Tom's Musings

This is 1944, probably in the Fall given how we are all dressed. I am the little shit squeezed between my father, Jeremiah Thomas Corbett, and my mother, Jane Ann (Spiglanin) Corbett. It was considered a mixed marriage in those days … the joining together of members from the Polish and Irish tribes in Worcester Mass. They probably still liked each other in these early days, their youth and hopes had yet to be dashed by a harsh reality and lost dreams. That would come later, as did the bitterness.

I cannot imagine that my presence in their lives was anything else than a serious inconvenience. They were players in their youth, lovers of gambling and night-clubs, and of drinking with friends. I would be pawned off on my grandmother who lived in the 3rd floor tenement while we occupied the first floor flat of the ubiquitous three story residential buildings that populated Worcester Mass. I liked my grandmother. She was straight out of central casting, plump and gey haired and matronly. Besides, she made the best eggnoggs imaginable.

I was also schlepped to the nearby tenements of two aunts who would be stuck taking care of yours truly. Such a joy I was 😊. In any case, I would be amused later in life by the arguments in the family about who really raised me … my mother’s sister or my dad’s sister. It was inconceivable to me that rational adults wanted to take credit for such a questionable accomplishment 😅. But there you have it.

When no one could be persuaded to look after me, I do recall being taken (reluctantly) to the homes or apartments of friends where my folks and their friends would gather for evenings of good cheer and poker. The drinks would flow among the adults, the laughter was abundant, yet I never had trouble falling asleep among the coats that had been piled on a spare bed. To this day, I can nap amidst total chaos. Napping is my personal strength.

One image survives from my earliest memories. Each morning, I would find mom sitting in her robe while smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer as she argued with one of her sisters on the phone. (Note: she mostly worked evenings serving drinks in taverns and night clubs.) She loved her siblings, but they fought like cats and dogs. I cannot imagine my mother denying herself cigarettes and beer during her pregnancy with me, even if the dangers were known in the early 1940s. How I was not born severely damaged is a mystery. Then again, perhaps I was … which would explain a lot about how I turned out.

Mostly, like all children of that era, I was left to my own devices. I would be thrown out of the house early and told not to return until the streetlights came on. If it rained, my mother had a favorite song … rain, rain, go away, Tommy wants to go out and play. This meant that she hoped the rain would stop so she could once again cast me out onto the streets. There, I could maraud throughout the byways and parks of Vernon Hill with a bunch of other mischievous rascals. A few years later, after I took up golf with a few ancient clubs given to me by an uncle, I would walk miles to the nearest golf club. There, I would whack the ball around the course all day (it cost one buck) before hiking all the way home before the sun set. Had I been kidnapped, the miscreants would have been in Canada well before anyone knew I was missing. Apparently, not even the perverts and pedophiles wanted me 🙄. And so, for better or worse, I was spared.

Here I am with my dad. The year is probably 1947 or 1948. He almost looks happy to be with me, actually appearing as if fatherhood was a good thing in his life. But that is not my early, though surely questionable, memory. No, my emotional sense is that I was little more than an inconvenience to him in the early years. He was fastidious while I presented him with so many messy demands and challenges. Later, that would change, but not for a number of years.

As a young man, he was a bon vivant. He had worked in the bingo circuit when it was a legal form of gambling and big business. He was handsome and likely a draw for the young ladies. He also skirted on the shady sides of life. Among his more risky ventures was an illegal football pool run by a partner and he. One day (as I was told by several sources) a local sportscaster correctly selected all the winners for that weekend’s chosen college games. That skewed the betting. He and his partner didn’t have the money that was owed to all the winners. After his tribe (the Irish) wouldn’t help, dad went to the Italians. That was the end of his semi-gangster career.

By the time I really got to know him, he was doing factory work. I’ve always wondered why he gave up on his exciting, youthful life. Did I have something to do with that? Oh, the guilt. In any case, over time their marriage was one of faded dreams and mutual recriminations. There was little love in the household.

