Lucky Me: Engaging a World of Opportunities and Challenges

By David C. Cole

This book explores an adventurous life of engagement in the challenges of economic development in a destitute China (1946-47), war-torn Korea (1951-52), divided Vietnam (1955-1957), and post-Sukarno Indonesia (1966-71). It also relates the author's subsequent experiences helping South Korea enter onto its high growth trajectory and Indonesia to modernize its financial system. Interspersed are vignettes of academic life at Deep Springs College, Cornell University, University of Michigan, Vanderbilt University and Harvard, and the challenges of working with the Navajo Nation to extract revenue and reduce pollution from exploitative coal-mining and power companies, as well as trying to devise an appropriate and viable approach to rural development for the remote, politically and culturally divided district of Abyei, on the border between North and South Sudan. Finally, it describes the author's efforts at preserving environmental and historical resources in Southeast Massachusetts. Throughout, the book recounts and acknowledges the important roles of teachers, colleagues, friends and family in enriching the author's fortunate life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Apr 26, 2016
• ISBN: 9781456621537

Book preview

MA

Chapter 1

Changing Course

My first glimpse of Asia is still, after some 65 years, indelibly painted in my memory – in the foreground the shimmering blue sea with porpoises bounding along in the bow waves and flying fish darting off at erratic angles; in the background the southern coast of Kyushu with a volcanic cone in the distance, lush green rice terraces clustered around its base, and small wooden fishing boats slowly moving across the sea.

All 500-plus passengers on the SS Marine Lynx were on deck taking in the view. It was a warm, sunny, Sunday afternoon, October 13, 1946, and we were nearing the end of a fifteen-day voyage from San Francisco to Shanghai. We were the first passenger boat to travel to China from the United States, more than one year after the end of the World War II, and we were loaded with Chinese returning home, foreign missionaries going back to their old mission stations, diplomats, relief workers, businessmen and many others. The ship was a barely converted troop transport, and most of the passengers were stacked in four-decked bunks down in the holds where the air was foul and facilities grossly inadequate.

But on that glorious afternoon we hung over the starboard rail captivated by the beauty before us, and even those who had suffered most on the trip over forgot the tribulations of the past two weeks. After we rounded Kyushu and swung toward the west, the sun went down directly ahead of us, a red ball in an increasingly hazy sky. As we steamed on towards the mouth of the Yangtze River the water turned brown and the smell of China, a mixture of silt and sewage, rose up to greet us. Junks appeared out of the darkness, and our big ship had to alter course many times to weave its way through dimly lit sailing vessels.

I stayed on deck – up at the bow – all night, not wanting to miss any of the excitement of this new experience. The next day as we sailed up the Yangtze River and then the Whangpo River to reach our docking site, I remained on deck, captivated by all the scenes and activities that we were passing. Once berthed it seemed to take hours before we could disembark, carrying our allowed two pieces of luggage. Next we were loaded onto military-style trucks and driven through the incredibly crowded streets of Shanghai to a small hotel on the west side of the city, where we were to be housed for a few days.

Perhaps it is not uncommon to be able to look back at a particular experience and say, that changed my life. For me, that passage from Kyushu to Shanghai in the middle of my nineteenth year set me on a new course, very different from what I had previously conceived, and one that I followed for five decades with a fair degree of consistency. I had little awareness of it at the time, but with hindsight it stands out as the defining moment.

**

What was the chain of events that led to my being at the rail of that ship on that voyage to China? It was obviously not pure happenstance, but can be traced to a reasonably logical sequence of events, experiences and decisions.

The first seventeen years of my life were spent in Royal Oak, Michigan, a town made famous at that time by Father Charles E. Coughlin, a fascist-leaning Catholic priest. More recently it served as the home of Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the proponent of legalizing assisted suicide. My teen-age religious and philosophical influences derived not from Father Coughlin, but rather from another religious leader, the Reverend Henry Hitt Crane, minister of Central Methodist Church in downtown Detroit. I attended that church with my family throughout my teen-age years and was a member of the choir and the Crucifers Guild. Dr. Crane was a compelling speaker and an outspoken pacifist, holding staunchly to that position throughout World War II. He was also sympathetic to organized labor, and Victor Reuther, brother of Walter Reuther and also an important leader in the United Auto Workers, was a member of our church. Much influenced by Dr. Crane, I accepted the pacifist position that I could not take the life of another person, and I also envisaged myself pursuing a career in the labor movement, perhaps as a labor lawyer.

