked at me and said, in English, “You want sandwich?” Three and one-half years later, I returned to Paris on my way back to the States. I went into a store dressed in my Togolese clothes and started to order something. The storekeeper looked at me, said hello in French and asked me where I was from. She obviously knew I wasn’t Parisian, but she didn’t identify me as English-speaking or American. I thought that was quite funny at the time.
The Peace Corps shaped my life for decades to come. I realized living in Togo what it was like to be a foreigner, how it felt to be one of the only people in my village of a different skin color, and how important language skills were to young kids hoping to move forward in life. It also gave me a better sense of appreciation of American democracy, even under the rule of President Nixon. Living in a military dictatorship was sometimes quite difficult to handle. I also learned to appreciate the benefits of living in a rich country like the United States, compared to in Togo, where we had no electricity and no running water.”
At P.A. Bruce won the Convers Prize, was on varsity running track, and All-Club Soccer. He was a member of the French Club, the Russian Club, the Chess Club, and the African Club. He was also on the Philippian. After Andover, Bruce went to Stanford.
“I was in Colombia right after Stanford, 1968-1972. Three years in the Peace Corps, one year more as a private citizen. I taught mathematics at the Universidad Pedagogica y Tecnologica in Tunja (two hours by bus from Bogota). I married my Colombian wife Consuelo in 1970, and we just celebrated 50 years of felicidad.”
Jack was at P.A. only in his senior year, when he was all varsity soccer, varsity hockey and All-Club lacrosse. He was also a member of the Spanish Club. After P.A. he went to Harvard.
“I was in a Peace Corps pilot project in Buno Bedele, Ethiopia, starting in 1967, teaching primary school English and giving vaccinations in rural villages throughout Ilubabor Province in the southwestern part of the country. As with all PCVs, it was an eye opening, cross-cultural experience that taught me more than I was able to reciprocate.
One memory that stands out the most was the local celebration of Emperor Hailie Selassie’s birthday in a small village, 20 miles from where I was. The celebration was hosted by one of the Provincial Chiefs and he invited about 30 local leaders and three Peace Corps Volunteerss. When we arrived, we had to walk down a slippery mud path and force ourselves through a large flock of vultures, which were eating the bloody carcasses of freshly killed goats and a cow. When we entered the house, there were a number of wooden tables and benches laid out with platters of raw meat, berbere (hot peppers), injera (spongy fermented flatbread) and locally filled bottles of fermented alcoholic drinks, Tedj and Tella.
The participants had already started and motioned us to take a seat and join the festivities. Once we sat, we were given a plate and a glass but nothing else, and we were a bit bewildered about how to eat, so we just watched. The guests all carried curved knives which they used to stab the large pieces of bloody meat, dip in berbere and put in their mouths. They would then proceed to cut the portion of meat protruding from their mouths with their knives, much like shaving.
We didn’t carry knives and were unsure how to proceed, but not for long, as three men stood up and threw their knives in our direction. All three knives accurately embedded in the wooden table in front of each PCV, and everyone laughed heartily about how they had scared the shit out of the ferenjis! (foreigners). We laughed feebly, but it was just the beginning because now we had to eat, drink and pretend to enjoy the feast. This was difficult to do, especially cutting the raw meat away from your mouth without shearing off your nose. Dealing with the berbere and the local alcohol was a further challenge. Somehow, we managed to survive our five-hour meal and stumbled out drunk with arms around our new friends and head back through the voracious vultures. I can’t say it was tasty, but it sure was a memorable meal!”
At P.A., Randy was in the Société Honoraire de Français, was in the Student Congress, the Phillips Society, PNYX (debate society), and the French Club. He was a solid JV athlete in football, hockey, and track. He was a member of the largest rock and roll group in the world, playing lead guitar, The Torqués.
During the summer of 1963 he stayed in France with a special prep school group of students with the Experiment in International Living. He went on to Princeton, where he majored in French and minored in Spanish and was in another rock group, The Nightwatch.
After Princeton he joined the Peace Corps in Libya, living in a Berber mountain community 85 miles south of Tripoli with no running water or electricity, teaching in two fifth grades. His observation about the Peace Corps is summarized in “The best way to learn about your own country is to leave it.” He would not have traded the experience for anything in the world, lending him an invaluable perspective on world affairs.
In 2020, he released a book about his and 101 of his fellow volunteers’ experiences, 101 Arabian Tales: How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya. The book was edited by Bob Marshall ’64.
At P.A., Jeff won the Lauder Prize for European History, the Federation of Harvard Clubs Book Prize, and the Schweppe Prize. He was captain of varsity winter track and was varsity cross-country and spring track, along the way winning the Track Trophy. He served on the Athletic Advisory Council, the Student Congress, and Blue Key. Jeff went on to Harvard.
Jeff served in the Peace Corps in Kenya. “I was a teacher at a small school (60 students; 9th and 10th grades) in a remote location in the Cherangany Hills of Kenya, along with an Irish priest and a Kenyan my age.” One day, Jeff needed to travel to Eldoret, 40 miles away, where the nearest grocery store was, and the school’s mailbox. For $2 he could take the bus. Having missed the first and possibly only bus of the day, he joined a group of students to walk. After 15 miles we had descended from the Cherangany Hills and started across the Uashin Guishu Plain. We had covered another ten miles, still encountering few people and no vehicles, when we saw a cloud of dust as a bus came up behind us. “I took a ride the last 15 miles to Eldoret for $1.20. Walking 25 miles had saved me 80 cents.”
“The experience at a remote school has occupied a disproportionate share of my thoughts and made me wiser about myself and human nature. It also left me with a deep respect for the gentle hardiness of the Kalengin people.”
Jeff practiced law in Washington, D.C. for forty years.
At Andover, Bob won a national merit scholarship, won first prize in the Means Essay, the Phillipian Prize, and the Abbot Stevens Prize. He was editor of the Phillipian, a member of the Natural History Club, a member of the Asia Society, the Extra Curricular Council, was in the Student Congress and senior year was class secretary. In sports, he played varsity soccer, varsity baseball and JV basketball.
He played clarinet in the band and the Torqués and claims to have been the leader of the Paul Revere Rockers. The group consisted of a dozen denizens of the dorm who, unplugged, assiduously practiced the catchy rock ‘n roll song, L’il Darlin’, with Bob hitting the falsetto parts, for the annual dorm singing contest at George Washington Hall. The contest was judged by a handful of dour, stern-faced faculty members from the Latin and Greek departments. Traditionally, the music had always been old fashioned. The faculty members hated it. The audience loved it, cheering to the rooftops. While the Paul Revere Rockers may have lost the contest, they won the hearts of the student body.
Bob’s other musical claim to fame was writing performing and recording, for the Torqués a mock rock song years before Sha-Na-Na, called I Ain’t Got Nobody.
Bob went on to Harvard and for many years thereafter was class secretary.
Bob served in Libya in Aujila, as a fifth-grade English teacher, an oasis 252 miles south of Benghazi.
“After Ghaddafi’s coup I taught high schoolers at an agricultural lycée in the Tunisian coastal town of Tabarka, near the Algerian border.
Back in New York, I went to Columbia Law School, worked three years at a law firm, then went in-house at Time Inc., where I specialized in libel law and read Time Magazine for a living. We relocated to Minnesota when General Mills recruited my wife, Siri, for their general counsel position. I had the luxury of retiring from the law and becoming a docent at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Eventually Siri retired, too, and we moved to Santa Barbara.
My Peace Corps years gave me a familiarity with Arab culture, confidence presenting to a group, comfort speaking a foreign language, despair of Middle East peace and something unusual to talk about. I don’t know if I had any impact on my students’ lives–I sort of doubt it–but we had a good time.”
At P.A., Dave was in varsity boxing, played JV football and was director of the Outing Club. He was in band, Chorus and performed in My Fair Lady.
“I taught general science to grades 5-8 in Nepal. I endeavored to teach hands-on, improvising equipment from whatever was locally available. I was fortunate enough to get the large library with proper tables and chairs for my classes.
My assigned school and a sibling school an hour’s walk up-valley were both being run by leftists, in fact our headmaster was closely linked to nationally prominent members of Nepal’s communist party. One day an army platoon marched down from the district headquarters, to take the headmaster and a student disciple away in chains. The government sent out a replacement headmaster, who was never accepted. Instead, our students were out on strike for some months, until the new guy abdicated. Then the army came back. This time they took away several leftist teachers, while others managed to leave town. Summer (monsoon) vacation intervened, with yet another headmaster and only a third of the previous teachers returning in the Fall. High school and P.A. had not prepared me for life inside a political whirlwind, nor was Stanford nearly so intensely political, despite Vietnam War protests and all.
The politics of cannabis were interesting as well. Although forbidden to volunteers, marijuana and hashish were legal in Nepal. In fact, a store owned by one of the royals was Kathmandu’s main outlet for hashish, sold in billiard ball-size lumps During Fall holidays another volunteer and I trekked through one district, crossing high ridges paralleling the western Dhaulagiri Himalaya. Above the highest villages, we struggled through dense thickets of hemp, probably uncultivated. Hashish would have been produced by rubbing leaves and buds with the hands, accumulating resin. Scrape off, rinse and repeat.
For me, 2 ½ years in the Peace Corps was a more intense learning experience than four years of college and God knows how many in graduate school.”
At Andover, Herb was in All-Club swimming, manager of JV lacrosse and of varsity lacrosse. He was the president of the Chess Club, on the Phillipian and won the Watt Prize. After P.A., Herb went to Princeton.
Herb served in the Peace Corps in Peru.
He currently works at Northrup Grumman.
At Andover, Matt was on varsity crew, and All-Club swimming. He was on the Mirror, a member of the Phillips Society, the Spanish Club, the Rifle Club and played in Twelfth Night, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. After Andover Matt went to Amherst College.
He served in the Peace Corps in the Marshall Islands. He taught ESL (English as a Second Language) in a small village on the Alilinglaplap Atoll, then in the second year traveled to the outer islands to support teachers. He then signed on for two more years to run government training programs and developing curriculum for teachers.
Jim’s father was in the Foreign Service so that even before attending Andover he lived in Austria, Italy and Spain. And while at Andover his father was in Somalia and Hungary.
At P.A., Jim played on JV lacrosse and on All-Club soccer. He was on the Phillipian, the Russian Club and the Africa Club. He was also a proctor at Andover Cottage.
“I was part of Nicaragua I, the first Peace Corps delegation to that country from 1968 to 1971. Our stated mission was to support the Nicaraguan National Bank’s program (supported by the Inter-American Development Bank) to provide low interest, short and medium term, in-kind loans to small farmers by expanding the bank’s capacity to provide technical assistance.
During training in Puerto Rico and Nicaragua we were given crash courses in crop science and development economics, just enough to give us a dangerous sense of competence. This was all part of the ‘Green Revolution’ launched by the well-meaning and Nobel Prize winning Iowa agronomist Norman Borlaug. How much good I did is questionable, and how much I learned during the subsequent two years in the northern Nicaraguan Department of Jinotega is immense.
At 6’3″ I was at least 5″ taller than the next tallest guy in the town of La Concordia, but what caused the greatest public spectacle was my ordering a pair of boots from the local cobbler. I needed them because I could only visit my demonstration plots by horse (or mule, but they were more expensive, and that’s another story), and sneakers, I was told by the chief agronomist I wouldn’t make it in the willie-wags, what with coral snakes and the like. But my zapatero didn’t have a last anywhere close to my size 13 EE feet. So, he decided to trace my feet on paper and go from there. Now, his shop was also the local bar and pool hall, so there was already a crowd there. He put a piece of paper on the floor to trace my right foot, and it was immediately obvious that it wasn’t big enough, so another sheet had to be added. Murmurs of amazement. Soon, a larger crowd gathered. The result was a pair of lace-up boots that reached close to my knee, and I wish I still had them.”
He is currently a retired teacher in Maine.
1965
At P.A. Jay won the Department of Physics Prize, was a National Merit finalist, was in the Radio Club, the Newman Club, and worked at WPAA.
After Andover, he went to Brown and majored in Engineering. “When I graduated in 1969, I had three career choices which didn’t involve getting blown up in Vietnam: the Peace Corps; a defense job designing missile guidance systems for RCA in Waltham, Massachusetts; and Naval Officers’ Candidate School. I’m still not entirely sure why I chose the Peace Corps, but I think it must have been for the adventure.
I was assigned to an electric power program in Ecuador. The national electric utility, Ecuadorian Electrification Institute, was rolling in money from oil exports and was pouring it into building a national transmission grid. Their connected load was growing at 29% per year compounded. The grid project absorbed almost all of its electrical engineers, leaving very few to run the operating utilities. So they used the Peace Corps as a hiring hall, reimbursing the Peace Corps for the full cost of the volunteers.
I was sent to the port city of Manta, on Ecuador’s central coast. The Manabí Division had one junior electrical engineer and one senior, two-line crews, two diesel-fired generating stations, and probably about forty miles of sub-transmission and distribution lines. I set up a pole-numbering scheme; did a load-flow study to predict fault currents (very difficult with only a slide rule); surveyed a sub-transmission line out to a fishing village ten miles east of Manta; and laid out the town’s distribution system.
My biggest project was to translate and edit a system specification, documenting the conceptual design of a 500-megawatt hydroelectric dam in Ecuador’s Amazon region. They were too busy running the utility to translate 464 pages of technical text. So, I did it. It took six months. Every two weeks I would fly up to Quito from Manta in a DC-3 with my typewritten translation, Patricio and I would go over it, and the secretaries would retype the revised copy.
Jay had a friend who owned a kinkajou, a rainforest mammal. Kinkajous have very long extrudable tongues, and this one liked to insert his up humans’ nostrils. There’s no experience quite like having your nose cleaned by one.
The Peace Corps gave me my vocation as an electric power engineer. I came back from Ecuador determined to spend my life designing and building electric power systems, preferably in the developing world. But first I had to go back to school. It was painfully obvious to me, in my isolation in Manta, how poorly I was qualified with only a bachelor’s degree.”
Elizabeth Giblin Jones, Abbot ’65
At Abbot, Betsy was vice president of her class, in Debating, Fidelio and Choir. She was A.C.A. Treasurer and played varsity soccer.
Betsy taught in the public schools of Baltimore then served in the Peace Corps in Uganda, 1971-1972.
“My time was cut short due to the death of one of the new volunteers. He had been on a sightseeing tour with a friend, having been advised not to travel because of dangerous unrest, and they tried to run a roadblock in their car, clearly scared by soldiers with weapons. He was shot and killed. Within ten days all volunteers were rounded up and flown out, a jarring, tragic end to a fantastic time. It was, of course, the time of Idi Amin.
A big group of us, American and British volunteers, travelled to the island of Lamu on an Arab dhow, Christmas of 1971. One of our number, a charming Irishman, Mac, charmed the crew into taking seven of us, free of charge, up the coast with them to the island of Lamu, off the coast of Kenya. They spoke no English and some of us had minimal Swahili. Mac chatted away to them and they to him, in the universal language of good cheer. It took three days, we slept on deck, in the rowboats on board or on the cargo which was bags of cement! I wouldn’t survive it now. We sang, got sunburned, shared what food we had and thoroughly enjoyed the adventure.
Being in Uganda completely changed my life. Within two weeks of arrival, I met a handsome, quite wonderful English volunteer. We married in 1973, returned to Africa for another nine years, both having loved it so much. All our four daughters were born there. Secondly, it changed my attitude to socializing and to money. No phones, no warning of visits, people just turned up; make space on your floor for sleepers, share your food, share whatever resources you have. Having now lived in Britain since 1983, our home has been visited by friends from around the world, many are people we met in Africa and Uganda was the beginning.
It completely changed my life, expanded my ideas of life, enriched my life and for me it was pure gift.”
Brinkley Messick III, P.A. ’65
At P.A., Brink was on the Phillipian staff, worked at WPAA, was in the Press Club, and played JV baseball. After Andover, he went to the University of Pennsylvania, where he learned Arabic. He got a masters at Princeton in Near Eastern Studies and Ph.D. in Anthropology at Columbia in 1978.