Gradually, though, I sensed my dad spent more time focusing on me, certainly by the time I played Little League ball. When I matriculated at St. John’s Prep, a rather elite Catholic school, he became active in the school’s men’s association. He eventually became president of the Pioneer Club (as it was known) even though he was blue collared worker while many of the other dad’s were white-collar professionals with college educations.

I suspect I disappointed my dad in many ways. He was a good amateur artist. He tried to encourage me in that direction, but it never took. He had hoped I might excel athletically, but I did nothing in that arena after entering high school. He never said anything, but I had this ominous sense that I failed him time and again. That feeling of shame never disappeared.

Eventually, though, he responded to me being in his life, taking some pride in my ability to avoid juvenile detention, expecially as I began to excel academically, though I was a late and unexpected bloomer in that regard. Eventually, though, his son who was best marked by many failures and shortcomings early on, began to look as if he might excel in life. It was a matter of pride and satisfaction to dad that his one and only offspring eventually got a Ph.D. and earned a position at a top research university. I think, in a way, I achieved goals well beyond his own reach … at least in his own mind.

As I think about him, it strikes me that he was likely a brilliant man, perhaps lacking in confidence and held down by circumstances. No matter, I absorbed a lot from him … his cynical, yet dry, wit along with his story-telling ability above all. I thank him for those gifts. They helped me survive adulthood with remarkably few real talents and skills. Do, thanks dad.

I mentioned being a fan of the early episodes of The Big Bang Theory. I loved the Sheldon Cooper character largely because he resembled a number of the cloistered academics I knew in real life, even if his traits were a bit exaggerated. In a favorite series moment, his colleagues notice Sheldon giggling for no apparent reason as the group is enjoying lunch. They prompt him to explain which he does as follows: he has dialogues in his head that he describes as sparkling and well above the usual banter he has in real life.

I’m no brainiac like the Sheldon Cooper character. Still, I must admit that some of the most stimulating discussions I have are with myself. No, I don’t actually talk to myself (most days at least), but I do routinely engage in internal and silent dialogues that strike me as remarkably insightful and even provocative. And yes, I realize that therapy might help.

It hit me that these internal explorations might make decent blogs … at least a few of them might. Let’s try and see. When and if I share one in the future, I’ll call it The Occasional Conundrum followed by the date … like I did with this post. What follows is a typical internal dialogue:

… When I want to shut off my brain, I watch sports (which is rapidly losing favor with me as even college athletes have become professional hired guns) or true crime shows. I’m not sure why I favor the latter unless it is because I learn something from exploring the depths of human depravity. To explore the darker side of humanity, crime and politics are always good bets. However, politics simply are too horrific, even for a depraved pervert like me. I’m also taken with the sophistication of recent crime detection technologies and the extent to which officers of the law will go to identify the miscreant of some dastardly deed and secure some closure for the victim’s loved ones. Most of these shows end with a feel-good triumph of righteous justice. It is the devotion of the forces of law and order to securing justice in some cases that caught my attention earlier this week.

In a recent show, the body of a female is discovered buried in a remote area in 1977. The case remains a who-done-it for many, many years until an informant contacts authorities and leads them to the killer. You would think … case closed. Justice, though delayed, done.

But no! One issue remains unresolved while available technologies have improved. Even though the killer has been caught, the deceased has never been identified. The killing was a random act, so even the evil miscreant had no idea who she was. The remainder of this program centered upon the search for the victim’s identity. We are now talking some three plus decades after the event despite searching diligently for years after the murder to discover who she was.

A cold case detective eventually took up this task and worked with the latest scientific methods to identify the girl (who turned out to be a teen runaway). Through dauntless, tireless, and costly efforts employing the latest DNA technologies and a considerable amount of manpower, he was successful. The show ended on a note of satisfaction when the few remaining kin got to know what happened to this person they barely remember from some four decades earlier.

As I’m noodling this story later, I’m thinking … that’s nice. Still, I’m troubled. Now, I know of many other crime stories where the search for the victim’s remains becomes more complex and expensive than the search for the guilty party or parties themselves. In many instances, this part of the mystery is more convoluted and demands more resources than all else combined.