A second dominant influence derived from my experiences at Deep Springs College beginning in the fall semester of 1945. Deep Springs, a small junior college in the high desert of eastern California, combines work on a cattle ranch with rigorous academics and student self-government for 20–25 young men who are all on full scholarship. It is an isolated existence that is intended to promote self-reliance and dedication to a life of public service. Along with the intellectual and philosophical challenges from my fellow students, in my first year at Deep Springs I also learned how to drive a tractor, plow a field, and repair and maintain tractors and other farm machinery, which directly contributed to my qualifications for the China trip. (Other skills acquired, such as participating in the spring roundup and ironing shirts in the laundry, were less useful.)

In the spring of 1946 prior to my eighteenth birthday I was required to register for the draft. On my registration card I stated that I was a conscientious objector (CO) to regular military service. At the time, nearly nine months after the end of World War II, the government was much more concerned with discharging personnel than with drafting new recruits, so there was little likelihood of my number coming up in the foreseeable future. Nonetheless having registered as a CO, I decided to explore alternative forms of service that I might enter in lieu of military service. I first contacted the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), which at that time was sending cattle to Poland and engaging in other postwar recovery efforts. The AFSC responded to my letter indicating that they did not have any openings at that time, but that one of the other pacifist organizations, the Brethren Service Committee (BSC), was recruiting people for an agricultural project in China.

I immediately contacted the BSC and, after a brief exchange of information about their project and my qualifications, much to my surprise I was accepted. The project entailed sending fifty men to China for one year with the primary objective of using tractors and other machinery to plant crops in the flood plain of the Yellow River so that refugees returning to their homes would have food to live on until they could reestablish their own farming operations. The inhabitants of this region had been forced to flee to west China in 1937 when the Chinese government opened a gap in the dyke of the Yellow River, in a failed effort to stop the advance of the Japanese armies. For ten years the river had spread out across a vast section of the North China Plain depositing silt and preventing any farming activities. In 1946 an effort was underway to close the gap in the dyke, put the river back onto its northeasterly course, and open the way for the former inhabitants to return.

The BSC had entered into an agreement with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) to recruit the fifty men, provide them with preliminary training in Chinese language and culture, expose them to maintenance and repair training provided by various tractor companies that were supplying tractors to UNRRA and then ship them off to China. This project later provided one of several models that fed into the design of the Peace Corps in President John Kennedy’s administration.

The BSC brought us together in four sequential groups beginning in June 1946 and I was asked to join the second group that went to their headquarters in Elgin, Illinois in mid-August. After a few days in Elgin we were sent to Detroit for training at the Ford-Ferguson tractor training facility in nearby Plymouth, Michigan. In the evenings, at the Downtown Detroit YMCA within a block of Central Methodist Church, we began our Chinese training. After ten days we moved to a YMCA in Chicago to continue our Chinese training, purchase the clothing and other supplies needed for a year in China, and get our final inoculations. On Sunday September 8 we boarded the train in Chicago headed for San Francisco, arriving on the following Wednesday. Our onward trip to China was put on hold by a longshoremen strike that had tied up all the shipping on the West Coast. Finally in the late afternoon of September 29 we were able to set sail, but as I stood by the rail anticipating a glorious view of the Golden Gate, it was so enshrouded in fog that we got barely a glimpse of the bridge as we passed under it.

Thus it was the combination of pacifism, learned at Central Methodist Church, and a minimum of tractor operation and maintenance skills, learned at Deep Springs, that opened the way to this adventure.

But other factors came into play. When I had first learned about the China tractor project and asked my parents if I could apply they said yes immediately. Five of my fellow students at Deep Springs also wanted to apply, but their parents would not agree. Fortunately, my mother’s Sunday school teacher from Central Methodist Church had gone on to become a missionary in China and my mother always admired that act of commitment. That same woman, Lucia Lyons, was on the boat with me, returning to China to resume her missionary activities.

In addition I liked to travel. At thirteen I had applied to join a trip for children to go to Alaska organized by a local coal distributor in Royal Oak, Mr. Buchanan, but he died that Spring and the trip was temporarily put on hold. Not to disappoint me, my parents took my brother, Ed, and me on a month-long tour of the western United States that included eight national parks, the San Francisco World’s Fair and many other memorable features. At seventeen I had taken the train from Detroit to Reno and then the bus down to Big Pine, California to be picked up by the truck from Deep Springs. My companion in the back of that pickup, Ed Wesely, from Brooklyn, who had just made his first trip across the country, opined that there sure was a lot of country west of the Hudson River to which I heartily agreed.

