Photos from Ray Smith

     It was wonderful to get in touch with Ray Smith.  And it turns out that Ray has photos as well as other materials from both training and his time in Sierra Leone.  He has been busy digitalizing them and then editing to recover some of the color, and has generously sent them to me on a DVD.  The photos are below.  I'll enter the names of folks as best I can, and you can correct me when you spot a mistake.  (If anyone else out there has photos and is willing to share them, I'll be glad to post them here.)    - Tony

? and Jerry Mills

Our soccer team

Char Roycht and Bill Whitten

Joe Bass, Char, and Bob Gross, Geoff Campbell, and Carole Zavoral

Char boarding bus

Hap Cawood, Bob Rawson, Jerry Davis, and Ray Smith

Burke Casari and Carole Zavoral

Dave Rieder

Bill Wooten, Hap Cawood, Carole Zavoral, ?, Ray Smith, Joe Bass, Judy Salisbury, Geoff Campbell, Dave Rieder (in red shirt)

John Benanti, Dave Sherwood, Sally Stahlbrodt

Bill Whitten

Clara Rathjens

Marvin Hanson, Dave Rieder, Mary Mullin, Geoff and Pat Campbell, Pat Preciado, Dave Frame

Tony Russell, ?, Dave Sherwood, Paul Chantrey, Jack Johnston, Wilbur Mellema, Bob Hopkins,  Bob Rawson, and Coach Miller before our game with "Peru"

John Benanti, Wilbur Mellema, Dr. George Bond (Project Coordinator), Bob Rawson, and Dr. Willard Hogan

Dave Rieder, Bob Rawson, and Clarence Lee, among others

Gerry Davis, Hap Cawood, John Smith, Bill Whitten, Coach Miller, Dave Frame, Joe Bass, Bob Hopkins, John Benanti?, Joe Gbujama, Rufus Stevenson

Stella Ferguson, Gini Maulfair, Gary Sandison, Celestine Labor, Burke Casari, Frances Williams

Hap Cawood

Ray Smith

Hap Cawood's Peace Corps Diary

Following are calendar-skipping snippets from my Peace Corps diary that provide some time-event markers and that mention members of our larger group, primarily when we were in Freetown. Unfortunately, in many instances I wrote down only single names (forgive any misspellings) of other PCVs and folks who associated with us. It’s not literature, but perhaps it will jog a memory or two.— Hap

1962

June 18, 1962

At New York City bus station met J. Mills, Campbells, and Maureen on ride to New Paltz. Walked with Bill Prosch and Jerry Davis from stop to Scudder Hall. Roommate: Davis. Had dinner and speeches, then dance.

 July 4, 1962

Picnic at New Paltz College Camp with large student-faculty crowd.

August 14, 1962

Accepted as a Volunteer—had come in from mountain camp…Returned to camp—hiked to beaver dam; bathed in falls.

August 17, 1962

Easy day at College Camp—went to rocks with Ray Smith; rained. Cocktail party and graduation.

This quick trip through training takes us to the end of our time at New Paltz.  To read Hap's diary entries from Sierra Leone, click on "Hap's Diary" under "Pages" on the right hand side of the blog.

Staff of Catholic Teachers Training College in Bo

1962

This is the Bo Teacher Training College staff photo, provided by Paul Chantrey.   In the first row are: Father Walsh, Irish priest; Principal, Father O’ Toole;  and Father Sullivan, Irish priest.

  In the second row are a Sierra Leonean instructor;  Sean Farren, Irish vol.;  Tom Maxwell, Irish vol.; and a Sierra Leonean instructor.  

In the third row are Dave Williams, PCV-SLII;  Paul Chantrey, PCV-SLII; Rex Jarrell, PCV-SLI; and Al McIver, PCV-SLI.

     This is in front of the main entrance of the school building.  Other buildings in the compound included the priests' house, a recreation/cafeteria building, numerous dorms, and an elementary school with individual classroom buildings.

"Pioneers" in The Talk of the Town

Sometimes I wonder where I was when all of these things were going on!  Paul Chantrey sent the photo below with a note that it was taken for a New Yorker article about our training group, but was not used in the article.  I have no recollection of that event, so I searched the New Yorker archives online.  It turned out to be a "Talk of the Town" item by Lillian Ross that ran in the June 30, 1962 issue.  A subscription is required to read the full text, but here is the abstract they provide:


Talk story about Harris L. Wofford, Jr. Special Representative for the Peace Corps for Africa. Writer met Mr. Wofford in front of the new local Peace Corps office, a store front on E. 42 St. and they drove to New Paltz, N.Y. to greet five dozen recent volunteers for the Teachers for Sierra Leone Peace Corps Project. Mr. W. had just resigned as Special Assistant to Pres. Kennedy on the Peace Corps & on Civil Rights. The recruits are to be trained at the State Univ. College in New Paltz. Mr. W. is moving, with his family, to Addis Abbaba, in August. In his new job he'll be administrator of the Ethiopian program as well as representative for Peace Corps work in all the other African nations. He's campaigning to recruit 300 teachers for the secondary schools of Ethiopa. Of the new, above-mentioned recruits it is hoped that 40 or 50 teachers will be sent to Sierra Leone. The Peace Corps is only a year old and they have 1000 volunteers working now, in 14 countries; minimum age 18; maximum age unlimited. They'll have 2000 in 27 countries by Sept. and 5000 in 1963. A program has been launched to recruit lawyers. The. No. 1 investment in Africa is in education. By doubling the secondary-school populations this year, they'll develop hundreds of college graduates qualified to teach school in Africa. Tells the names of some of the recruits in New Paltz and Mr. Wofford's welcoming speech.