In Morocco, in the Peace Corps, Brinkley was a teacher in Azrou in Middle Atlas Mountains. He and Carl Hermann ’65 visited Fez together. “Brinkley’s early specialty was Yemeni law. He became an Arabic scholar. His Arabic was excellent and his Berber was very impressive. Kids who followed us around in Fez were very interested in his blue eyes and competent Berber and were sure he come from a blue-eyed Algerian tribe.”
1966
At P.A., Bill was on JV football, All-Club basketball and All-Club baseball. He was in the student congress, was secretary of the Philomathean Society, was in the Asia Society, the French Club and PNYX. He also won first in the Goodhue Prize Examination.
He went on to the University of North Carolina, then received a masters degree from the University of Chicago in 1974 and a BA in Arts and Film from Columbia College in Chicago in 1979.
Bill served in the Peace Corps in Niamy, Niger.
After the Peace Corps he did film editing in Chicago, among other pursuits. He was also very interested in religion and became a follower of the Meher Baba Indian spiritual master. He produced a series of international videos about Baba. He spoke French.
Bill died August 17, 1990, in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
1967
At P.A., somehow Tom’s nickname was “Mellon”. Tom played varsity football, JV wrestling, varsity winter track, was co-captain of varsity spring track, and was on the Athletic Advisory Board. He served on the student congress, was President of Stimson House, Vice-Chairman of Blue Key, Head Deacon, on the Prom Committee, in the Chorus, in Trolls, and in the Pembroke Religious Conference. He won the Keyes Prize and performed in The Music Man. He went on to Princeton, class of 1971.
“Taking a leave of absence after my sophomore year, I enrolled in the Peace Corps, winding up in Ecuador. My endeavor was to organize landless Andean campesinos into a land cooperative, the aim of which was to claim land in the upper Amazon basin. “Upper,” meaning around 3000-foot elevation. The area we settled has a view of Sangay, a 17,000+ foot active volcano rising from the jungle floor in the distance. We, nor no one else, truly appreciated the global importance of the rainforest. It was all about land ownership and the opportunity to create personal wealth, or at least, a decent living for oneself and the family.
The program had an Ecuadorian governmental sponsor, which added legitimacy to our undertaking. We also received assistance from the Salesian Fathers, whose mission and airstrip in the jungle was the entry point for our endeavors. Otherwise, it was a two day walk from my colony site to the nearest road. When I first arrived, three co-ops and their respective colonies, or villages, had already been settled. I was fortunate enough to have a blueprint to follow, and a section of the jungle had already been predetermined where to begin.
From the mission, and depending on the depth of mud in the trails, it took four to six hours to hike to the colony site. It also involved fording three large rivers, two of which hand pulled cable cars had been built to aid in the crossing when the river level was too deep or dangerous to cross. Very briefly, what started as an adventure with three men hacking out a clearing in triple canopy rainforest has developed over the past 50 years into a vibrant town of almost 6,000 people. Originally known as 24 de Mayo, the date in which the Spanish were defeated in Ecuador, it is now known as Huamboya.
This Peace Corps project was studied and published by Tom Rudel, Princeton ’68, who is now a Ph.D. Munger Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Rutgers. There is also a Spanish language book written by Ernesto Salazar, Pioneros de la Selva, (Pioneers of the Jungle) which describes not just the efforts and successes of the colonos (colonists) in the Oriente, but also the environmental devastation that their presence has also caused. Again, in my mind, the economic advancement and much improved standard of living for the brave and determined people far surpasses the negative effects on the environment.
For a young 21-year-old, this was very exciting stuff. The experience was raw, primitive, and undeniably rich in adventure. My Peace Corps Ecuador stint was definitively the most formative time of my life. It was then that I determined that I wanted to go into medicine. In fact, it was an event just short of an epiphany. The intensity of our experiences was so powerful, so intense, and combined with the fortunate power of the memory of a 20-year-old brain, every breath was remembered. My feelings about my volunteer friends are summarized by Bob Dylan’s Dream: “I wish, I wish, I wish in vain, that we could be together …again… I’d give it all gladly, if our lives could be like that”.
He was most recently an anesthesiologist at Hoag Memorial Hospital.
At P.A. Buz played varsity football and was in the Andover Hockey League. He was in the student congress, Philo, the French Club and the Lilly White Champs. He was on the Phillipian and played in Curculio and Rudens. After Andover, Buz went to Harvard, where he majored in government. He earned his law degree from New York University.
“The Peace Corps experience was definitely life-changing in very positive ways for me, as for most people.
I served in Senegal in 1972-1973 as an advisor to an administrative decentralization project in the Notto arrondissement of Thies region. After a year, I transferred to Zaïre where I was the Team Leader of a Regional Surveillance Team in the National Smallpox Eradication Campaign for 1973-1974, based initially in Bukavu, the capital of North Kivu province, and later establishing a new team and base in Kindu, the capital of Maniema province. I re-upped and returned to Senegal for 1974-1975 as a project development advisor in the Secretariat for Human Development (Secretariat de la Promotion Humaine), based in Dakar.
Along the way, I learned three African languages and used them and French in my work. I also met my wife in eastern Zaïre.
“In Senegal, once, I was approached by a group of men seeking help to repair the mechanical water pump in their village. They hoped I could get them the replacement parts they needed to repair the pump. I was trained not to solve problems for the villagers but to assist them in finding solutions to their problems that they could implement on their own. I took them shopping for spare parts. Since the pump was manufactured in the US and all the water pump suppliers in Senegal were French, we could not find any spare parts that would fit. We analyzed what parts needed repair or replacement, then found a welder who repaired the metal draw mechanism of the pump and a leather worker who produced a replacement for the deteriorated rubber suction cup. The villagers put the pump back together and installed it. I was there when they started it up for the first time and shared in their joy when the pump that they had repaired themselves produced life-giving cold fresh water.”
“In Zaïre, I was Team Leader for a Regional Surveillance Team in the National Campaign for the Eradication of Smallpox. Each month my team and I would go on safari for two-three weeks to visit all of the hospitals and medical dispensaries in a couple of districts of exotic Kivu province to check on their vaccination practices and techniques, collect their vaccination statistics and deliver vaccines to them. We also stopped in villages to check the immunization levels of the population, collect data, and conduct vaccinations ourselves. Occasionally we would investigate a suspected case of smallpox or monkeypox.
The visit to Punia was a pretty eventful one. The American colleague with whom I was travelling on this mission came down with chickenpox and we had to check him in to the local mining company hospital for a few days. Upon arrival at the outskirts of one village, we found the villagers parading around with their faces painted white. When we asked what they were doing, we learned that they were celebrating the killing of an elephant who had been marauding the village and their fields. We asked to see the dead elephant and were taken into the forest a couple hundred yards from the village. The villagers had set a trap for the elephant with a sharpened stake suspended high in the trees that was released when the elephant broke through a trip wire of vines just above the floor of the forest. The elephant was lying with its valuable tusks still in place when we got there.
Some months later, Todd Healey ’68 who was in the Peace Corps in Zaire, came to my home base of Kindu for a visit. Two Belgians there invited us to play tennis. They arrived in their tennis whites, bringing with them the net that they kept at home. We, of course, had not packed our tennis clothes. Todd was wearing combat boots. The Belgians clearly expected us to be pushovers. But they didn’t know that Todd had been junior tennis champion at his club back home. A large group of local kids gathered at each end of the net to watch and compete as ball boys. As Todd prepared to serve, our opponents asked him how many practice serves he wanted to take. He said “none”. The Belgians exchanged snickers. Todd wound up and unleashed a rocket ace serve that they barely saw. The kids on the sidelines went wild! Same thing on the next serve. We won the match and the local kids spread the word throughout town about how the rough and ready Americans had upended the Belgian tennis establishment of Kindu. It was our own little ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ ”.
Buz speaks French, Spanish and Kiswahili well and also keeps some of his Wolof, Swahili, and Lingala.
1968
At P.A., Dunc played varsity soccer, varsity squash, and varsity baseball. He was a cheerleader, on the student congress, was a head usher, a student deacon, a proctor in Adams South, the leader of 8 ‘n’ 1, co-president of the Chorus and performed in Carousel, Camelot and How to Succeed. He went on to Princeton, where he majored in politics.
Duncan was a TEFL (English as a foreign language) teacher in high schools in Khon Kaen in northeast Thailand, 1973-1975. “I also tutored Thai teachers and government officials learning English to study abroad in English-speaking countries.
He is currently a self-employed consultant in real estate.
At P.A., Todd was captain of the JV hockey team, on WPAA, and the student congress. He was a proctor at Rockwell House, was in Chorus, Choir and the Latin Play. And he performed in How to Succeed. Later, Todd went to Harvard.
Todd served in the Peace Corps in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).
Once, on a trip back to Zaire, “Our plane was forced down in Entebbe, Uganda, tailed by a fighter jet. Idi was incensed that a bunch of ‘mzungus’ (‘white people’) had visited his airport.
Idi Amin himself lined up all the volunteers and inspected each of us. Amin was 6’3”, and 300 pounds, and I was 6’5” and 215 pounds. Amin stopped to eyeball me since we were at eye level. He did try to intimidate like any bully by squeezing my hand in a shake; I squeezed hard back, and he let go laughing.
He held us for four days mostly at a lovely colonial hotel and taunted Nixon. Then his keepers prevailed upon him to let us go.
Once word came that we were to be released we celebrated in the Entebbe airport bar scarfing beers and getting looped. The bartender enjoyed our company and pulled out a smokey bottle smiling, ‘Waragi’ which we later learned was banana gin–sweet, smokey and gullet sliding. We had a few shots and were wasted when the bartender tapped me on the shoulder, ‘Bwana! Bwana!’ and pointed at the airstrip. Our rescue plane propellers were spinning and the stairway was being rolled back. We ran for it, stumbling and falling, but made it to the tarmac in front of the plane as it was turning to taxi. We waved and shouted. One of the pilots saw us and we made it aboard.
On a much smaller adventure scale, in Kenya, Todd’s camera was once stolen by a monkey.
1972
Sarah Richardson Bearden, Abbot ’72
Sarah was only at Abbot Academy for her senior year, “But it was the best every school year remembered. I loved the Abbot community and that year we were coordinated with Andover, so we had Andover students in our classes. And we could go there to take classes. After Abbot, Sarah went to Bowdoin, where she majored in history.
She joined the Peace Corps in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo) teaching English as a second language…”but we were also encouraged to teach anything the school needed. We were in the bush in a very remote part of Zaire. I taught biology, in French, for one day! (I had not majored in biology and was new to learning French.) A few days later, the Mission Aviation Fellowship bush plane came in and delivered a Peace Corps volunteer who was a science teacher who was also fluent in French!
He’d been evacuated from an area with a highly contagious disease that turned out to be the first known outbreak of Ebola.
My experience in the Peace Corps enabled me to leave a somewhat sheltered life to really test myself in terms of learning what I was capable of when called upon to help people, for example helping that same biology teacher through his case of malaria with very few first aid supplies.
I am grateful to my Peace Corps experience for teaching me how to learn how to see the world through different eyes and to learn how other cultures use food and herbs, traditionally, to treat a variety of conditions.
In Zaire, I also had the opportunity to see how local people used food and natural remedies as medicine. I love the idea that the food we eat can nourish us but can also have qualities that can keep disease conditions at bay. Post Peace Corps, I sought out traditional cooking classes and natural remedy classes in other countries I lived in or visited. While in Japan, I studied traditional Japanese Zen Temple Cooking and also took a professional Indian Culinary class where Japanese chefs from Hilton Hotels in Tokyo were studying. I was the only non-Japanese in the class, and then in England I studied with a Cordon Bleu Chef. I have studied traditional aspects of Ayurvedic Cooking and culinary aspects of traditional Chinese medicine.
After my Peace Corps experience, I had more opportunities to live overseas, and up until this point, I have lived in Japan for seven years, England for seven years, and have done extensive traveling in many other countries. In all my travel experiences I have sought out information on which traditional foods and natural remedies have been historically used by that culture. In 1981, I married a man I had met in the Peace Corps and we later had two beautiful children, so my family was very much a part of my overseas living and learning experience.
Later, I studied Cross-Cultural Communication at the Thunderbird graduate school. I now have a master’s degree in nutrition. Along with my clinical and holistic private practice, I am a nutrition instructor, teaching practitioners who want to bring nutrition and culinary advice for patients and clients into their practice.
Clement served in Niger, 1979-1981.
“I was involved in numerous youth development projects (Carpentry . . . seriously? Niger is 3/4 Sahara Desert), but I mostly taught at a local school and served as the state basketball and soccer coach. Being Niger was a Muslim country, women’s sports were slow to generate community support. The women wanted to play, and I started quite a program in track, soccer, and basketball. Basketball became quite popular, and my women’s team did win the national title. I had such an amazing experience.
Following the Peace Corps, I received a Peace Corps grad school scholarship at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. After earning an MBA, concentration in international management, I worked for an international development firm in Washington. We did a lot of institution building projects for USAID and the World Bank.
1973
“I fell in love with pottery at Abbot with Audrey Bensley. My Mom was horrified when I proposed being a potter after Abbot, rather than college. So instead, I redirected my love for clay to studying soils which led to the agriculture school at Cornell University and their Peace Corps recruiter!
“I lived up in the mid-hills, in in Nepal, Sermathang village, (8,000 feet up) Helambu, about two-days’ walk from Kathmandu from 1977—1980. I worked with villagers who’d planted apple trees: pruning and making apple products that could be transported and sold in Kathmandu. Subsequently I worked in watershed management and community organizing in Asia with non- governmental organizations like CARE and WWF.
One of the funny stories from Peace Corps days was one of my early walks up to my village. It was a two-day walk from the road head where the five-hour bus ride dropped you. The first day along the Indrawati River. In the first year, there was no bridge, and the river was not small. So this particular time I was walking back by myself, and stopped at the edge of the river thinking about how to safely cross. I took my boots off. Just at that moment a Nepali man and his peon (manservant) came along and the man said he would help me cross, instructed me to wait there, and kind of shook his head saying I shouldn’t have taken my shoes off. Then he leapt up on the back of his peon with his shoes on! And the peon carried me across, keeping his shoes dry, and then me–taller than the peon! After that, a bridge was built across the Indrawati River.
I lived with a family in this village with about 70 homes. The family had three girls. The first moved to Kathmandu before I came. The second sister was beautiful, a few years younger than me–but lined up to be married to an older man in the next village. She really didn’t want to marry–and didn’t want to marry this older man from this other village further up the valley, more remote. So, she and I planned for her to escape and go down to Kathmandu with me. Her sister got her a job as a nanny with an American family, and eventually she emigrated to the USA and married a nice Tibetan guy whose family is in Kathmandu. They now live here in California!
Eventually I spent about 25 years in Nepal, and generally lived out of the USA until 2004.
I moved back to the USA from Nepal in 2004 for my own family reasons, but also because the civil war in Nepal at that time made it difficult for me to get into the field. After I moved to Santa Cruz, California, I was able to apprentice with a production potter for three years, and then established my own pottery.
Living in Monterey Bay, the past few years I’ve taken up some citizen science projects: scuba diving with Reefcheck and REEF to monitor biodiversity and participate in urchin culling to protect the kelp beds, and with NOAA collecting and identifying plankton. It’s been fun and satisfying to get back into science, and to explore marine management.
The Peace Corps was the most important part of my education, and the turning point that set me off to live and work overseas. I wish more people could have the experience of being in Peace Corps.”
1974
Phebe Ann Prescott Greenwood, P.A. ’74
“I took the International Relations seminar my senior year at P.A., which influenced me to major in the subject at Stanford, specializing in 3rd-world economics. That led me to the Peace Corps. I graduated early from PA, skipping some years to graduate and enter college at the age of 16.” Phebe graduated from Stanford class of 1979.
“As a Stanford graduate, I was set on working overseas in the field of third world economic development, which had been the subject of my undergraduate thesis and field of study in the International Relations Department of Stanford University. After a brief stint with a New York City consulting firm in Manhattan, I elected to participate in CrossRoads Africa, for a two-week journey to Togo, Benin, and Upper Volta. I joined the group and arrived in Togo, complete with a lightly packed frame pack, to join in where needed.