But going to China, sailing half way round the world, proved to be a real game-changer. As I started this adventure, I envisaged that I would do this for a year and after that return to Deep Springs, then on to Cornell and law school and eventually back to Detroit to join in the struggle for workers’ rights. The China experience set me off on a new, very different course.

**

I stayed in China for nearly eleven months, and my experiences there are described in some detail in Chapter 3. For the first three months I worked in Shanghai helping to set up a support base for receiving, checking, repairing and shipping tractors and associated equipment up-country. The next five months were devoted to escorting a shipment of tractors from Shanghai to Henan Province and then joining one of the tractor projects on the western bank of the Yellow River in the heart of the flooded area. En route to the project site I witnessed the final stages of closing the gap in the dyke on the south bank of the Yellow River that brought an end to the annual summer floods in central Henan and pushed the river back onto its prewar northeasterly course. While this greatly increased the potential benefits derivable from our tractor operations by reducing the risk of flooding, it also increased the mobility of both Communist and Nationalist military forces in the area. We were soon being visited every couple of weeks by sizable bands of foot soldiers from the Communist Eighth Route Army commanded by General Liu Po-Cheng. Some of the political cadres with these groups pointedly noted that there were no tractor operations in the areas that were nominally and in fact under their control on the east side of the Yellow River. Several of us concluded that unless we set up some operations in the Communist area, our existing projects were likely to be subjected to escalating harassment. We therefore urged our supervisors in Kaifeng, the provincial capital of Henan, and in Shanghai to initiate such a project, to which they agreed in late May.

The months of June and July 1947 proved to be the most exciting and challenging period in China for me. Together with my colleague Bob Pannebecker and six Chinese instructors, we proceeded to establish and operate a tractor project in the Communist-controlled zone on the east side of the old Yellow River flood course. We lived in tents, had open-air kitchen and eating facilities as well as latrines. I was laid low with dysentery for a week, but our operations went forward. June was an exceedingly dry month and the dust from the powdery loess silt soil along the roads was ankle deep when we walked out to the fields. Nonetheless we were able to sow large areas and, when the monsoon rains started in early July, the crops shot up out of that very fertile soil, growing 6 to 8 feet in one month. In the several tractor projects on both sides of the river, we managed to plant some twenty thousand hectares of sorghum and millet that provided much needed food for the refugees who were returning in large numbers from the west where they had fled to escape the flooding.

At the end of July armed conflict between the Communist and Nationalist forces throughout the flooded area escalated sharply and directly impacted our project. In August we held a conference of the tractor project personnel in Hangchow and decided to scale back operations in the areas where military activities either interfered with project operations or caused undo risk to the personnel. I decided not to go back to Henan but to return to the United States, which I did in early September, flying from Shanghai to Detroit on Northwest Airlines in a trip that took about 48 hours.

Shortly after returning home I was diagnosed with hepatitis so the next two months were devoted to recuperation. In the Spring I returned to Deep Springs for one semester and then moved on to Cornell University in the fall of 1948. My reasons for going to Cornell were several– the most important being it was the only school that accepted me. I had applied to only two schools, Williams College, which my grandfather had attended (1865–1869), and Cornell, which my father had attended (1913–1916). At that time Williams was not accepting transfer students because they were still accommodating returning veterans and entering freshmen. Cornell, on the other hand, had a longstanding relationship with Deep Springs and its affiliated organization, the Telluride Association, that had a house on the Cornell campus. I was invited to live at Telluride House, which had similar social objectives and scholarship opportunities as Deep Springs. I remained there for my two years at Cornell (1948–1950).

At Cornell I discovered that there was a small but excellent Department of Far Eastern Studies, headed by Professor Knight Bigger staff, a historian specializing on nineteenth century Chinese history. The department had only four undergraduate majors and 8 to 10 graduate students, so we undergraduates took classes and seminars right along with the graduate students in quite small classes.

I entered into the Far Eastern Studies program at Cornell with great enthusiasm, feeling that I already had a head start in terms of both Chinese language and awareness of current events and conditions in China. I also felt that I knew the kinds of things that I needed to learn in order to be more effective in addressing the huge problems that I had seen firsthand in China. While restoring agricultural production was clearly going to be important, I believed that the quickest and most effective way to improve living standards in China and, by extension, other parts of Asia, would be through encouragement of small-scale cottage and rural industry that would supply both goods and incomes to the vast numbers of poor people. Some of the more successful programs that I had observed or heard about in China were focused on promotion of small-scale rural industry. The setting up of a small blacksmith shop at our project in the Communist area had proven both popular and helpful to the local farmers who brought in all kinds of old and broken implements to be repaired.

