Through Grateful Eyes: the Peace Corps Experiences of Dartmouth’s Class of 1967

By Charles A. Hobbie

As the 1967 graduates of Dartmouth College received their diplomas, not many of them envisioned spending several years overseas in the underdeveloped world, living and working amid unimaginable disease, extreme poverty, and other hardships.
But an extraordinary number of class members from the remote college in New Hampshire’s mountains subsequently accepted invitations to journey to twenty-four different countries to live, work, learn, socialize, subsist, and grow with families in their host countries.
They were Peace Corps volunteers, and their mission was to promote world peace and friendship in programs of agriculture, conservation, education, forestry, health, hydrology, law, marketing, engineering, rural development, urban development, and tourism.
These volunteers were among the more than 650 graduates of the small but historic ivy league institution in the upper Connecticut river valley who have responded over the past sixty years to President John F. Kennedy’s challenge to help their country and the world. Peace Corps’ national headquarters has described Dartmouth’s cooperation with the Corps as “unsurpassed.”
This book features their incredible stories, compellingly describing what nineteen of them and five spouses did, how they lived, whom they met, what they learned, and how they were challenged and changed by their experiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 7, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663240095

Charles A. Hobbie

Charles A. Hobbie joined Peace Corps/ Korea in 1968 after earning degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Wisconsin. He has since served on Peace Corps staff and as AFGE’s deputy general counsel. He is now associate general counsel for the Peace Corps and lives with his wife, Young-ei, in Falls Church, Virginia.

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Through Grateful Eyes:

THE PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCES

OF DARTMOUTH’S CLASS OF 1967

Compiled and edited by:

CHARLES A. (CHUCK) HOBBIE

Through Grateful Eyes: The Peace Corps Experiences Of Dartmouth’s Class Of 1967

Copyright © 2022 Charles A. (Chuck) Hobbie.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written

permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views

of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4008-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4010-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4009-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022910356

iUniverse rev. date: 07/07/2022

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From the moon, earth is a blue and white ball rolling slowly in black space. It is difficult to picture, from out there, the harsh conditions of life that people suffer over much of that globe—disease-racked barrios and villages where hunger is a fact of daily life. It is hard to see those places from here, too, from our pleasant and structured part of the world. But there are people who have been there, lived there, and dealt with overwhelming poverty and hunger and disease and ignorance, who will never forget their experience there. I visited them when they were planting Miracle wheat for the Green Revolution in India and operating a tuberculosis control program in Korea: They are the Peace Corps Volunteers.

I remember 1961 as the year the United States sent its first man into space. It was also the first year we sent men and women into the underdeveloped world with the Peace Corps.

—Neil Armstrong¹

OTHER BOOKS BY CHUCK HOBBIE

Buffalo Wings (a childhood memoir)

The Time of the Monkey, Rooster, and Dog—A Peace Corps Volunteer’s Years in Korea

Days of Splendor, Hours Like Dreams—Four Years at a Small College in the Still North

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Peace Corps bumper sticker (shutterstock)

But if the life will not be easy, it will be rich and satisfying. For every young American who participates in the Peace Corps—who works in a foreign land—will know that he or she is sharing in the great common task of bringing to man that decent way of life which is the foundation of freedom and a condition of peace.

—John F. Kennedy²

Dedicated

to my best friend and beloved wife Shin Young-ei—a Peace Corps gift

Also dedicated to, and in grateful memory and honor of, Duncan Sleigh ’67 and William Smoyer ’67, who died in Vietnam during military service, and the members of the class of 1967 and their spouses now departed who served overseas as Peace Corps volunteers to promote the goals of world peace and friendship:

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Baker Library, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire (shutterstock)

In appreciation and honor of the approximately 310 Peace Corps volunteers who died during their service overseas in the Peace Corps’ first sixty years, 1961–2021, including Dartmouth alumni PCV Nancy Hart ’85, who vanished in December 1987 in Nepal at the age of twenty-four just after the completion of her volunteer service, and PCV Alan Hale ’61, who died in July 2019 in a bicycle accident in the Philippines at the age of eighty during his second tour

Peace requires the simple but powerful recognition that what we have in common as human beings is more important and crucial than what divides us.

—Sargent Shriver, first Peace Corps director³

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Seal of Dartmouth College on door of library, Nichols High School,

Buffalo, New York (courtesy of Blake Walsh and Nichols School)

The world’s troubles are your troubles … and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.