My village was Lavie, the subject of a ten-year effort by Peace Corps, AID, and the local Togolese to construct a $130,000 drinking water project. My village was infested with malaria. A Peace Corps volunteer would helm the project management for financial duties. Incredibly, the Peace Corps volunteer had just resigned. A resourceful local Peace Corps manager drove the four-hour grueling trip into Kpalime where he intercepted our group to ask if anyone was proficient in French and willing to join the Peace Corps as a field recruit. My hand was in the air for that instantly, and without a backward glance or single regret I stayed in Togo for the next three and a half years.
While planning to dig trenches for pipelines up into the mountains for dam sites, I was cleaning an area for cistern sites At one point, I inadvertently stood on a red ant pile. These ants travel in ropes of millions. You need to steer well clear or be killed by the swarm. It didn’t take me long to realize I’d been bitten. In a panic, the crew began shouting at me to move quickly, to get my clothes off as fast as a human could move–believe me I did. I hightailed it into the forest out of sight and stripped off every stitch, frantically shaking off my clothing and dancing around. I restored myself to respectability and returned to my group, who were overcome, laughing, joking and fit to be tied at my near escape.
We visited a village nearby to address water related health issues, particularly one village that scooped water from a nearby pond infested with guinea worm. The worm afflicted 90 percent of the village resulting in crippling of the limbs and early adult death. USAID had installed wells to prevent infection, but rather than stand in line for well water most villagers still waded into the pond to fill buckets, allowing the worm to infiltrate their skin. Witchcraft and voodoo were rampant, as most villagers did not believe in the western solutions to run water through cheesecloth to filter out the worm eggs and to boil all water used for any purpose. We did our best, visiting and educating as we could, but I was overwhelmed with a feeling of hopelessness.
Behind one hydro-electric dam, was a large, luxurious lake, seemingly an ideal spot for swimming in the heat of a Togolese summer. One day, I hiked up to the dam, prepared to swim laps. As I approached the edge of the water a Togolese watchguard raced out of his guardhouse and sped toward me shouting in Ewe. His arm gestures of snapping jaws perfectly conveyed the danger of crocodiles in the lake. Another man puffed up and explained in French the gruesome history of deceased Togolese who had been unfortunate enough to get caught. My next swim was in the ocean!
One young girl was Manna Yevu, the daughter of a Kpalime headmaster who became my fast friend throughout my three-and-a-half years. When I contracted malaria, Manna instead got herself to Lavie and turned up with family reinforcements, getting me through the next week until the bout passed. Manna was my frequent honored guest at American events. I took her to dinner at the Ambassador’s house and invited her to join us for a huge Thanksgiving given in Lome, turkey with all the fixings.
After her first year, “… US ambassador to the UN, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, led a small delegation to Togo consisting of Elizabeth Dole, then Transportation Secretary, and Ursula Meese, wife of Edwin Meese, at that time the US Attorney General. USAID, who funded my project, persuaded the delegation to come to Lavie on the grounds that it was a great example of cooperation and success, as it was run by the Peace Corps, funded by USAID, the general contractor (a resident of Lavie who was a respected engineer) donated his engineering project management, and the village donated all of the labor. The total cost was about $150,000, and it provided, in the end, clean water to 6,000 people.
So, one fine afternoon I sat on the edge of the paved road that cut through the middle of Lavie accompanied by literally every dignitary my little village could muster, and we waited for Ms. Kirkpatrick, Ms. Meese, and Ms. Dole to arrive. Both local schools had prepared dances and songs, and excitement ran high. In addition, large pots of palm wine had been generously donated by the village. No one in Lavie really knew who our visitors were, but everyone knew they were people connected to President Reagan, and that was enough to bring about great excitement. The USAID delegation arrived with only Ursula Meese and Elizabeth Dole in tow (Jeanne Kirkpatrick was delayed in town for meetings), but both ladies were extremely gracious and lively and game enough to walk up to one of the two rivers surrounded by very excited Lavie women and children to take pictures with cheerful volunteers of themselves scooping drinking water from the shallow banks, which also served as the local washbasin for laundry.
The group arrived in an enormous SUV, which impressed everyone, and I felt especially honored because at that point we had not completed any of the project, which was only in excavation (dams, cisterns and pipeline trenches) and scaffolding (dam and cistern) at the time. The game plan was to dam up clean water at the source, pipe it into a large cistern, then deliver water on demand through pipes to faucet standpipes throughout the village Since our visitors were dressed in elegant suits, they declined my invitation to hike up the rivers to see our under-construction dam sites, but they stayed and chatted with our chiefs and radiated everything that was really good about what American foreign aid can be. I will always remember the excitement and thrill of that moment, to think of such important people taking a long, hot and dusty journey out to a remote village just to symbolize that high-ranking officials all the way down to the lowly Peace Corps worker really did care that a small village in Togo should have clean water to drink.
As my project ended, our village gathered around for the final exciting proof–water from a standpipe and faucets. The gravity–propelled system was built, and the money mostly spend with about $20,000 remaining for ending details. The standpipes were scattered around the village, the dams built, the cisterns built and filled with water, the pipes either buried or crossing canyons to the village in the mountain area, and the cement circles with the standpipes at the center were ready to flow. I will never forget the shouting and excitement from the children when Ahonsou turned on the water faucets and the water burst out in a wild flow flooding the cement below and cascading everywhere. My split-second decision to remain in Togo with only a frame pack and a promise from a junior manager in the Peace Corps was so gratifyingly repaid, words cannot express. The Peace Corps gave me confidence that you can achieve what you put your mind to. The most important resources are within us.
I left Togo for school directly to get on a plane to arrive in Cambridge just in time to register for classes at the J.F. Kennedy School of Public Policy at Harvard. It was quite something after three years without running water or electricity to arrive at the JFK building off of Harvard Square. I wrote my application to Harvard on a black and white manual typewriter borrowed in the Peace Corps office in Lome, the capital city of Togo, and while I was filling it out and writing the essays there was a rolling brownout so I worked beside my kerosene lamp. I was in such a state of culture shock I barely made it through my first year — only with the kind assistance of many TAs and classmates.”
She is currently working in the Virginia Department of Transportation as a business and policy analyst.
At Andover, Chris was primarily involved with theatre. “I was the director of the Drama Lab, along with Deborah Rosen, during my senior year. (Previous year’s director was Peter Sellars, and after us, James Spader was director. Good company to be in!)
I studied horseshoeing at Montana State University, pre-veterinary science at University of Kentucky and then got a degree in Agricultural Economics from Cornell.
“At the time I was called up to be in Peace Corps Latvia, I had been working with Robert Redford on the movie Quiz Show that he was directing. When I told my friends that I was going to quit the film and do my Peace Corps stint, they were aghast. My career in film production was going into high gear. When I told Redford, he said: ‘Great!’ He was curious about all the details. Redford applauded the move mightily and congratulated me heartily.
I was in the second group to arrive in Latvia after the fall of the ‘wall’ and the agreement between U.S. and Latvia to start a program there. I was sent there because, with a degree in agricultural economics, my particular skills were needed there.
When I saw Redford after my return from Peace Corps he was thankful for my contributions and gave me a copy of the movie.
My service in the Peace Corps allowed me to look at the US from a more objective perspective. After Andover where I could go to the rare book room of the library and see letters signed by Jefferson and Washington, by the founders of the great American experience, I had a lofty view of American “exceptionalism”. My service in the Peace Corps led me to question that exceptionalism and ultimately to reject it. America is exceptional in certain ways but with that exceptionalism does not come righteousness. My service led me to live the rest of my life since as a sort of an exile from the ‘American way’. More than 30 years later I am still living happily outside the U.S.
Chris speaks French, Spanish, Dutch, some Urdu, Hausa, and Twi. “I suppose I could pick up Latvian again pretty quick if needed.”
“I married a diplomat (currently the Dutch Ambassador in Afghanistan) after Peace Corps, so we lived all over and raised three kids in a variety of places: Pakistan, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Ghana, Burundi and, of course, the Netherlands.”
1977
After P.A., Paul went to Oberlin College ’81 majoring in mathematics, music, and economics. Phi Beta Kappa (Ohio), Chairman of the Social Board (concert committee).
“I chose Oberlin because of their Music Conservatory, which told me I didn’t qualify for trumpet lessons. It was easy for me to get a math major, and therefore economics. With two majors out of the way, early on, I had time to pursue music on the fringes of the conservatory. I dug into jazz history, music of West Africa and South India, and spent much time bringing my favorite music to campus (Sonny Rollins twice, as well as Muddy Waters, Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Roches, Larry Coryell, Mingus Dynasty) No one in the conservatory wanted to accompany ukelelist/vocalist Tiny Tim when I booked him, so I ended up as his pianist.”
Paul served in Ghana, 1982-1985, where he taught math, statistics, piano repair, and rabbit raising.
He is currently self-employed. “I have spent the last eight years successfully buying and selling CPU chips full time.”
1979
At Andover, Bruce played varsity basketball, captained the football team, and was runner-up at Interscholastics in the javelin and dabbled in lacrosse. He enjoyed math and physics, but his favorite classes were English seminars led by Rev. Zaeder and Lou Bernieri. After P.A., Bruce went to Stanford ’83 majoring in Human Biology. played club lacrosse with Mason Day ’79. He then earned a Ph.D. in economics from The Fletcher School at Tufts University ’90.
Bruce served in the Mafinga region of Tanzania in the Peace Corps from 1985 to 1987 as a fisheries officer in aquaculture, in the village of Kideti. Bruce and 10 other future fisheries volunteers flew to Dar es Salaam. His roommate in the hotel was violently ill the first night. Unfortunately, the city’s water was not working so there was no way to wash the vomit down the sink. That was an appropriate introduction to public services in Tanzania.
Years later in an odd coincidence, when working on the Secretariat of the World Commission on Dams, Bruce met the water engineer who had been working on the water project in Dar at the time – and who laughingly recalled that weeklong water outage.
Bruce recalls that “the first night we volunteers went over to the “club” on the campus. We each had one or two Tusker beers (the big Tanzanian bottles) before dinner. The next day we found out that we had drunk the campus’ monthly allocation of beer in a single night. They had been too polite to tell us. So, a number of us went driving all over with the training supervisor trying to find beer to buy to replace what we had drunk. Beer, gas, sugar and more, I was to find out were all in short supply and rationed in Tanzania – this led me to study economics in graduate school.”
Bruce heard that an Anglican project in the center of the country, near the capital of Dodoma, had developed a nursery project, breeding Tilapia Nilotica, a desirable species for fish farming. Wanting to validate this discovery Bruce set up a visit to the nursery in Hombolo. This would have meant a tortuous bus ride back into Dar and then out to Dodoma. Instead, Bruce decided to ride there. The 400+ km ride (each way), involved crossing the vast and relatively uninhabited arid lands between Iringa and Dodoma. Bruce describes the trip as “one of the high points of his time in Tanzania though probably not the best of ideas.”
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Bruce looks back with on his Peace Corps experience as a difficult time, but one that was incredibly worthwhile. “The pace of life and work was slow. But when would I ever have found the time to read Atlas Shrugged? And what better environment than socialist Tanzania to test out Rand’s ideas and reject them? The experience of living and working in the village taught me all sorts of lessons, including never to under-estimate anyone based on their material conditions. Some of the farmers I worked with would – under different circumstances – have been accomplished in any field they tried.”
Bruce is now at Mercy Corps as a Senior Water Advisor.
At P.A., Andy recounts, “Luckily, I was an athlete able to make friends and teammates quickly in ice hockey, golf and track. In retrospect, I spent too much time finding support and solace there instead of working on US History, Latin, Philosophy, Calculus, etc.!” He then went to the University of Denver, where he also played hockey and majored in Finance and Marketing. “After Denver, I worked for four years in banking and commercial lending.”
He served in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica in 1989-1990, doing small business development in Santa Cruz, Guanacaste. “My primary jobs were fishing cooperatives. I helped them standardize ways to get more product to market faster with less spoilage.” He was also consultant to Ceramics Associations. “Secondarily, I taught English, coached baseball and generally hung out and became part of the community. I did solicit Major League Baseball teams with stories and photos and we received shipments of equipment from the Cleveland Indians and Montreal Expos!
“My next-door neighbor and I shared a mango tree which would drop large mangos on our tin roofs all year long, all day and night long. They sounded like they were dropped from an airplane.”
“His bulls also slept below the trees. One bull swallowed a whole mango which became lodged in his throat. He could breathe in but not exhale. For the next hour the entire neighborhood converged to try and figure out how to dislodge the mango. All tall men with long skinny arms were called into action. Pipes were inserted that straightened the pathway and served as a sleeve for arms to reach. Every few minutes the bull’s stomach was punctured to release air. Long story short, everyone in town came to buy meat from the bull that was butchered and hung from the mango tree.”
“I guess I should add that I ended up marrying a Costa Rican Peace Corps Program liaison that I kept running into in the Peace Corps office. We’re still together 30 years later.”
After the Peace Corps, he earned an MBA at Northwestern’s Kellogg School in international business, marketing, and finance. He earned an MBA at London Business School in International Strategy, then another.
“What has Peace Corps meant to me? There’s my wife and children who represent everything I could ever wish for. I have also built a software development services company in Costa Rica that once employed nearly 300 engineers. Today I run Accelerance, a company that partners with 75 software development shops in more than 30 countries and which helps US clients build global relationships and extensions of their own software development teams using the same principals of Peace Corps: mutual appreciation of one another’s cultures and commitments to work together collaboratively as equals. My company has also begun working with Peace Corps (starting with Costa Rica) in knowledge transfer to rural sites about careers in STEM and Women in technology.”
Ted served in the Peace Corps in Ethiopia.
He’s currently Executive Director of the Pride Foundation.
1980
Mike served in the Peace Corps.
He is currently controller at Babson Capital Management.
At P.A. Sarah played lacrosse, and she continued to play flute.
After P.A. Sarah went to Harvard, with a degree in history, magna cum laude. She won the Radcliffe College History Prize. From 1984 to 1986 she served in the Peace Corps in Morocco. Upon her return, she earned a masters in history at Harvard, specializing in the Medieval Islamic period.
She was an award-winning reporter for National Public Radio (NPR). She earned 1999 Foreign Press Club and Sigma Delta Chi awards (together with other members of the NPR team) for her reporting on the Kosovo War. She has reported from Lebanon, Israel, Syria, Serbia, and Bosnia.
Sarah lived in Kandahar, Afghanistan from 2002 to 2009. Having learned to speak Pashto, she helped rebuild homes and set up a dairy cooperative. In May 2005, she established the Arghand Cooperative, a venture that encourages local Afghan farmers to produce flowers, fruits, and herbs instead of opium poppies. The cooperative buys their almonds, pomegranate seeds, cumin and anise and artemisia and root dyes, extracts oils, essential oils, and tinctures from them, with which it produces soaps and other scented products for export.
In 2006, Sarah won the academy’s highest honor, the Claude Moore Fuess Award, which acknowledges distinguished contribution to public service.
She’s authored three books, and numerous articles, e.g., in Foreign Policy Magazine. Her book, Thieves of State, won the 2016 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She’s been interviewed on television by, among others, Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers and Charley Rose and on the radio for Fresh Air with Terri Gross. In 2010, Chayes became a special adviser to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen. In this capacity, she contributed to strategic U.S. policy on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arab Spring.
Sarah was a senior fellow in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Democracy and Rule of Law program. She is internationally recognized for her innovative thinking on corruption and its implications. Andover awarded her the 2019 Alumni Award of Distinction an annual award that honors individual members of the alumni body for making “significant positive impact on their communities, society, or the world.”
Sarah speaks Pashto, French and Arabic.
“I played football, hockey, and lacrosse at Andover.
I once got tossed from the library for chatting, which elicited a jibe from my adviser (and lifelong mentor) Josh Miner that amused him to no end: “Raucous Rokous causing a ruckus!” He called me “Raucous Rokous” or just plain “Raucous” for years thereafter.
After P.A., Chris went to Boston College, class of 1984, majoring in Economics then was an intern for Senator John Kerry, after which he served in the Peace Corps in 1986-1988, teaching Math and English at Lobatse Secondary School in Lobatse, Botswana.
“I thoroughly enjoyed my time (1986–1988) in Botswana. The people and the country itself are so beautiful. I tried to visit as many other volunteers as I could, which allowed me to see much of the country.
My parents came to visit. I wanted to bring them deep into the Kalahari Desert so I hired a guide and two assistants, rented land cruisers, and got all the necessary supplies (food, water, tents, petrol, etc.) together. We drove 17 hours into the desert. Just the six of us. It was an amazing adventure. I discovered my calling as an educator in Botswana and have been in education ever since.”