On the political level I left China with the strong feeling that the Nationalist or Kuomintang government would not survive and that the Communists would, and probably should, prevail quickly to help bring China out of its deep misery. The deterioration in US–China relations after the Communist regime was established in Beijing on October 1, 1949, along with the exploding witch-hunts in Washington to place the blame for losing China posed some serious dilemmas for my future life work.

In the spring of my senior year, 1950, I went to Washington to assess whether I wanted to apply for the Foreign Service as a way of returning to the Far East. Visiting the State Department office of Lindsey Grant, a good friend from both Deep Springs and Cornell, I was deeply dismayed to see that he and his colleagues were primarily involved in searching through old files to try to find documents that could be used to refute the charges of Senators McCarthy and McCarran about Communist infiltration in the State Department. I quickly decided that I was not interested in participating in that activity.

I also visited the offices of the Economic Cooperation Administration (ECA) in Washington. This agency had been established in 1948 primarily to implement the Marshall Plan in Europe, but it also had activities in Asia. I talked with the officials about possible programs in rural and small-scale industry development and learned that they were initiating such projects in Indonesia, Thailand and Taiwan. I immediately submitted my application and said that I would be available after graduation in June.

The weeks following graduation brought a very different and unexpected invitation to return to Asia. The Korean War started on June 25 1950 and within a few days the US government made clear its strong support for the South Korean government and announced that it would begin drafting new personnel for the military services. Being out of college, not employed in any priority activity, and without dependents, it was obvious that I would soon be called up. This posed a real dilemma. While I was still committed to a pacifist position, I also felt that the North Korean attack on South Korea was wrong, and that the US government was doing the right thing in supporting the South militarily. After several months of agonizing, I decided to accept the draft rather than refuse to register, but to serve in a non-combatant role. The draft laws at that time permitted such a non-combatant status and generally assigned all such draftees to the medical corps.

Throughout the fall of 1950 I pursued a possible position with ECA in Indonesia, but the bureaucratic process moved very slowly, and it was not clear whether such an appointment would qualify me for exemption from the draft. I believed that I could be more useful to society helping to promote economic development in Indonesia than serving in the medical corps in Korea, but the choice was not up to me. Finally on December 13, 1950 I was inducted into the army and sent down to Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas for basic army and medical training.

Near the end of the medical training I was asked whether I would like to stay on at Fort Sam Houston as a trainer of incoming troops, or be shipped out to Korea. Contrary to the choice that probably would have been made by most of my fellow trainees, I opted for going to Korea. I wanted to get back to Asia and to see whether there might be something useful that I could do there as a non-combatant.

The ten–day trip on a troop ship from Seattle to Yokohama in mid-June turned out to be no more uncomfortable than the previous one on the Marine Lynx to Shanghai. The train ride from Camp Drake, outside Tokyo, to the naval port of Sasebo on the west coast of Kyushu, was a pure delight. We passed through rich farming areas where the monsoon rains had just begun and thousands of farmers were busy tilling their rice paddies with oxen and wood plows. After a few days in Sasebo we sailed on an overnight troop ship and arrived in Pusan on a brilliant summer day, July 1, 1951. I felt as though I was returning home.

A group of us from the ship was soon loaded on a train and sent north through dozens of smoke-filled tunnels that, because the windows were kept open to reduce the heat, soon turned us into soot-covered soldiers. We passed through Taegu and on up to Wonju, where we were off-loaded and trucked down to an army evacuation hospital in Chung-ju. This was many years before the popular movie and TV program MASH, but in many ways our hospital unit resembled the MASH hospital, except that we were considerably farther away from the front lines.

Whenever I had any free time I climbed the nearby hills or wandered through the town observing what was going on and taking it all in. I was assigned as a clerk in the personnel office at the hospital so had little need for recently acquired skills of applying bandages or emptying bedpans. After about two weeks the Adjutant at the hospital called me in, said he had reviewed my personnel file and wondered whether someone with my training in Chinese language and Asian studies might be more useful in some other unit in Korea. Having read that morning in Stars and Stripes about a unit called the United Nations Civil Assistance Command, Korea, I suggested that it might be appropriate. Two weeks later the transfer was approved and I was on my way by smoke-filled train back down to Pusan and my real Korean adventure discussed at length in Chapter 4.