Perhaps I’m callous. However, after a reasonable point, the resources expended on finding decomposed remains (often little more than a few bones) to return to a family seems rather pointless to my cold, calculating soul. There is an important opportunity cost in all this. Could we not use that energy and sunk resources more profitably … improving public safety or crime prevention or even victim compensation in the first instance. Some of the searches done in the more difficult cases boggle the imagination, involving hundreds of people and months upon months of time and effort … all for what’s strikes me as little more than a symbolic result.

And so, in my head, I debate whether these extraordinary human and institutional efforts make sense. We talk about scarce resources all the time. And yet, in some cases, we spend remarkably little time thinking through how we expend some of those resources or how we might redirect them to more worthwhile ends.

But there is a larger issue here, at least I think there is 🙄. As human animals, we are more easily attracted to individual tragedies than more abstract dilemmas and challenges. Whole communities respond to a missing child with hundreds of volunteers spending hours slogging through fields and woods often in hopeless searches. Or look at the enormous effort expended to rescue a child trapped in a well, with the whole country seemingly fixed upon this singular tragedy. In the end, we applaud these heroic community efforts.

And yet, we know that untold numbers of children are facing horrific situations absent any attention at all. Many are undernourished, abused physically or emotionally, neglected, or exposed to depraved and drug-addled lifestyles. Out of sight, and out of mind, the lives of these children are diminished inexorably on a daily basis. Any help directed their way comes way too late in the process. In short, we respond to micro-tragedies but ignore macro-level challenges that impact far more victims. We even resist imposing a few more taxes on the uber-affluent to support services for vulnerable children. After all, those extra taxes might force the 1 percent to make a difficult decision … should their next luxury car be a Ferrari or a Lamborghini or (God forbid) merely a Lexus.

Something to consider at least.

I ran across a video of a guy talking about the interconnection between education and incarceration. In rapid fire succession he noted that 2 out of 3 kids who cannot read proficiently at a 4th grade level end up in jail, prison, or on welfare; some 80 percent plus of all teens who go through the juvenile justice system are functionally illiterate; some 70 percent of all inmates today cannot read above a 4th grade level: and a teen daughter is some 6 times more likely to become pregnant if she cannot read at a 4th grade level. The bottom line is this, if you are cognitively unprepared or undeveloped for the modern world, you are likely to fall by the wayside and in a big way.

Some of you will argue that Donald Trump did rather well with a reading and speaking capability estimated to be at the 5th grade level. Thus, education may not be all that critical. But he is not a good example. After all, he started out with $400 million plus from his dad (back when that was real money) and still managed to stumble into a half-dozen or so bankruptcies. He even bankrupted a casino, which is extremely hard to do. Currently, he is running one more time for the Presidency primarily, many speculate, to avoid jail time for the first set of felonies on which he has been convicted. Other convictions are likely to follow. Most poor persons of color cannot inherit huge fortunes nor borrow large sums from Russia to stay afloat. They make it or break on their own. Sadly, too many are ensnared in our nefarious, Byzantine, and failed systems … especially the so-called justice system.

I can recall one of the hundreds of brown-bags I attended while working at the University. The presenter over- viewed her research on the criminal justice system. She looked at each key decision point in the system from issuing a warrant to arrest, arraignment, negotiations, sentencing, release, parole, and reincarnation. At every such point, people of color fared worse. It was as if there was some form of systemic adverse racial treatment operated here. How shocking! How utterly predictable!

Next I read The Many Lives of Mama Love. This memoir was written by Lara Love Hardin, a well educated white women who ran afoul of our broken justice system as a result of going astray with drugs early in life. She made it back to a full life as a successful and best-selling author as well as a CEO of her own literary agency. But her time being ensnared in the tentacles of our justice system trapped her in the depths of despair, almost breaking her. At her worst moment, it led her to the precipice of despair and suicide. One book she later co-authored was about a man who spent almost three decades on Alabama’s death row before he was exonerated. How many innocent people are murdered unjustly in the so-called name of justice.