After the Peace Corps he earned an MA at Middlebury in English.
He’s taught at St. Paul’s School, the Governor’s Academy, and is now the third-form dean at Kent School, teaching English, and coaching squash, ice hockey, and lacrosse. Along the way, he was a development director at the Outward Bound School at Hurricane Island in Camden, Maine, where, seasonally, he’s been a sailing instructor. Josh Miner was an advisor.
Chris learned enough Setswana to get by.
1981
At Andover, “I did Search & Rescue and fencing for athletics as well as drama (plays, not musicals!) I also played trombone in the jazz band and band.” After PA, she got a BS at Northwestern and an MBA from UNC. Then she joined the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone, from 1989 to 1991, as a health volunteer and technical trainer.
“I was evacuated from my site 3/4 of the way through my service because of the civil war erupting in Sierra Leone in 1991. My village was on the southeastern corner of the country on the road to the Liberian border near where the first fighting started. I wanted to stay in the country so I was moved to the capital city, Freetown and worked to build a displaced persons camp for UNHCR (UN High Commissioner for Refugees). The day after my Peace Corps service ended, I traveled back to my village to say goodbye. I had been loaded in a land rover with an hour to pack when evacuated and never got to say a proper goodbye. It wasn’t safe to stay long but we all got some closure. I went on to travel for four months across West Africa and my village fled into the bush to hide from the violence and fighting. Many people were killed over the duration of the war and my house was burned.
Once I commissioned a canoe to be carved from a cottonwood for me after a couple of months living in my village. I like to fish and lived close to a river. We selected the tree and in two months of hand carving I had my canoe. It took eight strong young men to carry it to the river from the forest. I used it only a few times, chaining it to a tree at the edge of the river when I wasn’t using it. One day, I went to the river to fish and the canoe was gone. The thief couldn’t cut the heavy chain I had on it, so he cut down the tree! And it was not a small tree. I was told later on that someone had stolen it so I wouldn’t fall into the river and be eaten by the crocodiles in the river.”
I started a latrine project and with my counterparts built latrines in several villages riding the supplies to the other villages on the back of my bicycle. I learned how to repair a bike inner tube in the dark as that is when it seems they always chose to blow. I am still involved with the North Carolina Peace Corps Association and served on their board for a few years. I am at the UNC-Chapel Hill Gillings School of Global Public Health and my interest in Public Health started with my Health volunteer assignment in Sierra Leone. Several of my colleagues served as volunteers as well. I served as the volunteer technical trainer for the next class of PC volunteers Sierra Leone and did my masters in Instructional Design after seeing how much better learning could be if it was well designed.”
The impact of the Peace Corps on Catherine? “Ultimate self-discovery. I learned how a group of people who were so poor economically were so rich and generous. I learned much more from them than they ever learned from me. By being a foreigner, I was granted so much privilege not afforded other women and that lesson of unearned white privilege has always stayed with me. I made friends for life; friends in my village and other PC volunteers. I still eat incredibly hot peppery food and have taught my children to do so as well.”
Catherine is currently Associate Director of the Gillings School of Global Public Health at UNC.
After Andover, Bill attended the University of Paris IV; then on to Duke ’85 cum laude history (with distinction) and French.
He then served in the Peace Corps in Morocco, 1985-1988, and married a Moroccan woman. Then two years at the American University of Cairo ’92; on to Harvard University ‘02 for two years in Near and Middle Eastern Studies; then earned a Ph.D. at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy ’03. Along the way he studied Advanced Arabic at the National Affairs Training Center/Foreign. He was at the Service Institute from 2004 to 2011.
His multi-variate career included being an Arab music producer from 1991 to 1996, producing 14 CDs in Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt and Senegal; earning a Fulbright Scholarship in the State Department in Tunisia and Algeria. In 2007 Bill was an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service; between 2008 and 2009 he was a Goldman Sachs Fellow and Visiting Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins. He then spent six years at the Department of State including being officer in charge of Tunisia and Libya policy. For two years he was director of the North Africa project at the International Crisis Group. He then spent a year in Rabat, Morocco as Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at AMIDEAST/Mohammed V university; then almost two years as the director of Middle East and North African programs at the Center for Islam and Democracy followed by a year as associate director for North Africa and the Middle East at Control Risk in Dubai; three years as a visiting professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the Elliott School of International Affairs in Washington, DC. Currently, he teaches courses on North African and Middle Eastern Politics, Persian Gulf area studies, and Radical Islam for various agencies in the U.S. intelligence community as a Professor of Political Science and International Affairs at the United States Intelligence Community. He also served at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, Libya.
He currently serves on the faculty at George Washington University’s Elliott School for International Affairs and has taught or lectured at more than 100 universities, authored three books, and co-created six documentaries and 14 albums of North African music.
In 2018 at Fenn, an independent boys’ elementary school in Concord, Massachusetts, Bill received a Distinguished Alumnus Award.
He has received six merit awards from the U.S. Department of State, two medals from the Egyptian government, and an alumni achievement award from his undergraduate alma mater, Duke University.
Bill has lived for 13 years in seven Muslim countries, is fluent in French and Arabic, and speaks Berber and Spanish.
1982
At P.A., Lisa’s main activities were French horn in the orchestra and theater. After Andover, Lisa went to Washington University in St. Louis, where she received a BA in psychology and Russian language and literature.
Lisa served in the Peace Corps from 1990 to 1992 in the Central African Republic in the town of Berberati. “My PCV (Peace Corps volunteer) job was in school health education. I worked with elementary school teachers as a trainer to help them implement a new public health curriculum that had been developed jointly by the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Education. While I was there, the World Bank funded an accelerated teacher training program to certify recent college graduates as elementary school teachers and I was able to provide public health education training to them as well.
I had the opportunity to work with some experienced elementary school teachers. They had completed a curriculum training on health education. A group of 6th graders performed a skit in a neighborhood market about good hygiene practices in the marketplace. The teacher had written and directed this skit with his students. After the performance, the neighborhood “chief” (roughly the equivalent of a town council member) came up to me and thanked me for all the work I was doing with the teachers. He told me he thought it was so important for people to learn about health. I was so pleased to learn this local leader shared and supported our goals.
After Peace Corps, I attended the School for International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont.
I received a MA in International & Intercultural Management. More recently I completed a remote, online master’s program in applied economics at American University, graduating in August 2020.
I later worked for World Learning and USAID in Armenia from 1994 to 1996 and then for USAID in Georgia from 1996 to 1998.
“My two years in the Peace Corps provided a profound cross-cultural experience. I learned about a place and about people who were very different from my white American experience in the United States. I found that it was both easier to adapt to the living conditions in the Central African Republic, where electricity and running water were scarce; and harder to adapt to the local culture, than I had thought. After two years, I came to have great love and affection for Central African friends and neighbors and yet I felt I had barely scratched the surface of understanding what was most important to them. I never really knew whether I had helped anyone or just provided some fleeting entertainment as the “strange American.” Since then, I have strived to respect people’s differences and sought to learn more about other cultures, recognizing that the U.S. is not the ‘center of the universe.’ “
She speaks Russian,
At P.A., Joyce learned how to swim and did shotput in track. After P.A. Joyce went to Wesleyan.
From 1989 to 1991, Joyce served in the Peace Corps in Mauritania for nine months, then Mali. “I worked with women’s cooperatives and small businesses.” The most amazing beach I’ve seen was part of the Sahara Desert behind a sand dune. For me, Peace Corps was an extraordinary experience. It was such a mixture of feelings, work, and politics that it’s tough to categorize. It has shown me what I am made of and made me a better and more grateful person.”
1983
Samuel Avrett, P.A. ’83
At P.A. Sam was on crew team, studied biology, chemistry, history and American literature. After P.A. Sam went to the University of Pennsylvania, BA Economics and Political Science, graduating in 1987.
He served in the Peace Corps, doing health education in Bozoum, Central African Republic 1990-1991, including support for immunizations, maternal-infant nutrition and prenatal health screenings, prevention of diarrheal disease, and prevention of HIV.
“My work included supporting immunization tours, in which two or three health workers and I would drive out along river beds and dirt paths for three to five days to reach remote villages and migrant Mbororo herders with the offer of basic immunizations (MMR, DTP, even polio I think). The best memories are memories of connecting with people across language and culture, including playing Mankala in roadside dirt with people as we waited for transportation, sharing meals with the Lebanese merchant in town, helping a village to build a springhouse, and helping families understand more about the right medicines for, or prevention of, issues like worms, scabies or hepatitis.
Peace Corps taught me a lot about living in a rural community and the dynamics of change in places where there are few resources. The experience of Peace Corps gave me credibility in applying for other international work.”
1985
Margaret Bottcher McManus, P.A. ’85
Meg served in the Peace Corps in Senegal.
1986
After Andover, Jennifer went to Colgate then earned an MD at the University of Colorado, Denver, in Obstetrics and Gynecology.
Jennifer served in the Peace Corps in Guinea, 1993-1995, as health and community development volunteer.
Jennifer is currently an OB/GYN specializing in gynecological surgery in Denver.
At Andover, “I loved math, art, and languages (I studied Spanish and Italian), I liked sports (took Search and Rescue so that I could rappel down the Bell Tower). I also did gymnastics, played ice hockey, and ran cross country for a couple of seasons. Between schoolwork and sports, I learned a lot about working hard and perseverance. I learned to evaluate and judge the outcome of my work/endeavors by the effort that I put in, a quality that has served me well in life.”
After Andover, Lisa went to Middlebury with a major in art and minors in mathematics analysis and probability and statistics. She then went on to M.I.T. and earned a masters in architecture.
“I served in the Dominican Republic from 1991 to 1993, technically serving as an Agriculture Volunteer, but my tech trainer was a forester and our main task was to teach farmers how to terrace and plant trees amongst their crops to prevent erosion/loss of topsoil. Thus, I was more of an Agri-Forester. Apparently there had been a population boom in the 1980s and a lot of families moved to higher terrain, where they were not familiar with farming. Excessive amounts of topsoil were being lost and farmers’ yields were decreasing. This was an effort to correct issues associated with the status quo farming techniques on hillier/more mountainous terrain. Of course, with the appearance of a seeming 15 year-old Dominican girl (I looked really young at the time and my skin color made people think I was Dominican) I spent a lot of time — especially in my first year—working with youth groups and Mothers’ Clubs promoting organic gardening techniques.
I was so young when I went into the Peace Corps! I got harassed more (by police when I was with other white volunteers and by men, who assumed I was fair game since they thought I was a young Domincan girl/woman) but I also didn’t get cheated as much in markets or on gua-guas (local buses/transportation).
I am originally from New York City, and I knew that there was a large population of people who looked brown and black, but spoke Spanish, but I didn’t know that so many of them were Dominican. Certainly, upon my return, my Peace Corps experience gave me a lot of perspective about the backgrounds of my fellow New Yorkers that I came to appreciate. The two cultural exchange goals: the better understanding of the host country on the part of Americans and a better understanding of Americans on the part of the host country are the goals that I still carry with me today.
I’m not highly judgmental, but my Peace Corps experience certainly reinforced my intuition not to rush to judgment. Most of all, Peace Corps gave me time to really reflect on what I wanted to do with my life. I determined I wanted to do something with a social purpose. One of the disparities between families that I befriended was the difference in their housing — how poorer people living in thatched roof houses spent more time collecting water, for instance, than people living in houses with tin roofs, where they could collect rainwater in 55-gallon drums. I ultimately applied to architecture school which rolled into a dual masters degree with urban planning. I’ve been involved with planning and community development for 25+ years.”
She is currently a Community Development Director at the town of Essex, Vermont.
1988
After Andover, Kim went to Hobart and William Smith Colleges, then to the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast where she was a rural health agent, 1996-1998. She earned an MPA at Princeton in 2000, then a Ph.D. at Princeton in 2008.
She is currently a Senior Director, International Foundation NGO Partnerships at Mathematica.
1989
Sarah Burgess-Herbert, P.A. ’89
After Andover, Sarah went to M.I.T. ’91 in environmental engineering then took a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, class of 1994. She joined the Peace Corps in Thailand in Chiang Mai, managing the development of a bilingual national park visitor’s center, from 1995 to 1996. She then earned a Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology/Genetics at the University Hawaii at Manoa ’05.
She is now a senior science and policy advisor to USAID at Social Solutions International. She speaks Thai.
1990
After P.A., Stephanie went to Georgetown. Stephanie served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic. She is currently a journalist and reporter with NBC news.
Lila Nichols O’Mahony, P.A. ’90
Lila current works at Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital in the Seattle area in Pediatric Emergency Medicine. She served in the Peace Corps.
“
My main activities at Andover were musical – chorus, Cantata Choir, the Fidelio Society, and the handbell choir. I also rowed varsity crew, but I can’t say I was truly ever any good at it.”
After P.A., Allison was an AFS student for a year in Bodø, Norway. She then went to to Syracuse University ’96 majoring in music and linguistics. She then earned her masters in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, 2000. The program included serving in Bulgaria in the Peace Corps 1998-2000, where she taught English at Geo Milev English Language School in Bourgas, Bulgaria.
“In August 1999, two major natural events happened that I will not ever be able to forget. The first was the total solar eclipse that swung over the northeastern corner of Bulgaria on August 11. I had to travel to the town of Balchik to see it. I went with a fellow PCV and another American friend who worked for the American Red Cross in Bulgaria. The three of us and some other friends found a spot on a cliff overlooking the Black Sea, and it was probably the best place we could have been. We could see for miles around us in every direction. We saw the shadow coming towards us from the east, and we saw it spread over the sea to the west– such a powerful sensation!
The second was the Izmit, Turkey earthquake on August 17, less than a week later. Since I was in Burgas – only about five hours away by car– the earthquake was strong enough to wake me up at 3 AM. It was this New England girl’s first experience with an earthquake! I remember watching the open windows swaying back and forth and realizing that it wasn’t just my bed that was shaking. I stayed up for about an hour afterward, watching CNN International on TV and hoping that I’d find out more about the quake. I gave up after the hour and went back to bed, thinking that it was probably just a minor little quake and that it wouldn’t merit the international news cycle. Boy, was I wrong! I later realized that I was the closest volunteer in Bulgaria to the quake. When I woke up the next morning and it was all over the international news, I called the Peace Corps office to let them know I was OK, and they hadn’t even heard about it yet!
Both my AFS experience in Norway and my Peace Corps experience in Bulgaria have had a tremendous impact on my life and my career. I would not have done my Master’s degree–and therefore my Peace Corps experience. If I hadn’t gone to Norway with AFS, and my career teaching English to non-native speakers would not have been as rich had I not had those international experiences. Sometimes I forget how life-changing my Peace Corps experience was, but then I tell a story from that time, and my audience says, ‘Wow, that’s so cool!’ and I have to stop to remind myself that yes, it was cool. My Peace Corps experience is just so woven into the fabric of my life–it’s just such an integral part of me–that I forget sometimes that not everyone gets that experience. I wish everyone could.”
She’s now a freelance editor. She speaks Norwegian and Bulgarian.
1991
Erin served in the Peace Corps in China.
“While at PA, some classmates and I started a rock band called Sour Mash that played at events both at Andover and elsewhere in New England.” He earned a BA at Boston University and went to Fletcher School at Tufts.
“I was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Turkmenistan, 1997-1999, and it was probably the most transformative experience of my early adult life. I lived and worked in a small town in the desert, taught English, music and sports, helped start camps for children and teacher training, supported learning centers, and grew very close to my community. My musical experiences and skills informed my Peace Corps service, where I used music and singing to engage students and community members, entertain at weddings and other events, and generally bring me closer to my small town as well as other volunteers.
The experience set me on an international career path, and I have been living and working across Eurasia in a number of different roles almost ever since. My time in Turkmenistan opened my worldview and challenged me as a person, but also gave me a wider and deeper perspective on the US and my own history. It also forced me to think more deeply about the commonalities between cultures, and the collective challenges that we all face. In short, I simply would not be the person or the thinker that I am today without my Peace Corps experience, and I remain in touch with many of my friends from those times. I have visited Turkmenistan many times since then.