Once again a fascinating opportunity in Asia presented itself - this time as a result of my by then somewhat compromised pacifist philosophy coupled with my recent training in Chinese and Asian studies. The Korea experience, with the help of the GI Bill of Rights, in turn led me back to graduate school to learn more economics. This sequence of alternating between academia and field operations in Asia was to continue throughout most of the rest of my professional career. I was attracted to academia first to learn and then to teach about some of the practical, applied lessons that I had learned from the fieldwork. And I was attracted to the practical fieldwork in both rural areas and later in economic policy-making because it provided opportunities to make a contribution to the welfare of the people of Asia and learn more about the problems of promoting economic development,

Chapter 2

Life Before China

My early life, as I think back upon it, was defined mainly in terms of summers. There were some important experiences at school and elsewhere, but the really critical, memorable events came in the summers. When I was six, in 1934, with help from my uncle, Glenn Routier, two old lumberjacks and a Native American, we built a log cabin on Van Etten Lake at Oscoda, Michigan. In 1936 Dad bought a small sailboat for our use on the lake. In 1939 we took the month-long trip by car out West. In all these instances we means my parents, my only sibling and older brother, Ed, and myself. Of course my parents organized these events and paid the bills, but we did them as a family and I felt very much a part of a caring, providing, and loving family.

Beginning in the summer of 1941, at the age of thirteen, I began to venture out on my own. That summer was spent at National Music Camp at Interlochen, Michigan. I returned there in the summers of 1943, 1944, 1945, 1946 and 1948. The first three years I was a regular camper in the high school division, and the last three years a member of the staff. Each of those summers was special in terms of the music performed, the people met, and the experiences encountered. In 1946 I had to leave camp before the season ended to begin preparations for going to China, and in 1947 I was in China. But I returned to Interlochen again in 1948 between leaving Deep Springs and moving on to Cornell. Interlochen obviously had a strong attraction.

My Parents

My parents married in August 1920, bought the house at 2113 Woodland Ave. in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1922 and lived there for the next 35 years. Mother had grown up in Detroit, attended Central High School, but had to drop out before her senior year to take care of her three younger sisters after her mother died. Subsequently she took secretarial courses and worked for the Curtis Publishing Co., publishers of the Saturday Evening Post, and then for the Detroit Edison Company. It was there that she met my father who came to work for the Edison Company upon graduation from Cornell University in 1916.

Mother was always self-conscious about her limited formal education and worked hard at broadening her horizons through reading and involvement in local organizations. She was an avid pursuer of causes such as the World Federalists and United Nations. Her approach was much more emotional than intellectual and often, I felt, at odds with my father’s inclinations. She was quite vociferous in expounding her views, while Dad kept his own counsel. I tended to agree with her positions on most issues.

Dad was born in Nyack, New York in 1889 and lived there at 3 La Vita Place on the banks of the Hudson River until his early teens. He had two brothers and two sisters, the younger of whom drowned in the Hudson when she was three. At some point in his teens, his mother had a mental breakdown and was committed to a mental hospital in Middletown, New York. His father moved the family to Middletown, and Dad graduated from Middletown high school in 1906 at the age of sixteen. After graduation he worked in New York City for four years in the office of a coal distribution company.

Fortuitous circumstances opened the way for him to gain a college education and move on into his professional career. His father, Edward Harmon Cole, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Williams College in 1869, had subsequently studied law but never took it up as a profession. Dad’s grandfather, Seth Beach Cole, had been a prominent attorney and judge in New York State and had pressured his son to study law. Seth was a delegate to the Republican Party conventions in 1856 and 1860, the latter of which nominated Abraham Lincoln for the presidency. Edward’s principal occupation was as Secretary to the Nyack School Board until he had to move to Middletown. After several years in Middletown, he was hired as a secretary by Ezra Rust, a Michigan timber baron based in Saginaw, Michigan. Edward moved to Saginaw, settled his wife in the State Mental Hospital in Pontiac, and worked for Ezra Rust until Edward died in 1915.