The tragedy of our criminal justice system is reflected in the fact that we have more of our citizens incarcerated in jails and prisons than anyone else. Our 2 million plus prisoners represent one-quarter of the world’s total, even though our proportion of the globe’s population is about 7 percent of the total. Our per-capita rate of individuals behind bars was 629 per 100,000 people in 2021 (according to the World Prison Brief) … the highest among civilized nations by far. At the least, this is a costly failure. At one point, the cost of being incarcerated in a maximum security slammer rivaled that of financing a Harvard education, though schooling may have shot ahead in recent years. Nevertheless, stuffing people in cages takes a lot of money.

I’ve oft wondered why this is so … why do we have so much crime as suggested by our numbers living in cages? Why are there so many who apparently have failed the most basic test of citizenship by not playing by the rules? Perhaps it has something to do with our hyper-inequality of income, wealth, and opportunity. Money and its obsequious display are worshipped here at the same time as societies’ goodies are redistributed more and more toward the top of the pyramid. Worse, the ability of those at the bottom to ascend the socio-econonic ladder has become increasingly more difficult as the cost of upward mobility (e.g. good educations) exceed available resources for too many youth. Want the American dream, I say often, go to a Scandinavian country.

But let’s back away from the big explanations for a moment. Let’s forget about bothersome facts such as living in a society that encourages having more guns than people out on our streets. Or let’s not dwell on the systemic failing of American culture that favors punishment over habilitation to motivate proper behavior. We have an unstated ethos that people are essentially evil (and some undoubtedly are) and that only the harshest treatment of real and suspected miscreants can secure the safety of society. Thus, we have a long history of employing fear and even state-sanctioned killing to ensure acceptable behaviors. Yet, homicides and criminality often are highest in those states with the harshest laws based on a retributional perspective of human nature.

Moreover, our culture stresses a virulent form of individualism where all are expected to achieve success (or overcome adversity) on their own. It is a weakness to seek help from the government, and it is a drain on so-called scarce resources. We seem less bothered that others who are more fortunate can buy success or evade the consequences of bad choices if, of course, they can pay for those things on their own. The concept of public goods (like access to medical care and higher education and good legal representation) are undeveloped in this land of opportunity.

We seem to easily forget that investments in the young, starting with universal pre-natal care, quality child care, excellent early education for all, and prevention of problems is much better than harsh interventions after the issues are fully manifest in counter-productive behaviors. In consequence, we are beginning to lose the global competitive race because we are not investing fully in the next generation. We once had the premier education system in the world. Now, we are diverting resources from such critical needs under the absurd assumption that the top of the economic pyramid is not getting enough of the economic pie. The hard right argues we should divert even more from public needs to further augment the wellbeing of the uber wealthy. Hell, the share of the pie going to the 1 percent has gone from about 10 percent of the total to about 25 percent since the start of Reaganomics. This tectonic redistribution of resources represents a fundamental shift in our culture and our values … and not in a good direction.

Some of our failings might well be attributed to specific public decisions (discrete policies). These are things more easily righted. For example, after the Voting Rights legislation of the 1960s resulted in Black Americans exercising their franchise rights in larger numbers, a scheme (purportedly initiated in the Nixon White House) of voter suppression emerged. Through tacit understandings, the judicial system found ways to increase the penalties and legal punishments on drug use that disproportionately impacted communities of color. Though most drugs found their ways into White communities (that’s where the money was), most who were caught up in the system were not White. And guess what, felons could not vote. How convenient for the traditional holders of power … those at the bottom were disenfranchised in yet another way. That is a conscious and systemic societal failure.

Once an individual is in that system, the rules and protocols make it near impossible to escape. Lara Love Hardin, author of Mama Loves, was the right color, was very talented, and already had an education before she ran afoul of the system. Yet, she almost buckled in the face of the insane and contradictory demands she faced. On parole, she faced a bewildering array of competing and conflicting demands among institutional silos operating in isolated ways though theoretically functioning within the same system.

It was as if no one understood that there was no coherent system nor cared about those caught up in it. Lara desperately tried to be in two or three places at the same time to please her parol officers, the criminal court, and the family court. She lived in constant fear of going back to jail or losing custody of her youngest child, or both. And there seemed to be no one to help nor help her make sense of the bizarre world in which she was trapped.