To this day, as I now work as a development contractor for USAID and other organizations in Eastern Europe (currently Serbia, but previously in Ukraine, Moldova, and in Central Asia), I use music and performance to help me learn about the cities and towns I work in, performing at bars and events both solo and with local musicians. It also helps me access parts of the cultures that would otherwise be difficult to enter. It’s also a lot of fun!”
Evan is currently IRX Director in Serbia Chief of Party for Strengthening Media Systems.
1992
At P.A., Anne swam and played water polo (there was no varsity women’s team, so she played men’s varsity for a year). My senior year, we finally got a women’s team.
After P.A., Anne attended Emory University ’96, where she studied Arabic for two years.
“In the Peace Corps in Jordan, 1997-1999, I worked with the Ministry of Social Development in a center for juvenile offenders. Most were from the camps, and ‘crimes’ ranged from kissing a girl on the cheek to theft/assault. I managed to secure small USAID grants for sports equipment, and training in woodworking for the boys, and also provide training for the staff. What was really wonderful was that we were able to travel in the region, Israel, Syria, Yemen, Egypt, etc.
Peace Corps put me on the (non-linear) path to a career that I love. I met my husband in the Peace Corps (a fellow RPCV) and after Peace Corps we moved to China, where we taught English for year, and then embarked on a trip where we travelled for a year on a budget of $10/day. We started an importing business (handicrafts from Yemen, Pakistan and India) and olive oil/olive oil soap from Syria. Things were going well, then it got hard to get containers in after 9/11. I went back to school for my MPH in at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health in 2003. My husband became a Peace Corps Fellow, teaching in the south Bronx.
We moved to Milton Academy (where my husband teaches History) in 2004, and I finished up my doctorate at Harvard in 2010 at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Since graduating I have been working in global health and work for JSI, a public health consulting organization. Currently, I am supporting projects in Zambia, Uganda, and Pakistan as well as writing technical proposals for large USAID bi-lateral projects.
Katherine served in the Peace Corps, attended Yale University, and is now Deputy Assistant General Counsel at USAID in Washington, D.C.
“At PA, my most memorable activities were helping to start the first Ultimate Frisbee team; we played as a team for the first time in my senior year. I was also a Prefect in Rockwell South, something I really enjoyed.” After Andover, Matthew was at Stanford ’96, majoring in German Studies and Physics.
He then volunteered for the Peace Corps, serving in Baraboi, Moldova from 1996 to 1998.
“I was an English teacher. I did shake hands with the president of the country, Mircea Snegur, at my swearing-in!
I also helped run an English language summer camp in the summers. At the time, no one knew about Nigerian scammers, so when the local Russian mafia thugs (who owned a local sausage factory – closed since 1992) came to have me translate a letter they got from Nigeria, I thought, well, why not? So, I translated, and eventually got on the phone to Nigeria, and worked to arrange payments and travel to Nigeria. The Russians eventually cut me out of the deal, which was actually very comforting for me! It was a strange experience to ride down to the capital city in their Mercedes (a two-hour ride, which usually took 6 on the bus!) and then talk to someone in Nigeria. I was not the best negotiator. At one point, the person on the line asked me about one of the Russians, saying “Is he trustworthy?” The best I could come up with was: “Oh, he’s trustworthy!” The Nigerian responded with: “I believe you.”
He then went to the University of Maryland in College Park for his doctorate in Physics.
“The Peace Corps helped dull the edges on some youthful angst and helped me recognize that I can change the world in small ways. I met my now-wife shortly after returning, and we both agree that she would not have liked my pre-Peace Corps self!”
Matthew is currently a professor at Ithaca College. He speaks Romanian and a bit of Russian.
1993
After Andover, Lara went to Providence College, majoring in political science. She then went to the London School of Economics and Political Science for her masters.
She served in the Peace Corps in Amman, Jordan 1999-2001. Then got her JD at Yale, graduating in 2004.
She is currently partner and chair of the Private Funds Investment Group at Fisher Broyles, LLP.
She speaks Arabic and Spanish.
1994
After Andover, Colm went to Northwestern, class of 1998, to major in Slavic studies then he joined the Peace Corps and served in Urgench, Uzbekistan, 2003-2005. After that, he got a combination MBA and Masters at Indiana University, which included studies in Ural-Altaic and Central Asian Studies.
He worked in India for a year. He is currently the Communications Director at the Carlisle Companies.
1995
Charlotte Kendrick Rowe, P.A. ’95
After P.A., Charlotte went to the University of Vermont ’99, then studied nursing at Thomas Jefferson University.
Charlotte served in the Peace Corps in Ivory Coast, teaching health, nutrition and HIV/Aids prevention from 2000 to 2002.
She is currently an emergency medical technical in Hopewell, New Jersey.
1996
At P.A. Jerry was on the varsity wrestling team.
After P.A., Jerry got a B.A. in economics from Columbia, class of 2000, then a J.D. from the University of Wisconsin ’05. Jerry then joined the Peace Corps in St. Lucia.
“St. Lucia is a former crown colony and an anglophone country to boot. Therefore, the culture shocks are subtler than what I imagine many of my Peace Corps brethren experienced. There are lots of positive memories: camping at the foot of Gros Piton and cooking fish pulled from the ocean just hours before are some of the brightest.
The country in which I served was a rich third world country; we were never going to starve, but there was not a lot of variety. However, when I came home and went grocery shopping for the first time, the mere act of walking into the grocery store paralyzed me. There were just too many choices. The big take away: we are very blessed to be in America.”
After five years at Skadden Arps, he opened up his own law office.
At P.A. Dan played soccer, was on crew and worked in community service.
After Andover, Dan went to Yale, class of 2000, and majored in applied math.
Dan served in Paraguay from 2000 to 2002 as a beekeeper. “I was a beekeeping extension agent, helping small farm families diversify their income through honey production as well as teaching sustainable agriculture techniques such as ‘green manures’ and no-till agriculture.
My Paraguayan friend and I were relaxing after working some hives, and he told me he wanted to show me a whole different kind of ‘bee’. He told me I didn’t need to wear a veil or anything because ‘these don’t sting’. He poked the hive with a stick, and all of a sudden they started swarming out. My friend started to run away. I followed him, puzzled. I said, ‘Why are we running, I thought these bees don’t sting?’ He said, ‘Yeah, but they do BITE!’
Peace Corps was a tremendously formative experience for me. It gave me an understanding and appreciation for different cultures, and the importance of welcoming strangers. I will always be grateful to the people I met and who did so much to take care of that clueless gringo down there.”
Seth Leavitt-Carlson, P.A. ’96
Seth served in the Peace Corps in South Africa.
1997
After P.A. Alexis went to Sciences Po in France for one year, then graduated with honors from Georgetown in 2001, majoring in International Politics and Latin American Studies, winning the William Manager Prize for best thesis. Alexis served in the Peace Corps in 2002-2004 in health education in Nicaragua. She then earned a masters in complex systems management at The University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and the Environment ’07, graduating with honors.
She is currently Chief Sustainability Officer for Arcadis in Munich, Germany. She speaks French, Spanish, German, and Portuguese.
Dorian served in the Peace Corps in Jordan.
1999
At P.A., Katie was involved in various types of community service, especially in a residential facility for people suffering from Alzheimer’s and an after-school program in Lawrence. After Andover, Katie went to McGill ’03, majoring in political science and economics.
She then served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, from 2003 to 2006 as an environment sector volunteer coordinator.
“Vick’s VapoRub is a household product in the Dominican Republic. It is used for much more than the chest congestion for which it is chiefly marketed in the US (headaches, insect bites, and a whole host of dermatological issues). One successful project I worked on with the local women’s association consisted of producing and selling a substitute. This was a great fundraiser for the association, and it made a cheaper household product available to the broader community.
Peace Corps made me understand the depth of my privilege, while at the same time teaching me that personal fulfillment is not dependent on wealth. I also had more fun and adventures than I can count. My experience was so positive that I stayed on a third year as a volunteer coordinator to help ensure other volunteers had the personal and professional support they needed to have a great experience and contribute meaningfully to their communities. I would definitely consider joining the Peace Corps again later in life. I loved it.”
She then earned her MBA at Esade in France, ’09.
Katie is currently Vice President, Research and Analytics at the Irvine Company, a real estate investment company. She speaks French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
Rachel Burnes Kinsolving, P.A. ’99
She served in the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic.
2000
Liz’s main activities at Andover were community service: PALS and MS2. “I also had the awesome opportunities to visit South Africa and China during the summers before my upper and senior years at P.A., which undoubtedly fed my interest to live abroad.” After P.A., Liz went to Yale, where she majored in history.
Liz served in Kara, Togo in the Peace Corps from 2006 to 2008. “I was a Community Health Volunteer. I worked with an Association of People Living with HIV and helped start a community-based treatment program.
I often tell people that I was the slowest Peace Corps volunteer on a bike in all of Togo. I had the most wonderful host family, consisting of a mother living with HIV and her adopted daughter, who gave me love and support and also privacy and space. I had a mango tree and lemon tree in my yard, which felt like the ultimate luxuries.
Peace Corps was an incredible opportunity to immerse in another culture and learn the ultimate lesson of being humble. It made me realize the importance of building relationships–spending time sitting and chatting with people–rather than trying to implement a bunch of activities. In Togo, I would often meet adults who fondly remembered a Peace Corps Volunteer from their childhood giving them a small window into another world, like time out of a childhood filled with chores and work to play and be a kid, and that’s where the difference was actually being made.”
2001
At P.A., Matt played varsity soccer. After P.A., he went to Williams College, class of 2005.
He went to the Peace Corps in Ukraine, from 2006 to 2008, where he raised $70,000 for local youth development; founded and led “Open World,” a youth organization that mobilized community support for youth development, developed and operated a youth center, internet café, community newspaper, and annual HIV/AIDS awareness weekend; designed curriculum and instructed more than 150 students in 4th to 11th grades; and trained non-profit, local and regional government staff concerning the development of youth initiatives. Upon his return, he got a masters in public policy at Harvard ’10.
Matthew is currently founder and principal consultant, Matthew Aronson Consulting.
After Andover, Erica attended Carleton College ’05, majoring in Political Science.
After college she served in the Peace Corps from 2006 to 2008. She then earned a masters at Michigan ’11, in Russian and European Studies. He combined this with a law degree. She’s currently senior legal counsel at FMO, a Dutch entrepreneurial development bank. She speaks Armenian, Russian and Spanish.
2002
At Andover, “I played basketball, football and ran track. I was honored to be named captain of the basketball team for the 2001-2002 season, and was a Phillipian Athlete of the Year and Schubert Key winner for character and sportsmanship in 2002. I was also a part of the Bread Loaf Writing Workshop started by Lou Bernieri and documented stories of Lebanese immigrants in the nearby city of Lawrence. Those experiences helped instill in me a spirit of Non Sibi. After Andover, Jonathan went to Cornell for one year in communication then finished college at Vanderbilt ’06 in communication/film.
He served in the Peace Corps from 2007 to 2009 in Aouloumat, Tahoua, Niger as a Community Health/Nutrition Extension Agent.
“My friend Tsahirou, the chief’s son and my best friend in the village was such a great guy and always helped everyone, often with no personal reward, embodying Non Sibi himself. I learned many things from him and from others in the village where I lived, first and foremost being patience. There is a great Hausa saying: Mai hankuri yana dafa dutsi har ya sha romonsa: ‘A patient one can cook a stone and drink its soup.’
The Peace Corps has meant a lot to me, and has informed everything I’ve done since. I never had the opportunity to leave the U.S. until I graduated college, though I had been active volunteering in Andover and in Nashville, where I attended Vanderbilt. I remember stating in my application and interview that I’d be willing to go wherever there was the most need. When I received the assignment, Niger was ranked 177nd out of 177 countries which had submitted data to the UNDP Human Development Index, so they took my statement quite literally. My time in Niger was transformative, and launched my humanitarian and development career, from Doctors Without Borders in India and South Sudan to the UN World Food Program in Italy and Germany. And now, almost 15 years later, I work remotely for United Nations Development Program and have twin boys with my partner, a doctor with Doctors without Borders, so things have kind of come full circle.
What I loved about the Peace Corps is that since I lived in a very rural area, I actually didn’t learn French, but rather the local language of Hausa, the second most widely-spoken language in Africa after Swahili. Over two years I became fluent, and have since met and conversed with Hausa speakers all over the world: in places as diverse as Delhi, Rome, London and the U.S., with people from Niger, Nigeria, Cameroon and Ghana. That’s the overwhelming positive. I now speak bits and pieces of several languages (including Hindi, Italian and German), but Hausa is still my most comfortable after English.”
2003
After Andover, Joe went to Boston College, class of 2008, majoring in finance and information systems and was member of the ice hockey team. He then went to the Peace Corps in Suriname, 2008-2010, where he assisted Conservation International in the development of a rainforest tourist lodge in South America and taught better agricultural practices, promoting vegetable and cassava production.
He is currently Vice President, Equity Research at Sandler O’Neill.
2004
After Andover, Jessica got a BA degree at Dartmouth in geography, Latin American and Latino and Caribbean Studies. She then served in the Peace Corps in Azerbaijan from 2009 to 2011. She then earned a masters at Fordham in Latin American and Latino studies, then went on to a JD at Columbia Law School. She is currently a staff attorney at Advancement Project National Office. She speaks Azerbaijani and Spanish.
Allegra Asplundh-Smith, P.A. ’04
After P.A., Allegra majored in history at Yale. She was in the Peace Corps in Dominica.
“I lived and worked in a small farming village for two years. I partnered with eco-resort Jungle Bay to create Open Books Open Minds, a community organization that builds popular school libraries to inspire a love of reading in young schoolchildren. I also developed and delivered, along with local business leaders, the country’s first training and mentorship program for entrepreneurs; to date 100 young people have participated and launched more than 30 new businesses. I authored a memoir and guide for volunteers working in Caribbean school libraries and published the first collection of original poetry by Dominican students.”
She then earned an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin, in Finance and Operations.
After four years at Goldman Sachs, she’s been a board member and chair at Hands Across the Sea, a non-profit dedicated to raising literacy for children in the Eastern Caribbean.
After P.A. Dorothy went to Georgetown and served in the Peace Corps in Senegal, 2008-2010
She served in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso.
After P.A. Alanna went to Georgetown, class of 2008, then joined the Peace Corps in the Dominican Republic, 2008-2010, as a community development economic advisor. She spearheaded strategy, framework-building, execution, and evaluation of initiatives creating economic, health, and environmental value for 1000+ low-income clients, e.g. fair trade tourism venture for national cocoa cooperative; she led field vision, logistics, and intercultural teams in park project with Ben & Jerry’s founders and staff as well as Dominican community leaders. After the Peace Corps she earned an MPA at the Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government ’15 and an MBA from MIT ’16.
She later worked in Angola for a year. Alana is currently Senior Vice President, Implementation Strategy at Per Scolas. She speaks French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
2006
Sarah Linnemann Pryor, P.A. ’06
After P.A. Sarah went to Georgetown, majoring in biology. She Sarah served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines, 2010-2012, then attended Tulane School of Medicine. She is currently a resident physician at Johns Hopkins Hospital. She speaks Cebuano.
2007
After Andover, Alex went to Georgetown, majoring in art history, then to UCLA for a masters in architecture. He served as a teacher and teacher trainer in the Peace Corps in Sine, East Java, Indonesia from 2012 to 2014.
Alex is currently an architectural designer at Kelly Wearstler.
After Andover, Aysser went to the Université Suisse, Relations Internationales ’09 then the Lahaye University in The Hague, in Science Diplomacy ’12.
He served in the Peace Corps as an engineer in disaster in disaster and humanitarian relief for eight years from 2005 to 2013.
Aysser is currently a development officer at the Clinton Foundation in Tunisia and a foreign affairs officer at the Tony Blair Foundation in Tunisia. He speaks Arabic and French.
After Andover, Jared attended Wesleyan ’11, majoring in American Studies. He then joined the Peace Corps, in Vanuatu from 2001 to 2013, serving as an English literacy teacher, librarian, workshop facilitator, and tutor at Iwunmit Primary School in Imaen, Tanna, where he managed a world map and water and sanitation project, and directed a school sports program. He then studied at Cleveland State University for two years of health sciences study. Then, he earned his MD ’21 at Northeast Ohio Medical University.