—John Sloan Dickey ’29

President, Dartmouth College⁴

CONTENTS

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FOREWORD

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DARTMOUTH COLLEGE IS A GLOBAL institution committed to social change. John Sloan Dickey ’29, diplomat, scholar, and Dartmouth president from 1945 to 1970, famously said, The world’s troubles are your troubles … and there is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix.⁵ In 1951 President Dickey created the William Jewett Tucker Foundation at Dartmouth with volunteer service programs and academic credits for social activism. In 1961 President John F. Kennedy established the Peace Corps, providing opportunities for Americans to serve in developing countries. With these common interests, hundreds of Peace Corps volunteers were trained on the Dartmouth campus in the 1960s, and it is unsurprising that to date, more than 650 Dartmouth graduates have served as Peace Corps volunteers, as Chuck Hobbie ’67 notes in this book’s introduction.

I graduated from Dartmouth in 1983. I had fulfilled the premed requirements but was not feeling sufficiently mature to begin medical school. I thought the Peace Corps would give me an opportunity for service, for adventure, and to know myself better. I served in Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) as a fisheries program volunteer and returned instilled with the motivation and mindset to complete medical school with honors and embark on an exciting career in global health and government service. And I’ve been privileged to remain involved in various ways with both Dartmouth and the Peace Corps.

Author Chuck Hobbie’s Peace Corps service was as a teacher in the Republic of Korea. He was similarly inspired and motivated by his experience to embark on a long and distinguished career in nonprofit federal sector labor and employment law for AFGE, AFL-CIO, and government service, including serving as the Peace Corps Korea desk officer and the Peace Corps associate general counsel. Chuck is an accomplished writer, having published several books—including memoirs of his childhood in Buffalo, his time as an undergraduate at Dartmouth, and his service with the Peace Corps in Korea. Now he has shared his gift for writing and publishing with his Dartmouth ’67 classmates, a remarkable forty-three of whom (6 percent of the graduating class) served as Peace Corps volunteers. Eleven of them have passed away. Most of the rest contributed to this wonderful book, chronicling in nineteen chapters their own Peace Corps experiences, in five cases together with their wives (Dartmouth was still all-male in the 1960s).

The book is a delight to read. The intelligence, humor, and resilience of the authors shine through in every chapter. It was an extraordinary time when most of them served in the late 1960s. Many joined the Peace Corps as an alternative to being drafted into the Vietnam War. They were abroad during the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, during the Chicago riots, and during the Woodstock music festival. Most of their countries of service had just become independent in the prior decade. Peace Corps itself was relatively new; some of its teething pains are documented in these stories. It’s striking how much some of the countries have developed and changed in the intervening fifty years, such as Chile, Iran, and Korea, whereas others, such as Chad and Sierra Leone, are still struggling.

Many of the recurring themes in the book continue to define the Peace Corps experience in the present. The descriptions of culture shock, loneliness, austerity, adventures, and professional and health challenges will resonate with readers who have lived and worked immersed in the culture of a developing country. Many of the new graduates grappled with questions of privilege, race, social class, and their early-career experiences with inept bureaucracies—both foreign and domestic. There are critical questions about the roles and impact of volunteers, but myriad examples also abound of communities—and especially individuals’ lives—changed by their presence.

Chuck has given his classmates the extraordinary gift of the opportunity to share their narratives. Every returned Peace Corps volunteer has stories to tell. His classmates have a multitude of stories that have been running through their minds and told in bits and pieces for five decades and more. Now they are in print for all of us to enjoy. The most compelling and recurring theme is how the writers, like me and most volunteers, grew up during their service and learned about themselves, their role in society, and their potential to make a difference. John Sloan Dickey and John Fitzgerald Kennedy would be astonished, amused, and very proud.

—Peter H. Kilmarx, MD, ’83, M’90, Peace Corps Zaire 1984–86,

Rear Admiral US Public Health Service, retired⁶

INTRODUCTION

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FOR THE PAST SIXTY YEARS, a small, poorly funded federal agency has sent Americans abroad on two-year missions.⁷ The work of these volunteers is not well publicized. In fact, this agency’s work is virtually unknown in this country. Each American sent abroad pursues three goals: helping the people of interested countries in meeting their need for trained men and women; helping promote a better understanding of Americans among the peoples served; and helping promote a better understanding of other peoples among Americans.