Mr. Rust was a friend of Lucien L. Nunn, a pioneer in the electric power industry who developed the first high-tension transmission lines in Telluride, Colorado and established the Telluride Power Company. Mr. Nunn was deeply committed to education of young men and imbuing them with a spirit of service to the community. He established college-level training programs at all the Telluride power plants, recruited young men to come and work in the plants and attend the courses, and subsequently sent them on to complete their college educations, mainly at Cornell University, where he established the Telluride House and the Telluride Association in 1911.

Mr. Rust apparently recommended my father to Mr. Nunn as a potential recruit for his work-study program at the Telluride power plants. Mr. Nunn interviewed my father in New York City in 1910 and accepted him into the program. Dad worked at several of the plants from 1910 to 1913, then moved on to Cornell, living at Telluride House, where he completed his engineering studies and received his degree in 1916. Upon graduation he was offered a job with the Detroit Edison Company, which had previously hired a number of Cornell engineering graduates, and he quickly accepted the position and began a career there that lasted for 40 years.

The main focus of his activities at the Edison Company throughout those years was planning the power distribution system for all of southeastern Michigan. An internal Edison Company document written by Jason Howe in 1988–the year Dad died–annexes a report Dad wrote in 1920 and goes on to say: Mr. Cole, probably more than any other individual, influenced the development of the overhead transmission system as we know it today. This is a noteworthy statement considering the changes that had occurred in southeastern Michigan over a period of nearly 70 years.

A very important benefit of his employment with Detroit Edison, that I did not appreciate at the time, was that his position was not affected by the Great Depression of the 1930s. His job continued throughout that decade and our family provided support and lodging for some of our relatives. I took their extended visits for granted and did not realize that they were staying with us because of loss of homes or employment during that period.

The most memorable manifestation of his professional involvement in my life was the amount of time we spent wandering through back roads and alleys looking for new sites for substations or checking on the progress of new transmission line installations. On December 7, 1941, we heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor over the car radio while sitting in a farm field just south of the Willow Run Bomber Plant that was being built by Ford Motor Company to mass-produce B-24 bombers. Dad was checking the new high voltage lines coming into the new substation for that plant. We were shocked along with the rest of the country and free world, but at least we had the sense that the Bomber Plant would soon be providing a response to this attack.

I also learned from my father to be always cognizant of directions and map coordinates and where I was situated in relation to them. But I did not inherit the same capacity that he had to remember the name or number of every highway he had ever traveled in his many trips across the country.

Early Years

Summers in northern Michigan were the benchmarks of my young life, first at Higgins Lake in 1932 and 1933, and then at Van Etten Lake from 1934 on. After building the log cabin in 1934, we would head Up North the weekend after school let out and not return until Labor Day. This pattern was broken in 1937 when my parents had a serious automobile accident in May on their way to Great Aunt Gertrude Chamberlin’s funeral in Boston, and had to spend part of the summer in Royal Oak recuperating. I went to a YMCA camp for two weeks before going on to Oscoda. Then, as mentioned previously, we took the trip out West in 1939. But even in that year we spent at least a month at the cabin.

In 1936 we bought our first sailboat – a 15-foot Snipe class sloop. Prior to that we had done some occasional sailing on one of the inland lake scows belonging to our good friends, the Loud family. At that time Dad did the sailing and Ed and I had only crewed. Having our own sailboat meant that Ed and I could sail as much as we wanted so we spent many hours out on the water. My brother soon became a good sailor and taught me a lot.

The land on which we built the cabin was given to my parents by the Loud family. Bruce and Estelle Loud were our next-door neighbors in Royal Oak. They had lived previously in a large house in an elegant neighborhood on the east side of Detroit. Mr. Loud was from an old lumbering family in northern Michigan. H. M. Loud and Sons were listed, along with Ezra Rust, on the Lumbermen’s Monument on the banks of the Au Sable River fifteen miles west of Oscoda. But the family’s economic circumstances had been severely damaged by the Great Depression. They had to give up their house in Detroit and thus moved into our middle-income neighborhood. They became good neighbors and good friends.

The Louds had five sons, the two youngest, Hugh and Francis (Fran), were still living with their parents when they moved to Royal Oak. Hugh was some two years older than my brother, Ed, and Fran was half way between Ed and me. This led to a natural progression of overcoats, jackets and miscellaneous clothing from Hugh to Ed to Fran to me. But more importantly, Francis Loud became my idol and role model, especially during the summer months when we all moved up to Oscoda and spent much time together. The Louds’ house was two miles up the road, but we managed to get together for part of almost every day. They had a tennis court, sailboats, rowboats, a canoe, and best of all a houseboat. We would swim off