2009
“I was part of the COD (Community Organization and Development) sector in Albania. Specifically, I worked with a local municipality in the coastal city of Lezhë in northern Albania on writing grants for EU integration. We worked on things such as water and air quality, rights for the Roma community, and school development. In addition, I was able to work to start a youth basketball team, work with the Water Project to install a new bathroom at a village school, run an English club, start a model UN team, and make countless connections.
I went camping in the hills outside of Lezhë. My now fiancée and I found a field atop a mountain overlooking a small village and set up camp for the night, only to have a couple who were taking their sheep herd for a walk stumble upon us. After assuring them we were sleeping outside on purpose and were not afraid of the local wildlife, they left only to return 45 minutes later with homemade cheese, homemade wine, and fruits and vegetables from their garden. They insisted that on our journey home we stop by their house for lunch. Sure enough, when we woke up they were waiting outside of our tent to escort us to their home, where we spent the entire afternoon chatting and getting to know each other. It was such a wonderful experience and speaks to the hospitality of all Albanians.
The Peace Corps completely changed my life trajectory. Before entering I was a CPA and now I am a public high school math teacher. It sent me on a quest for how I could best serve the community I live in, and for me that is through education. It also introduced me to my fiancée who was another PCV, and for that I am one lucky guy.”
Zach is currently at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
Gloria Oluwayayo Odusote, P.A. ’09
At P.A. Gloria was a shot-putter.
She went on to Princeton, with a BS in Engineering. She served in the Peace Corps, 2013-2015, in education and community development, in Lesotho. “My experience as a Peace Corps volunteer in Lesotho was amazingly volatile. One day a car is crashing into my house with me in it, the next day, I’m feeling the high of people cheering me on as I try riding a horse. There were truly life-changing highs and lows.
While volunteering as a high school math and science teacher, I gained so much respect for the Basotho, the people of Lesotho. Many of my students were truly brilliant and many of the teachers were so hardworking and supportive, despite meager resources. It was impossible not to be in awe of them and it gave me a healthy amount of respect for teachers everywhere. It is exhausting work. When I wasn’t teaching, learning to speak Sesotho, making Lesotho beer (joala), or figuring out fun ways to annoy my students, I would hike for hours and take in the spectacular view. The Mountain Kingdom is an awe-inspiring place, and I cannot wait to go back and visit.”
Gloria speaks German, Sesotho, and Spanish. She is currently a program manager at the US EPA.
2010
Chelsea Renee Quezergue, P.A.’10
Chelsea served in the Peace Corps.
2011
After P.A., Morgan went to the University of Maryland ’15, majoring in Romance Languages. She then joined the Peace Corps as a Pelle Education volunteer from 2015 to 2017, serving in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. While there she taught English and adopted multiple animals.
“I just had coffee (plain with lots of sugar) and injera (sour and flat) with bean stew and spinach. The family that lives in my compound invited me over for just coffee and then proceeded to feed me an entire meal. I’m starting to get used to using my hands to eat, and I’ve found there are various methods of picking up the stews with just injera bread. You can fold up the stew in a little injera envelope to get it to your mouth, you can pinch it with just a little piece of injera, or you can grab a huge piece and create a cone-shape and get a whole handful of stew to your mouth that way. There is a learning curve here.
I have also eaten more goat in the past two weeks than ever before in my life. Tastes fine, but it’s hard to watch goats that you’ve named and pet be killed for food . The goats in my compound now are named Eddie and Pesto; my compound family doesn’t know yet that I named them. For now, I’ll feed them banana peels and bread and make sure they have a nice life.”
“I’m grateful to Peace Corps for the opportunity to challenge my assumptions about the world beyond my family and community, devote time to learning about a region of the world whose diaspora community had welcomed me in my US hometown (Washington DC), and better understand the complex (and admittedly, often problematic) ways the US engages with communities and countries around the world”
She then went to Goucher College for a post-baccalaureate in pre-medical studies; and is now in the class of 2022 at the Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University in Washington, DC.
2012
“At Andover I was President of Andover Mock Trial and a board member at Community Awareness for Everyone (CAFÉ) as a senior. I was a reporter for the Phillipian and served a year as the newspaper’s Advertising Director. I played football for four years and studied Russian.”
Daniel was an Eagle Scout. After Andover, Daniel went to Tufts ’16 majoring in International Relations/Russian and Eastern European Studies. In 2015 he pursued a Russian language program in Irkutsk, Russia. From 2016 to 2018, he served in the Peace Corps in Comrat, Moldova, teaching.
“I was an English Educator working at a Romanian language school in a predominantly Russian speaking region in southern Moldova. Together with my school, we won and managed a Let Girls Learn Grant and an Academy of Central European Schools grant.
Through a local NGO in my community, I got involved working with students with disabilities in Moldova. One of my favorite memories in Moldova was playing chess with a student with an intellectual disability named Vasya at his home in a village not far from my town. He happily made sure I knew all the names of the chess pieces in both Russian and Romanian, and then proceeded to crush me. Ultimately, to give Vasya better competition, I had to call for backup. My thirteen-year-old host sister was a Queen’s Gambit style chess champion in Moldova and trained with a coach in Odessa. She came to the rescue and provided Vasya with real competition and another friend.
Having grown up in Massachusetts, and visited both Hyannis Port and the JFK Library, President Kennedy’s legacy holds a special place in my consciousness. As the product of a non sibi education, I am of course proud of the service aspect of Peace Corps. What I think is often overlooked though is Peace Corps’ second and third goals. As much as we “meet the need for trained men and women abroad,” we also teach locals about the US and the US about locals. I think Peace Corps’ greatest legacy is this improved understanding between peoples. I continue to have close relationships with several members of the community in which I served.
Peace Corps also reframed the way I look at the world. I studied Russian at Andover and loved it, a unique opportunity offered at Andover and only a handful of other high schools. Andover Russian spurred my interest in foreign policy, especially in great power politics. Having previously studied in Russia, living and working in Moldova offered an entirely new regional vantage point from the perspective of a country that is often overlooked as a former ‘satellite state.’ Zeroing in on the experience of a developing nation changed my worldview. Learning Romanian, observing the unique challenges of living between east and west, and living the everyday life of local people all were new tools for understanding Eurasia.
Finally, Peace Corps had a special role in bringing me closer to other volunteers. I served alongside Americans from across the country and benefited from sharing a common experience with volunteers from Kentucky to Arizona. I am a firm believer that expanding our national service programs will also serve to better knit together the fabric of America.
I interned with the Democratic staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from August 2019 to February 2020. I am currently a Research Assistant with both the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Trilateral Commission.”
He speaks Romanian and Russian.
After P.A., where he was on crew, Nicholas went to the University of Toronto ‘16, majoring in physics and philosophy. Nicholas then served in the Peace Corps from 2017 to 2019 in Uganda, working on financial education, expansion of climate smart agricultural practices, expanding clean water access, and facilitating access to financial resources to rural farmers through community-based saving cooperatives.
After the Peace Corps, he’s currently working on his master’s degree in Engineering Physics/Applied Physics at Technische Universiteit Delft in the Netherlands. He speaks French.
2015
“At PA, I was very involved with athletics. I played varsity football, basketball, and volleyball. In the classroom, I was most interested in Russian taught by the uber-enthusiastic Mr. Svec. For extracurriculars, I participated in a club called ARC that matched students with mentally and or physically disabled ‘buddies’.
After graduating from Andover in 2015, I attended Bucknell University ‘19 where I majored in International Relations and Russian Language.” In 2018 he had studied at St. Petersburg State University in Russia.
“In July of 2019, I left for the Kyrgyz Republic to serve as an English language teacher in the Peace Corps. Where, during my three months’ training, I lived with an industrious and lively host family including three young boys, ages twelve, ten and one, in a village called Kengesh. I shared this village with four other Peace Corps volunteers, though we all lived with different host families. One night early on into my experience, I was starting to feel quite ill. The heat and new diet had been getting to me. It had been at least 100 degrees for a couple weeks in a row. As I was losing control over my bodily fluids, my host family stepped in and began to instruct me as to their local health practices.
Against the advice of the Peace Corps doctors, my family demanded that I stop drinking water, and instead repeatedly gave me near-boiling cups of tea with a scoop of raspberry jam inside. Then my host mom removed my shirt and tightly wrapped a bed sheet around my body. This only made me feel worse. The tight sheet constricted my stomach making me feel as if though my insides were about to burst. Every time I tried to adjust it or take it off my host mom would chastise me.
Meanwhile the dad was removing the one fan I had in my room because he believed it was the cause of my sickness. I ended up spending the majority of the night sitting outside on a bench going to and from the outhouse. My neighbor, a fellow Peace Corps trainee, watched the events of the night unfold from her window no more than twenty yards away. At one point, she texted me asking if I was okay and whether or not my strong-willed host mom Damira was trying to kill me. Although I felt like she was wrong that night, I know she did everything out of love and care. We may have different beliefs in regards to health, and maybe a few other things, but we shared a mutual respect for one another. I feel incredibly thankful to have met such a wonderful family who were willing to do whatever it took to take care of me.
I lived and worked in a mountainous village called Taldy-Bulak. In this village, I co-taught English at the secondary school with two local English teachers. We focused on improving their language and learning new teaching techniques through regular practiced conversation, detailed lesson planning, and attending teacher training sessions throughout the region. I also individually ran afterschool English clubs, one of which was a PenPal club where the students wrote and exchanged letters with my mom’s high school English class at Masconomet High School in my hometown of Boxford, Massachusetts.
Serving in the Peace Corps has had a profound impact on me. First and foremost, I feel so thankful for being fortunate enough to travel the world and learn new perspectives. When a whole village welcomes a complete stranger into their homes, it is a humbling and powerful moment. I am most proud of the relationships I forged while serving in the Peace Corps. It is without a doubt an experience I will never forget.
While in serving in the Kyrgyz Republic, I spoke both Russian and Kyrgyz, though I was far more comfortable with the former because of the extensive amount of time I spent studying it during my high school and collegiate years. In March of 2020, along with every Peace Corps volunteer around the world, I was evacuated from my post due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I caught one of the last airplanes out of the country before the airport was temporarily shut down. In total, I served just under nine months of the 27 I had signed up for. Saying goodbye to everyone in the Kyrgyz Republic who made my service so special was especially emotional due to the abrupt nature of my departure. I hope to return soon and visit some of the people that have had such a big impact on me. Part of my inspiration to join the Peace Corps was due to Danny Gottfried ’12 who served in Moldova. My father also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Gabon, but he went to Exeter so we don’t like to talk about that! Lastly, the idea of Non Sibi is something that compelled me to join the Peace Corps. Giving back has been ingrained in me since I was a child through my parents. It is truly one of the most rewarding things you can do.”
He then went to the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan from 2019 until March 2020, when all 7,300 Peace Corps volunteers worldwide were recalled due to COVID.
At Andover, Katherine was on women’s varsity crew, Andover Ambassadors and Women’s Forum. She went on to Holy Cross with a BA in chemistry, then joined the Peace Corps in Morocco, starting in 2019. “I am working to increase youth leadership, strengthen youth networks, build capacity of professionals who work with youth, and promote girls’ education. This work is executed in partnership with local community leaders and youth in order to promote volunteerism and youth leadership through activities such as sports, basic health education, environmental projects, project management training, thematic English teaching, and self-esteem activities for girls.”
Due to COVID-19, Katy was evacuated from Morocco in March 2020, after just six months in country. A wrenching experience.
She speaks Spanish and learned some Arabic in Morocco.
FACULTY/KEY PEACE CORPS STAFF
Thomas E. Cone III, Biology instructor, 1966-2017
After going to Trinity College, Tom joined the P.A. faculty as a biology instructor in 1966.
“On the very first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, student Jamey French and the student group Andover Ecology Action enlisted hundreds of Andover High students, P.A. boys, and Abbot girls to collect a pile of trash in downtown Andover. The pile reached 12 feet high.”
He served in Liberia in the Peace Corps from 1964 to 1966.
“Our group was trained as teachers. I spent the first four months teaching biology in night classes in a high school in Monrovia and coaching the school’s track team in the afternoons.
During our January “vacation”, I volunteered to help however I could. I went to a mission called Boystown, modeled after the one in the U.S. I was so fond of this, especially due to the agriculture possibilities I could also get involved in, I requested and was allowed to remain there for my next year and a half. To raise money for room and board for the approximately fifty homeless boys about age 8-16, crops were grown. Chicken eggs were mostly lost in the bush, and the few pigs ran wild. I oversaw the building of three chicken houses and, with help from friends, I bought more than 1,000 day-old chicks flown by KLM from the Netherlands. We were selling lots of eggs a few months later, and roosters were taken to the market. I also oversaw the building of pig sties with mud blocks. A 350-pound Duroc sow was imported from Iowa to breed with the small pigs we had. My last effort, with the expertise of a German agriculturist, was to oversee an acre of paddy rice to be created from the bush and planted. (for fun I also helped about raise 25 turkeys that were sold to people from the US Embassy, USAID, and USAIS for the next Thanksgiving and Christmas!). They were happy!
I still taught in the mornings: math, science, and geography. My first wife taught English and art.
I have always loved wildlife, and everything is bigger and better in the tropics! With my encouragement, people would bring me some kind of snake every day. I would keep them in an old empty fish tank I had, study them, and then let them go. I had a movie projector so I could film some. When I returned to the US, several friends saw some of the films and identified one as a Black Mambo, one of the most poisonous snakes in the country!
I loved the Peace Corps, and it has always affected my life, from the enjoyment of teaching, loving wildlife, and opening my eyes to the world.”
Charles Dey, teaching fellow in History, 1956-1960
Charley attended public schools in Millburn and Short Hills, New Jersey.
He went to Dartmouth and played varsity football and tennis, graduating in 1952, with distinction in History. His nickname at Dartmouth was “Doc”.
A three-year stint as an officer in the Navy followed, during which Charley reached the rank of Lieutenant while serving on the heavy cruiser U.S.S. Albany in the Mediterranean. While on shore leave in December of 1955, on a blind date that had been arranged by his younger sister Judy, Charley met Phoebe Evans in New York City under the clock at the Biltmore Hotel. Although he was four hours late—detouring along the way to allow a fellow seaman to visit his dying grandmother—Phoebe waited, and their hearts and lives have been joined since that day.
After obtaining his master’s degree from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, he got a teaching fellowship at Phillips Academy. He was a history teacher at Andover from 1956 until 1960. He also coached tennis.
Inspired by JFK’s call to service, in 1962 Charley, Phoebe, and their two daughters spent a year in the Philippines, where he worked as the in-country director of volunteers for the Peace Corps.
In the 1960’s, Charley worked as Associate Dean of Dartmouth College, and then as Dean of the Tucker Foundation, While at Dartmouth, Charley’s leadership led to the expansion of opportunities for Dartmouth students to learn through the experience of working with those outside the typical college experience, including programs with minority students in Jersey City, gang members in Chicago, rural youth in Mississippi, and perhaps most significantly, through A Better Chance—an organization that continues to prepare young people from disadvantaged communities for positions of leadership.
In 1973, Charley was hired as head of school to unite the Choate School and Rosemary Hall into a single coeducational institution. Following eighteen years of service at Choate Rosemary, Charley and Phoebe moved to Lyme, Connecticut. Before long, Charley was bringing his experience and passion to the disability world. “I’d like you to do in the 1990s for people with disabilities what you did for minorities in the 1960s” charged his dear friend and college roommate Alan Reich, founder and president of the National Organization on Disability. In response, Charley developed the program Start on Success (SOS), a public-private partnership to assist students with disabilities in transitioning from school to the workplace. In 2002, he was awarded the Tucker Foundation’s first Lester B. Granger Award for his dedication to education, racial equality, and public service. He received the inaugural Purpose Prize from Encore.org in 2006, given to social entrepreneurs who in their later years contribute substantially to society. Harvard’s Graduate School of Education honored him with an Alumni Council Award in 2010 in recognition of his “deep and lasting impact on the world.”
Charley passed away on April 16, 2020 in Walpole, New Hampshire.
Brendan J. Farrington P.A. ‘47
After P.A. Brendan was at Williams College then Catholic University. He accepted a job in Peace Corps headquarters for some years.