Of course, I am referring to the Peace Corps—an agency whose formative years roughly corresponded to those of Dartmouth’s class of 1967 (’67s). In this regard, as the ’67s prepared for first grade in elementary school in 1951, Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers, AFL-CIO, released an article titled A Proposal for a Total Peace Offensive, suggesting that the United States establish a voluntary agency for young Americans to be sent around the world to pursue humanitarian and development objectives.⁸ Several senators picked up the idea of a peace corps, including then Minnesota senator Hubert Humphrey, who in 1957 introduced in the Senate the first bill to create the Peace Corps. Three years later, Senator John F. Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, raised the idea during a campaign speech at the University of Michigan.⁹

After Kennedy’s election in 1960, he signed Executive Order 10924 on March 1, 1961, which officially established the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps Act soon followed when Congress passed and the president signed the act on September 22, creating an unusual government agency: to promote world peace and friendship through volunteers to serve, under conditions of hardship if necessary, to help [interested countries] in meeting their needs for trained manpower, to promote a better understanding of the American people on the part of the peoples served and a better understanding of other peoples on the part of the American people.¹⁰

Less than two years later, Dartmouth College commenced its long cooperative association with the Peace Corps. As the college mailed admission acceptances to students who would become members of the class of 1967, the Peace Corps asked Dartmouth in 1963 to provide seven weeks of pre-service training during the summer for a group of thirty-three men and women going to the African Republic of Guinea to teach English as Peace Corps volunteer (PCV) members of Guinea I.¹¹ Many other training groups followed. By the time of the graduation of the ’67s four years later, the college had trained 725 volunteers in Hanover and elsewhere and had been picked as the site of innovations such as the two-year training program between junior and senior years.¹² Peace Corps’ national headquarters described Dartmouth’s cooperation with the Corps as unsurpassed.¹³

Epitomizing the college’s cooperative impact on the Peace Corps was a hugely important Dartmouth contributor to the training of Peace Corps volunteers at the college and elsewhere: Professor John Rassias. In 1966 he became director of the first pilot program of languages for the Peace Corps in Africa, leading training for the Ivory Coast. His unique method of teaching language, known as the Rassias Method (also known as the Dartmouth Intensive Language Method), was later adopted by the Peace Corps and was nationally—even internationally—celebrated.¹⁴

The sustained robust relationship between the college and the Peace Corps has been reflected most importantly in the exceptional numbers of Dartmouth College graduates who have been volunteers. Since the agency was founded, more than 657 Dartmouth alumni have served as volunteers in the Peace Corps’ two-year program.¹⁵ Early Dartmouth volunteers included the late US senator and presidential candidate Paul Tsongas ’62 (RPCV Ethiopia); the first openly gay vice presidential candidate, the late Mel Boozer ’67 (RPCV Brazil); former Kentucky attorney general, circuit judge, and state representative Fred Cowan ’67 (RPCV Ethiopia);¹⁶ Pennsylvania governor Tom Wolf ’71 (RPCV India); and former US assistant surgeon general Peter Kilmarx, ’83, M’90 (RPCV Zaire)¹⁷—among many others. Most recently, at the time of the temporary cessation of the agency’s operations in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, fifteen Dartmouth alumni were serving as volunteers.¹⁸ For sixty years the college has been among the top PCV-producing schools in the country.¹⁹

In the early years of this relationship, forty-three members—about 6 percent—of the class of 1967 (plus eight spouses) volunteered to address some of the world’s troubles by serving in the Peace Corps in twenty-four different countries.²⁰ This percentage of ’67s who served is astonishingly high. Peace Corps’ historic records indicate that the 6 percent Peace Corps service (as opposed to application) rate of the ’67s is probably the highest percentage of any graduating class of any college or university in the sixty years of Peace Corps’ existence.²¹

These returned volunteers’ accounts in the following pages compellingly represent the earliest stories of the approximately 240,000 Americans who have served in the past sixty years in more than 140 different countries to promote world peace and friendship. The memories recounted by these ’67 pioneers and five spouses in the initial years of the Peace Corps detail what the ’67s and their spouses did, why and how they did it, where they did it, and what they learned so many years ago, as they worked in fifteen different countries in a wide variety of programs: agriculture, conservation, education, forestry, health, hydrology, law, marketing, engineering, rural development, urban development, and tourism.

Among many insights found in the pages that follow, ’67s recollect the training and program implementation—in varying degrees of effectiveness—that attended the first decade of operations of the new agency. They further recall that they were prompted to volunteer for two years of service for a variety of reasons. Some joined the Peace Corps for purely altruistic motives. Others joined, wishing to serve their country, as a temporary alternative to being drafted into military service in the Vietnam era,²² and others volunteered because they sought to pursue adventure. All believe that the Peace Corps experience was hugely significant to their lives, and many express their gratitude to their host countries and peoples, to the American government, to Dartmouth, and to the American people for their experiences.