Here is a link to the online abstract: http://www.newyorker.com/archive/1962/06/30/1962_06_30_024_TNY_CARDS_000271246

Photo by New Yorker.  Shown are Margaret Berry, Judy Salisbury, Ed Berry, Mary Mullin, Paul Chantrey, and Anne Burdick

Vassar photo 2 sent by Paul Chantrey

Vassar trip.  Shown are Maureen Bonfield and Tony Russell in foreground, Bob Rawson (back to camera), Jack Johnson, Caroline Brown,  and Sally Stahlbrodt

Vassar photo 1 sent by Paul Chantrey

Vassar trip.  Shown are Bob Rawson, Leilani Marsh, Kyle Ogden, Tony Russell, Maureen Bonfield, Jim Murphy, Sally Stahlbrodt, Caroline Brown, Judy Salisbury

Program for pregnant women in Sierra Leone

There is an interesting article on the Doctors Without Borders website about services they are providing to pregnant women (and on through birth and postnatal care) in two districts of Sierra Leone.  It has several photos taken at their Jimmi Bagbo clinic.  A link to the article is given under "Links" on the right side of the blog, if you'd like to take a look at it.  Just double click on the link and it will take you directly to the article.

Sargent Shriver's Visit

      Note:  This article by Hap Cawood originally appeared in the Dayton Daily News, January 23, 2011.

For those of us fortunate enough to have served in the Peace Corps in its earliest days, Sargent Shriver’s legacy is personal.

I got to meet him on April 15, 1963, nine months into my service as a Peace Corps teacher in Sierra Leone. Shriver was flying around West Africa in a two-engine prop plane that could land in remote places where we Peace Corps Volunteers (PCVs) worked. We had been invited to meet him at Sierra Leone’s little airport, but I was the only PCV able to get there to join the ambassador and Peace Corps officials to greet him. (In those weeks I was supervising workers in Sierra Leone’s first census, and my region included the airport.)

The times were still golden, with Kennedy alive, five months after the Cuban Missile Crisis that caused us to wonder how we might get home and what would be left of it, and seven months before Lee Harvey Oswald would nearly rip our hearts out.

Shriver’s presence was palpably uplifting, but what touched me most was what happened on the ferry we took to the capital, Freetown. I went to the front of the ferry so he could talk with the officials, but he shortly left them to come to me, asking me about my work and the morale of the group.

That evening we PCVs attended a reception for Shriver. He gave us an overview, and then we just milled around and talked casually. One PCV called him "Chief," which I thought was a good balance between too-familiar "Sarge" and too-formal "Mr. Shriver." On a balcony porch one or two of us at a time would joke with him, maybe chat about something small, then ask him this and that about JFK, and he would share little inside stories and glimpses. I had to concentrate to grasp the subtle enormity of this. Somehow we had gotten into the room with American history, and it was an embracing and friendly place.

Shriver said that on his way out of the country, he would fly up to see us and the folks thereabouts. Four or five of us PCVs came in our Jeeps. For the Sierra Leoneans, especially, it was a big event having an airplane land on a remote, grassy field. After landing, Shriver asked me for tips. I suggested some greetings and comments in Temne, whispering them to him a phrase at a time. I thought, here I am, a little Kentucky mountain boy on the far side of the world, telling the President’s brother-in-law, a national power in his own right, what to say; how humble and kind this remarkable man is.  

When I returned from Sierra Leone in 1964, I stopped by the Peace Corps headquarters before heading to Indiana University to help train a new Peace Corps contingent. When the elevator door opened, there was Shriver, between two assistants carrying briefcases, heading out. He was just as friendly as he had been in the bush.

For years afterward, I had to track him in black and white, on TV, taking over President Johnson's War on Poverty, then in hearings fighting against the tear-down of his work by the drain of the Vietnam War and the obstructionist work of senators like John Stennis who resented and demanded the defunding of the successful program empowerment of the black and poor in Mississippi. But Shriver withstood the test of time.

I last saw him at the Peace Corps’ 25^th anniversary celebration where he talked to hundreds of us at the amphitheater in Arlington Cemetery. On Sept. 23-24 I will be back in Washington for the 50^th anniversary, but mostly to see the group with whom I trained and worked. We are less interested in the big events than in being together.

I guarantee you that we won’t be talking about what we accomplished. We will reminisce about the great adventure we had when were young—what President John F. Kennedy and Sargent Shriver gave us: the opportunity to appreciate and learn from a kind and generous people; the chance to represent and share in small ways the best values of the nation we love with heart and soul; and to have been able to do it in the empowering shadow of two men who radiated that spirit in a breadth and depth impossible even now to measure.