Jerry Foster, English instructor, 1969-1976
“I graduated from the University of Southern California in 1959 I was in the US Navy as Explosive Ordnance Disposal and Diving Officer (scuba and hard hat) 1959-1962. Then I got a UCLA Ph.D., 1962-1968, with two years off for the Peace Corps in Nigeria where I taught English at the Awgu County Secondary School.
I taught English in the Andover Summer Session from 1965 to 1969 and joined the regular PA faculty in the fall of 1969. I was an English instructor, JV basketball and football coach, and house master through school year 1975/76. In additions, I was Dean and director of admissions of the Summer Session 1969/70, Director of the Summer Session until 1974. Between 1973 and 1976 I was Director of the Complementary Schools project, when I developed, funded, and started the MS2 (Math and Science for Minority Students) program.”
Jerry served in the Peace Corps in Nigeria with his wife. “The Peace Corps in Nigeria was a great experience.”
Josh Miner, physics instructor and director of admission, 1952-1985
After graduating from Phillips Exeter Academy in 1939, Josh Miner was in the Princeton class of 1943.
He served as a captain in General George S. Patton’s 3rd Army in Europe, commanding an artillery battery and earning a Bronze Star and the French Croix de Guerre.
A long-time physics teacher, coach, housemaster, and director of admissions at Phillips Academy, Josh founded Outward Bound USA at Andover. He joined Sargent Shriver to use Outward Bound in 1961 as an initial and inherent part and parcel of the Peace Corps. Throughout the 1960s Outward Bound trained a host of Peace Corps volunteers in outdoor skills through exacting physical challenges, team building, and compassion for others. Overall, 750,000 people have gone through the program. Josh has been recognized each year since 1995 at Reunions when the Josh Miner ‘43 Experiential Education Award is conferred on chosen Princeton graduates.
Josh received the Exeter equivalent of the Claude Fuess prize, the “John Phillips Award”. It honors an alumnus “whose life and contributions to the welfare of the community, country, and humanity emphasize in high degree the nobility of character and usefulness to humanity that John Phillips sought to promote in establishing the Academy.
Gregg served in the Army during World War II and graduated from the University of Idaho in 1950.
He began his legal career as the prosecuting attorney for Power County, Idaho, from 1950 to 1954. He was very active in the Democratic party, assisting in the campaign for Estes Kefauver. He was elected as a state representative in the Idaho House of Representatives in 1956. He served as majority leader in the Idaho House before running for the U.S. Senate in 1960 but losing.
He then went to Harvard where he received a master’s degree in public administration at the Littauer School of Government.
In 1961, he worked for Sargent R. Shriver as deputy director for recruitment with the Peace Corps. He became chief counsel for the House Small Business Committee under Representative Wright Patman and later with Representative James Roosevelt’s distribution subcommittee. Subsequently, he worked with Representative John Dingell as chief counsel for the Small Business Subcommittee.
He left the government to join the National Cane Sugar Refiners Association as president and later became the executive vice president of the National Oil Jobbers Association, now the Petroleum Marketers Association of America, before becoming independently employed as an antitrust attorney with the firm Bassman, Mitchell and Levy, providing counsel for the National Association of Texaco and Shell Wholesalers.
He passed away in 2001.
Kathleen Pryde, physics instructor, 1994-2013
Kathleen served in the Peace Corps in Malawi, 1990-1992
“I taught high school science to about 100 students at a public school in Lilongwe. Jason did software development with the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture.
The time we spent in Peace Corps gave me a clear perspective of the poverty and needs of people in the third world, and I continue to donate to organizations that help with their needs.”
Kathleen was a physics instructor and chair of the physics department at Andover from 1994 to 2013.
Reagh Wetmore, chemistry instructor, 1950-1966
For many years a chemistry teacher and the varsity swimming coach, in 1961 Reagh headed the physical training camp in Arecibo, Puerto Rico for the Peace Corps. This was the first physical training initiative for the Peace Corps, the overall management run by Josh Miner, also of Andover. William Sloan Coffin, Jr. ’42 headed up the program and gave inspiring speeches. Alan Blackmer ’55, trained for Nigeria there and Ray Lamontagne ’53 from Peace Corps Headquarters was there to help manage the program.
The physical training routine was a 5:00am two-mile run. Exercises included pull-ups, hurdle jumps, sit-ups, dorsal lifts, push-ups, and presses with weights carved from logs. There was an aerial obstacle course as well as rock climbing, horizontal ropes, a Burma bridge, skin diving, and a zip wire starting at 40 feet high as well as drown proofing enabling anyone to swim a mile and to float indefinitely. There was a four-day expedition, where trainees hiked 20 to 50 miles over rough terrain using maps and compasses, cooking their own meals and purifying their own water.
Phillips Academy and Abbot Academy Alumni Missionaries
Unbeknownst to most alumni, including those who lived right next to this landmark near Rabbit Pond, is a large boulder, Missionary Rock, with a metal plaque inscribed with a memorial for the 248 Andover Theological Seminary alumni from the classes of 1810 to 1910 who served in Christian missions overseas. 25 of these were Andover alumni.
It reads “In the missionary woods, once extending to this spot, the first missionary students of Andover Seminary walked and talked one hundred years ago, and on this secluded knoll met to pray.
In memory of these men: Adoniram Judson, Samuel Nott, Samuel J. Mills, Samuel Newell, Gordon Hall, James Richards, Luther Rice, whose consecrated purpose to carry the Gospel to the heathen world led to the formation of the first American Society for Foreign Missions.
In recognition of the two hundred and forty-eight missionaries trained in Andover Seminary, and in gratitude to the Almighty God, this stone is set up in the centennial year of the American Board … 1910.”
The full stories of those 25 are below. In addition, there were–not consecrated by a boulder, but intrepid as their male counterparts–were the approximately 44 Abbot alumnae (from classes 1830 to 1916) who spread out across the world as missionaries. Their amazing stories, too, are captured below.
These Abbot Academy and Phillips Academy missionaries were precursors to the 161 graduates from both schools between 1939 and 2015 who served in the Peace Corps. The main difference? The missionaries were driven by the values of American Protestant religion while the Peace Corps volunteers were driven by secular American values.
PHILLIPS ACADEMY
Daniel Poor, P.A. 1805
Poor was born on June 27, 1789 in Danvers, Massachusetts and graduated from P.A. in 1805. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1811 and attended Andover Theological Seminary in 1814. He was ordained in the Presbyterian Church at Newburyport, Massachusetts, in June 1815.
He was founder of the first English School in Jaffna, Sri Lanka.
He married Susan Bulfinch and left for Ceylon on October 23, 1815. They arrived in Colombo on March 22, 1816. The Poors then settled in Tellippalai. Poor pioneered the English education service to Tellippalai and its adjoining villages.
Though the American missionaries came with dedication and fanaticism to spread Christianity, they did not confine themselves strictly and fully to evangelism alone; they were keen to impart a liberal education.
On 9 December 1816, Poor founded the Common Free School which is currently known as Union College, Tellippalai in the Dutch Hall that had been infested with poisonous serpents when Rev. Samuel Newell stepped into the compound in 1813. The Common Free School was the first English school founded in Jaffna. In 1818 Poor converted the school into Family Boarding School. again the first of its kind in Jaffna. The school started with six students; in 1821 the total number enrolled was 11 boys and 3 girls.
His progress in Tamil was so rapid that he spoke the language freely in less than a year. His wife Susan died on May 7, 1821, after giving birth to one son and two daughters.
Poor then married Ann Knight of England, on January 21, 1823. Poor moved to Vaddukoddai, Ceylon, where he founded a boarding school for boys. This school became an important educational center for the entire region and succeeded in sending out well-trained teachers and Bishops to schools and churches which is currently known as Jaffna College . He was given the degree of D. D. by Dartmouth in 1835. He was transferred to Madurai, India in 1836, where he founded thirty-seven schools that he visited in succession and frequently addressed from horseback to crowds of adult natives.
Poor returned to Jaffna again in 1850 and continued his work at Manipay until he fell a victim to the cholera epidemic that struck the peninsula disastrously in 1855.
Daniel Poor Memorial Library, in Madurai, Tamil Nadu, Sri Lanka, officially began its functions on June 28, 1915.
From the opening of the first American missionary school in Tellippalai [Tillipally] in 1816, through 1848, one hundred and five Tamil schools and 16 English schools were founded.
He died 3 February 1855, Manipai, Jaffna.
Daniel Temple, P.A. 1813
Daniel was born December 23, 1789, in Reading, Massachusetts, the first born of 13 children.
At the age of 20, in December 2010, he had a conversion during a pentacostal meeting and made an open confession of Christ before men and became an open member of his church. At this time, he read about Dr. Buchanan’s Christian Researches in India which awakened in him feelings that resulted in a decision to become a missionary.
He immediately then went to study at Phillips Academy. In 1813, he went to Dartmouth, where he graduated in 1817. He then returned to Andover to study at the Andover Theological Seminary, graduating in 1820. At Phillips, Dartmouth, and the theological seminary, his classmate and roommate was William Goodell (Andover 1818). He was designated as a missionary bound for Palestine. In anticipation of his traveling overseas, he wrote, “It is a privilege to be employed in any way in advancing the Kingdom of God, however painful and unwelcome the labors of such an enterprise may be.”
He was married December 4,1821 to Rachel B. Dix. It was decided they would first go to Malta because things were felt to be unsafe in Turkey and Syria at the time. January 2, 1822, they embarked, with a printing press, on the brig Cyprus. They encountered a violent storm at sea, making them “extremely sick in our berths.” They did creep on deck, however, and the waves “plunged us down into a depth which seemed to threaten at every moment to be our grave.”
The voyage to Malta took 55 days. While there, he started to learn Italian. While in Malta he taught fifty children in a Sabbath school. He translated and had printed books in Italian and Greek. And he was preaching three times a week. After few years, his wife Rachel was becoming increasingly ill, becoming “feeble” and their youngest child, a baby was feeling ill as well. After long suffering, his wife Rachel died in January 1827. On the heels of her death, his son William and his daughter Catherine died. “Their departure has stripped the earth of almost everything that has seemed in any measure charming to me before.”
In 1828 he returned briefly to the U.S. with his two children. He married a second time, on January 4, 1830 to Martha Ely and two weeks later returned to Malta.
In 1833, they moved to Smyrna, Turkey on December 23rd. He discovered they weren’t the only missionaries there. There was the London Jews Society, the Church Missionary Society, and the Ladies Association at New Haven. At one point they escaped a large fire that affected 200 families. They also experienced frequent earthquakes.
On June 6,1935, the plague came to Smyrna, creating great alarm. It had already desolated parts of Egypt. They had to cease all operations until August. During the plague Temple had couriers put letters in a “smoke box” to smoke the letters, then air them out, as protection against the disease.
In 1837, Temple started a monthly magazine, written in Greek, called The Repository. In October of that year, he was attacked by a “severe bilious fever” for 16 days.
“We are living, alas, in a very wicked part of the world.” Two Greeks were assassinated close to them within ten days. At this point Temple had three schools teaching two hundred children. But the Greek religious authorities soon cracked down on his schools and threatened his teachers, creating great anguish for Temple. At one point the Greek patriarch sent out a circular about Temple and his missionaries. It read “Satanic heresiarchs, appearing within the last few years from the caverns of hell and the abyss of the northern ocean being the sport of demons and evil passions.” He forbad all his subjects from reading any of our translations of the scriptures in Turkish, Arabic, Servian, Bulgarian, or Sclavonian or any other dialect. “I have not been able to refrain from weeping over this.”
Despite all these attacks, Temple soldiered on. One year they printed more than three million pages. He usually preached in English at the Dutch Chapel. Sometimes he preached in Italian.
Temple often preached on board American and English merchant vessels. He reflected his pacifist beliefs when he spoke of the American and English war vessels. “These mighty ships and guns, however, can only cast down and destroy. But who shall build up and plant?” He wrote, “Must Syria be given up in despair, because Satan and sin and death have reigned there so long?” In the latter part of 1842, he lectured weekly at a sabbath school for English and American
children in Smyrna.
He had been in Malta and Smyrna from 1821 to 1844, 23 years. On June 7, 1844, he and his family left on the bark Stamboul from Smyrna for the States. On June 22nd they passed Malta, “The sight of it touched a thousand tender strings in my bosom…”
Back on dry land, he was overwhelmed to see his elderly mother, his brother, and his two sons after all this time. “At Andover and Worcester, we met many of our old friends.” His next stint was a town 30 miles outside of Cleveland, Ohio. While in Ohio, he visited Marietta, Western Reserve College and the Lane Theological Seminary. Thence, he visited New Albany and Madison, Iowa. He traveled to Brooklyn, to Connecticut, then settled down for some time at the South Church of Concord, New Hampshire. He left Concord in 1846.
In January 1847, he was invited to be the pastor at the Presbyterian Church in Phelps, New York. Soon after being there, he was at the age of 58, failing in his sight and somewhat in his hearing, as well as in his general health as he had bouts of hemoptysis. (“the coughing up of blood”). One treatment? A blister to the chest. He was unable to
preach, as he was hoarse and not able to speak well. He stayed some months at the “hospital mansion” in Cleveland. Treatment included having his uvula removed and sponging his larynx in a nitrate of silver plus three spoonfuls a day of cod liver oil.
In January,1851 he was staying in Chagres, Panama. He then decided to go across the Atlantic Ocean to Liverpool. On the return voyage, his ship encountered icebergs, and the weather was “tempestuous”. Temple was enfeebled and very worn. In his life, he had received no salary for his missionary work.
He died August 9, 1851 at the old family homestead in Danvers, Massachusetts.
Life and Letters of Rev. Daniel Temple: for twenty-three years a missionary of the A.B.C.F.M. in Western Asia (1855)
Josiah Brewer, P.A. 1817
Valedictorian of his class at Phillips Academy, Brewer also attended Andover Theological Seminary. He was a preceptor of Young Ladies Academy in Bangor, Maine, and taught Native American children on Old Tom Island, 1822-1823. Brewer attended Yale Divinity School, finishing in 1825. He was a missionary to Greece and Turkey, 1826-1838. He wrote A Residence at Constantinople in the Year 1827. Back in the U.S., Brewer was the chaplain of the Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield. He was an abolitionist and agent of the Anti-Slavery Society in Hartford, Connecticut, then principal of the Female Schools in New Haven and Middletown, Connecticut, 1844-1857. Between 1857 and 1866 he was pastor, Housatonic/Great Barrington, Massachusetts and finally lived in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.
Isaac Watts Wheelwright, P.A. 1817
He attended Andover Theological Seminary, 1825, while teaching at Phillips Academy 1822-1826. Wheelwright also taught at Dummer Academy in Byfield, Massachusetts, and in New Orleans. He was an agent of the American Bible Society in South America and the superintendent of Lancastrian Schools in Guayaquil and Quito, Ecuador. In addition, he established the English Classical School in Valparaiso, Chile. He retired to the U.S. in 1853. Wheelwright was a postmaster for 16 years in South Byfield, Massachusetts.
Richard Edward Pedrick, P.A. 1818
Originally from Marblehead, Massachusetts, Pedrick taught in South America and was murdered on the road between Montevideo, Uruguay and Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Lemuel Brooks, P.A. 1818
Brooks was a Presbyterian minister and missionary in Chile as well as a benefactor of Hamilton College, Auburn Theological Seminary, and Protestant missionary institutions.
William Goodell, P.A. 1818
To get to Andover the first time, he walked from his home in Templeton, Massachusetts, a distance of 60 mile with a trunk on his back. One account has him going to Middlebury College (another to Dartmouth) then Andover Theological Seminary, 1820. He was in Turkey for 43 years.
He was accepted as a missionary and, at the close of 1822, sailed for Malta (with Daniel Temple, class of 1813) then the next year went to Beirut, where he aided in establishing the station that became the center of the Syrian mission. In 1828, due to the threat of war between England and Turkey, the missionaries removed to Malta, where Goodell labored in preparing and printing books for the mission. He went to Constantinople, where he commenced the Armeno-Turkish mission. During his missionary life he and his devoted wife endured many trials and perils and moved their residence 33 times in 29 years. One of his chief labors was the translation of the Bible into Armeno-Turkish, which took him 20 years. In 1865, after 43 years of work, he returned to the United States and died in Philadelphia on February 18, 1867.