Their words additionally document the life-changing lessons that the volunteers learned from their foreign hosts, who shared with them their homes, their way of living, and their way of thinking. They taught the volunteers to appreciate, to understand, to talk less and listen more. They taught humility. They taught the Americans to comprehend better the world and their shared humanity. As recipients of these lessons and of their hosts’ generosity, the nineteen ’67s and five spouses whose stories follow are like most returned Peace Corps volunteers in believing gratefully that what they received from their overseas hosts was far more than the little they contributed to their host countries.

The influence of our individual PCV classmates in terms of skills and long-term impact on their countries of service may not have been substantial, as they all seem to agree that they contributed little to the development of the host countries. The relationships they formed, however, were both priceless and enduring. These relationships may be ultimately their greatest achievement. As their stories establish, the early volunteers of Peace Corps’ first decade were often the first and only Americans their host country acquaintances had ever known or would ever know. The volunteers’ coworkers, students, neighbors, and host families got to know them as typical and unpaid American ambassadors, who lived and worked with them in their communities day in and day out, unlike other international assistance workers or missionaries or military personnel who lived in compounds to which they retreated at the conclusion of the workday. The PCVs thereby promoted lifelong relationships, which fostered a better understanding, positive or negative, of the American people among the peoples served.

Additionally, by writing and publishing their memories and telling readers about their host countries and friendships with the people of these countries—even decades after their service—these RPCVs are continuing to fulfill, partially at least, the third statutory goal of the Peace Corps Act mentioned previously: promoting a better understanding of other peoples on the part of their classmates and of the American people. As this ’67 learned from his Peace Corps host country a half century ago, with understanding comes friendship, and with friendship comes peace.²³

Finally, I would like to express not only my sincerest thanks to the classmates and their spouses who were willing to share their Peace Corps experiences in this book, but also my heartfelt gratitude to them and to the other RPCV classmates and spouses for their combined one hundred–plus years of volunteer service in the cause of world peace so many years ago.²⁴

—Charles A. (Chuck) Hobbie ’67²⁵

Dartmouth Class of 1967 Peace Corps Volunteers 1967–2010

²⁶

All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days, nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

—President John F. Kennedy, January 20, 1961²⁹

CHAPTER 1

JAY BOEKELHEIDE

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Peace Corps Chad 1967–69

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MY PEACE CORPS EXPERIENCE STARTED one evening at Dartmouth just before Christmas of 1966, when I slipped on ice outside the library and fractured my right ankle. I spent a few days on my back in the hospital and then wore a cast. In the spring I was pronounced healed. But I wasn’t. It hurt to walk—a lot. I complained. In response to my complaints, the doctor prescribed Valium under the assumption that the pain was in my head. The Valium actually helped—my ankle still hurt, but I didn’t care—but when the prescription ran out, I abruptly found myself in a rage, which lasted the best part of a month, and my ankle still hurt. So I limped on.

After graduation I spent the early part of the summer at my parents’ house with my younger brothers. The local state college had a practice ski jump hill covered with broken almond shells. I had a 50 cc bike, and while playing with my brothers, I attempted to ride up the ski jump hill from the bottom. I didn’t make it. I jumped off, landed wrong, broke the fibrous liaison that had fooled the orthopedic doctors, and landed back in a new hospital bed, soon after my first and only wonderful experience with injected morphine. This time I got a screw to hold things together.

While recovering I received a letter announcing that my application to the Peace Corps had been accepted. I had asked for possible destinations based on where I imagined it would be fun to go. I remember asking for Jamaica or Nepal. The letter did tell me where I was going, but the notification turned out to be, on the one hand, literally a puzzle and, on the other, a premonition of things to come. Whoever had typed the letter had typed most of it one row too high or too low on the keyboard; I don’t remember which. So to find out where I was going, I had to get one of my brothers to bring a portable typewriter to my hospital bed so I could transpose letters to figure out my destination.

The letter said something like this: Since you asked to go to Nepal, we assigned you to Andhra Pradesh in India. But the state of Andhra Pradesh just had an election, and the party aligned with the Chinese Communists won, so that won’t work. But since you chose to go to a desert —I didn’t— we’ve decided to send you to the Sahara. To Chad, actually, for a program called Chad 2.

Okay, I thought, so be it. Actually, I didn’t care. I just wanted out of the hospital bed. This whole chain of events couldn’t have been a better prologue to my career in the Peace Corps.

I was told to report to a training center in Leland, Louisiana, a month or so later. I got my cast off, and my ankle felt pretty good, so I went. I stayed for a day or so with a friend who was starting law school at Tulane and then made my way somehow to Leland, approximately thirty miles from Baton Rouge.

The training camp was set among soybean fields in rural northern Louisiana and had been derelict for years—broken windows, no toilets, fire ants, no functioning kitchens, and so on. It had been developed as an educational center for African American soldiers returning from the Korean War