Dyer Ball, P.A. 1820
Ball was from Shutesbury, Massachusetts. After Phillips Academy, he attended Yale for two years then went to Yale Divinity School, 1829. He was a teacher and missionary in St. Augustine, Florida and Charleston, South Carolina. He studied medicine at the Medical College of South Carolina. Ball became a medical missionary in China, 1838-1866. While there, he published Chinese almanacs.
Henry August Homes, P.A. 1826
He went to Andover Theological Seminary, 1834. He was a missionary in Constantinople 1836 to 1850. As a linguist and historian, he studied oriental languages in Paris and translated many books into Armeno-Turkish. He was a member of the American Oriental Society. Homes was U.S. Chargée d’Affaires in Constantinople, 1851-1855. After 1863, he was back in the states as librarian of the New York State Library.
George Champion, P.A. 1827
Born in Connecticut in 1810, Champion left Phillips Academy in 1827 then went to Yale. At Yale, he was a member of the Society of Inquiry on the Subject of Missions to the Heathen. He graduated from the Andover Theological Seminary in 1834. Along the way he attended Dartmouth Medical College during 1833. On December 3, 1834, he and his wife Susanna boarded the bark Burlington on their way to South Africa. He brought along a goat so they could have milk in their tea during the voyage. He was one of the first group of American missionaries to the Zulus, arriving in 1835 in South Africa. He was frail and often sick. Despite this, he tramped inland for 150 miles beside an ox wagon to ask Dingaan’s permission to preach the gospel in his land.
Accompanied by their interpreter, a white youth from the Cape, they presented the tall, ponderous king with gifts; an umbrella, a razor, a tin trunk with a lock, handkerchiefs, and quantities of the white and yellow beads that only royalty could wear.
Despite Chief Dingaan’s voicing some objections to their presence in Zululand, the king in 1836 allowed Champion and Grout to open a mission station, on a site chosen by Dingaan himself, on the Umsunduzi River. Champion and Grout proposed not only to help the Zulus “know God,” but to teach the Zulus to read and write. They built two small houses with walls of stone and mud and roofs made partly of thatch and partly of wagon canvas. Champion soon learned to speak Zulu. Eventually as many as 300 people showed up for the Sabbath services. Champion and Grout set about translating the Bible into Zulu, an effort, involving later missionaries, that took until 1883 to complete.
Extreme fighting between the Matabele tribe and the Boers then massacres of Boers by the Zulus, with 10,000 Zulus fighting the Boers, and with Susanna deranged with terror, forced Champion to leave. Champion returned to the United States in 1839.
He ministered for a year at the Congregationalist Church in Dover, Massachusetts. He died in 1841 at the age of 31.
Amos Abbot, P.A. 1829
He left Phillips Academy in 1829 and attended the affiliated Teacher’s Seminary, 1832-1834. He served in two missions to India 1834-1847 and 1857-1859. He published several books in India. He then studied medicine in Philadelphia, 1869-1871, and eventually became a physician in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Nathaniel Abbot Keyes, P.A. 1827
Congregational missionary in Syria, 1840-1844.
Benjamin James, P.A. 1836
James was the first African American student at Andover. He worked as a printer (of dictionaries, religious texts, and schoolbooks), teacher, and missionary in Liberia, 1836-1846, and a schoolmaster in Monrovia, 1846-1869. He was also treasurer of the Republic of Liberia
Lyman Jewett, P.A. 1836
He served as a Christian minister to the Telegu people of India in Andhra Pradesh, 1848-1883.
Joseph Thomas Noyes, P.A. 1839
Congregational missionary and founder of 47 parishes in Sri Lanka, and Madura District,
(Tamil Nadu), 1848-1892.
Henri Byron Haskell, P.A. 1853
Medical missionary in Mosul, eastern Turkey (now Iraq), 1857-1861. Owner of important 9th-century BCE Assyrian palace reliefs from ancient Niniveh honoring Ashurnasirpal II.
John Kinne Hyde DeForest, P.A. 1862
Missionary in Japan, 1874-1911. Decorated by the Emperor for promoting international peace and for relief efforts during the famine in 1906.
David Downey P.A., 1865
Baptist missionary in India for 55 years.
Joseph Hardy Neesima, P.A. 1868
Born in Tokyo, Neesima was the first Asian student to attend Phillips Academy (1865-1867), Amherst College, and Andover Theological Seminary (1870). Neesima was a Christian missionary in his native Japan and founded Doshisha University, a Christian institution, in Kyoto in 1875.
Boudinot Currie Atterbury, P.A. 1869
After P.A., Boudinot went to Yale. He then attended Bellevue Hospital, finishing in 1878. He worked in New York, Paris, and Palestine before becoming a medical missionary in China, 1877-1896. While there, he built a hospital. He received the Chinese Imperial Order of the Double Dragon, by the Dowager Empress of the Qing dynasty for his services during the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894, in 1896.
Frederick D. Greene, P.A. 1881
Greene was a missionary to Armenian Turks and founder of mission schools during the 1880s and 1890s. He wrote The Armenian Crisis in Turkey (1895) and in 1896 founded the National Armenian Relief Committee. He was also a social worker and director of the New York Saturday and Sunday Association.
David Bates, P.A. (unknown class)
P.A. student, went on to Andover Theological Seminary from Cohasset, Massachusetts.
ABBOT ACADEMY
Henrietta Jackson Hamlin, Abbot 1830
She was born May 9, 1811 as Henrietta Anna Loraine Jackson, in Dorset, Vermont. Her father had gone to Dartmouth. Her religious inclinations were evident at the age of five, when she declared, “O Lord, destroy all my sins!”
The first school that she attended with her sisters, was in Rutland, Vermont, In 1825 she attended a school in Chester, Vermont, then to a school in Brookfield, Massachusetts, where she studied logic, natural history and botany. She then went to a school in Haverhill, Massachusetts. In 1829 she went to “The Female Academy” in Andover, Massachusetts (later Abbot). One who taught her French there was the Reverend Mr. Schauffler, who later was a missionary in Turkey.
She co-opened the Catskill Female Academy in 1833, teaching math there for one year. She was shy, retiring, gentle and tender-hearted. She was a reader and intellectually inclined. Her brother said she never read “light, trashy literature.” She loved poetry.
On one occasion, she visited Bangor, Maine and met Cyrus Hamlin of the Andover Theological Seminary. Having hoped to explore the interior of Africa or of China, he was appointed to take charge of a seminary in Constantinople for the education of Armenian youth. This mission had been founded by the Reverend William Goodell, Andover class of 1818, in 1831. He invited Henrietta to be his associate in this mission. She struggled mightily on the decision, including writing letters to her mother, her father, and her brother. She felt she was wasting her current life and that a mission might give her life meaning and direction.
They were married on September 3, 1838, with her own father officiating. Thus, on December 3, 1838 they boarded the bark Euromas. On the ocean trip she was severely sick, due to many turbulent storms which terrified her. It took four weeks to get from Boston to the Mediterranean. The bark continued directly onto Constantinople, arriving on January 25, 1839. In 1839 they had a baby girl named Henrietta.
They opened a seminary school in 1840, where they both taught. There were 12 children in the school, initially, two of whom were Jewish. They then got a larger school, doubling their attendance to 27, then later to 47 students. By 1847 they had 38 scholars and two assistant teachers.
Missionary work was highly competitive, even in that day and the Jesuits in Constantinople were very aggressive in trying to captivate native souls.
After Henrietta suffered a slight hemorrhage of the lungs in 1845, they decided to go the island of Halki for her health. Reverend Hamlin himself was in failing health, with a “troublesome cough”.
In Turkey she learned Greek and Armenian fluently and Turkish and German pretty well. She was constantly striving to make “the truth of God powerful to the salvation of the soul.”
They also had daughters Susan, Caroline, Abbie, and Mary.
In 1850 she is described as “feeble”. On July 26, 1850 she was attacked by a “violent influenza” while she was at the end of a pregnancy. She gave birth to her 5th daughter on July 29, 1850. The family then went to Rhodes, presumably for Henrietta’s health. On October 19th she had “distressing symptoms”, on October 28th “very weak”. On November 8th, she was emaciated and had extreme suffering and a sense of suffocation. Near the end, she said “The Lord bless my husband. The Lord bless my children and my unworthy self.” Henrietta died on November 14, 1850. She was buried in the sands of Rhodes.
They re-interred Henrietta’s remains in September 1851 in Pera Cemetery in Istanbul, Turkey. What was inscribed on her tombstone was PEACE, PERFECT PEACE. She was described as a woman of great refinement, sensibility, firm in purpose and persevering in execution. A person of singleness of spirit and a simplicity of faith, who exercised kindness to the poor.
In 1854 a biography about her entitled Light on the Dark River was published.
Martha Williams, Abbot 1834
Martha Williams, then Mrs. Charles Sherman, was a missionary in Syria.
Fanny Lewis Scudder, Abbot 1836
Fanny Lewis, then Mrs. Henry M Scudder, in India as a missionary at Chennai (formerly Madras)
India, 1840-1860.
Emily Love, Abbot 1837
Emily Love, then Mrs. William E. DeRiemer, was a missionary in India.
Seraphina Haynes Everett, Abbot 1845
Seraphina Haynes, Mrs. Joel Everett, was a missionary in Turkey and head of the Girls Seminary,
Constantinople, 1850-1860.
Sarah Wardell, Abbot 1852
Sarah Wardwell, then Mrs. Albert G. Beebe, was a missionary in Turkey.
Amelia Gould, Abbot 1856
Amelia Gould, then Mrs. Americus Fuller, was a missionary in Turkey.
Martha Tracey, Abbot 1857
Martha Tracey, then Mrs. William W. Livingston, was a missionary in Turkey.
Mary B. Merriam, Abbot 1858
Merriam was a missionary in West Africa, 1860-1864, and a teacher in Freedman’s Schools, 1864-1874, in the American South. She wrote Home Life in Africa (1868)
Rebecca Tracey, Abbot 1859
Rebecca Tracey, then Mrs. Edward H. McCallum, was a missionary in Turkey.
Abbey Hamlin, Abbot 1866
Abbey Hamlin, daughter of Henrietta, then Mrs. Charles Anderson, was a missionary in Turkey.
Maria Gore, Abbot 1867
Gore worked with Dr. John C. Berry in Japan, 1872-1893. Dr. Berry founded hospital and training school for nurses connected with Doshisha University.
Clara Hamlin, Abbot 1873
Clara Hamlin (step-sister of Henrietta Hamlin), then Mrs. Lucius O. Lee, was a missionary in Turkey including nine years at Scualri Girls’ School. During a massacre, their school buildings were looted and burned. Afterward Clara Hamlin Lee established an orphanage and later returned to the U.S. and lived in Andover several years. She died in 1902.
Belle Perkins Pettee, Abbot 1874
Missionary to Yokohama and Kobe, Japan, 1878-1898.
Emma Wilder, Abbot 1874
Emma Wilder, then Mrs. George H. Guterson, of Winchester, was a missionary in India. She was the daughter of missionaries in Africa.
Isabella Wilson
Isabella Wilson married Rev. J.H. Pettee and was a missionary in Japan, 1878-1914. She did much work for troops during Russo-Japanese wars. At a New Year’s fete for returning soldiers, she served 3, 644 soldiers hot rice, dumplings, and stew.
Anna Bumstead, Abbot 1875
Anna W. Bumstead was a missionary in Africa
Harriet Newell Childs, Abbot class of 1876
Harriet Childs, then Mrs. Willis Waldo Meade.
Olive Twichell Crawford, Abbot 1876
Olive Twichell, then Mrs. Lyndon S. Crawford, was a missionary in Trebizond (now Trabzon) in Turkey. She taught in the Mission House in Constantinople and founded a girls’ school in Constantinople, modeled on Abbot Academy. She knew Greek and was very proficient in languages, modern and ancient. She married in 1890, then went back to Brousa to work. Massacres caused her to be sent to Trebizond on the eastern border of the Caspian Sea 1895-1897, when she returned to America.
Jane “Jennie” Pearson Stanford, Abbot 1876
Jane Pearson Stanford, later Mrs. Arthur W. Stanford, was a missionary in Japan for forty years (1886-1926). A teacher in the Girls’ School, she was proficient in classic Japanese and became head of Kobe College. She frequently visited Abbot as her husband’s ill health brought them back to the U.S. for several years.
Ellen Emerson Cary, Abbot 1877
Home in Ogden, Utah after serving as a missionary in Osaka, Japan, Ellen Emerson Cary, founded a permanent Christian center among Japanese in Ogden. With the Reverend Otis Cary, she taught at the Doshisha Girls’ school and helped the poor in Japan earn money, 1877-1887. She served Japanese congregations in California and Utah then returned, to Japan 1932-1938.
Isabella Bliss, Abbot 1878
Isabella Bliss, then Mrs. Henry O. Dwight, was a missionary in Turkey.
Mary Pixley, Abbot 1878
Mary Pixley volunteered in Zulu Mission school, 1890 on, in South Africa.
Martha Gleason, Abbot 1879
Martha Gleason was a missionary in Turkey.
Caroline Byington, Abbot 1880
Caroline Byington, then Mrs. Orville Reed, was a missionary.
Alice Bird Greenlee, Abbot 1881
After marrying William M. Greenlee, she was a missionary and teacher in Zahleh, Syria, 1884-1887.
Sarah Ford, Abbot 1881
Missionary and teacher in Sidon, Syria. 1883-1885, the same period that Alice Bird Greenlee was in Syria.
Harriet Gibson Heron, Abbot 1881
Married to James S. Gale. Seoul, Korea. First husband was Dr. Herron who died after a few years. In Korea from 1885 on.
Alice Gleason, Abbot 1882
Alice Gleason was a missionary teacher in Mexico at Guadalajara (the Corona Institute)
Mary Schauffler, Abbot 1885
Mary Schauffler, later Mrs. Benjamin W. Labarce (even later Mrs. Platt), was assistant professor of missionary practice in the Kennedy School of Missions, Hartford, Connecticut. She was in Persia (Iran) for twelve years, 1893-1905. Her life was described in the novel “The Goodly Fellowship”, written by Rachel Schauffler a cousin.
Jeannie Jillson, Abbot 1887
Jillson was a missionary in Trebizond (now Trabzon), Brousa, and Smyrna (Izmir), Turkey, 1904-1910, and in Lebanon, 1910-1937. She was superintendent of the Associated Charities and head of the American Missionary Board in Beirut, 1933-1937.
Sarah Foster, Abbot 1888
Sarah Foster, then Mrs. Frederick Greene, was a missionary in Turkey and, later as Mrs. Samuel A. Rhea, in Persia (Iran).
Fannie Gordon, Abbot 1892
Fannie Gordon, later Mrs. Sam C. Bartlett, was a missionary in Otaru, Japan and became proficient in Japanese.
Mabelle Booker, Abbot 1894
Mabelle Booker was a missionary, 1908-1914.
Edith Pond, Abbot 1895
The daughter of Presbyterian missionary Theodore Pond, Edith Pond was born in Mount Lebanon, Syria. Her husband, Manuel Ferrando (a Roman Catholic then Episcopal), was bishop of Puerto Rico.
Ethel Arens Tyng, Abbot 1907
Ethel Arens Tyng was active with the China Episcopal Board and wrote Letters to my Grandchildren in 1963.
Mary Sweeney, Abbot 1909
Mary Sweeney was at Institutional Institute, Spain
Nora Sweeney, Abbot 1912
Sweeney was a teacher in the Philippines.
Hildegarde Gutterson Smith, Abbot 1914
Hildegarde Gutterson Smith, worked in Turkey, doing Near East Relief for one year
Marion Selden, Abbot 1916
Marion Selden was at the International Institute, Spain
Elsa Wade, Abbot 1916
Elsa Wade, later Mrs. C.T. Holbrook, was in Labradoras as a nurse.
Lilian Waters, Abbot class of 1925
Lilian Waters, then Mrs. Edwain A. Grosvernor, was a missionary in Turkey.
Elizabeth Mary Lyman Forsyth, Abbot 1928
Elizabeth Lyman was a missionary in India.
Henrietta Chadbourne, Abbot (unknown class)
Henrietta Chadbourne was a missionary in Central America.
Susan Pratt, Abbot class of 1852
Susan Pratt, later Mrs. George R. Ferguson, was a missionary in Africa.