Everyone in the system wanted to maximize their success no matter the overall cost. For example, DAs wanted to clear cases. So, they piled on unsolved crimes to available criminals awaiting adjudication while promising even lighter sentences if they went along with this scam. That helped them look better while not serving justice one whit. Prisons were busting at the seams at the same time that for-profit incarceration models made it economically advantageous to maximize prison populations, at least in some cases. Looking from the outside, it is a system absent an overall purpose and rationale. It resembles more closely a complex array of separately moving parts operating from decidedly distinct purposes and cultures.

Many years ago, during my professional career, my colleague (Jennifer Noyes, now right hand person to the University of Wisconsin Chancellor) and I spent a fair amount of time working with human service programs. In particular, we oft worked with welfare programs as they shifted from handing out money to moving vulnerable persons into employment and productive roles in society. Officials running these systems initially wandered about in confusion and disarray during this period of change.

As we consulted with a number of them across the country, we developed what we called the line-of-sight exercise. We would walk through the client’s experience in the current system (from the customer’s perspective), continuously asking officials what they really wanted to accomplish at each key point. Discrepancies between intent and actuality oft led to dramatic rearrangements in responsibilities, roles, and structures. Most of all, it became apparent that new cultures were required. We saw some amazing changes … new collaborative arrangements among what had been competing (or at least unaligned) systems. We put together welfare-work models that became inspirations around the country and even internationally.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could do that on a larger scale. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could reimagine the justice system (or non-system) from the viewpoint of those caught up in it. Even better, how about doing a form of line-of-sight exercise for our American society? Perhaps we just might reimagine the kind of world we want, not the one we have.

Just imagine that.

As homo sapiens, we are vulnerable to overstating our ability to comprehend the world about us. Some of that hubris stems from our past record of success in unraveling numerous opaque physical laws. I am yet astounded by scientific feats that permit us to send a spacecraft on a multi-year mission to hit a small sphere traveling through space at thousands of miles per hour. Such feats of technical accomplishment boggle my mind, which is not difficult to do given that I struggled mightily with high school algebra.

To my mind, there are two dimensions of reality where our understanding of how the world operates remains stubbornly illusory. One is the subatomic dimension where strange phenomenon and inexplicable happenings yet surprise, and occasionally confound, the best of physicists. The other is at the societal level where social scientists struggle to explain and predict behaviors (both macro and micro) with at best marginal success. There may be third dimension that lies beyond the scope of our known universe of some 93 billion light years across and which contains some 2 trillion galaxies, each comprising billions upon billions of stars. The very concept of such a vast world remains meta-physical in character … at least to me.

I’m familiar with some of the hard questions addressed by social sciencists, having banged my head against some of them during my career. So, I was taken by a book I recently read for one of my three book clubs (yes, I need to get a life). It is titled Fluke and was written by Brian Klaas. I found his work a compelling read for the best reason of all … his thesis conforms to my own priors.

Klaas argues that life at the macro or societal level, unlike complex technical questions, are much harder to understand. Why? Basically, outcomes are the result of a virtually infinite number of interacting events that cascade foward in complex ways because of human predilection and immeasurable uncertainties. Looking for easy causal chains in such a chaotic environment is a fools errand.

His first vignette is instructive. In 1945, Secretary of War Henry Stimson was involved in selecting the first Japanese target on which to drop an atomic bomb. At the top of the list given the committee was Kyoto, the former imperial Capital, now a major arms center for the Japanese military. Stimson refused to even consider this city. The other members of the committee were befuddled. It met ALL the selection criteria, the clear favorite. Why not Kyoto?

It turned out that Stimson and his then new bride had honeymooned in that very city some two decades earlier, when the cherry blossoms 🌸 were in bloom. He could not bear the thought of destroying a city toward which he felt such a sentimental attachment. Kyoto was thus spared, Hiroshima was not. On the second mission, the city of Nokura was the target. But when the bomber arrived over the site, an unexpected cloud cover was present. It appeared temporary, but the crew, fearing they were getting low on fuel, moved on to the back-up site of Nagasaki. On such idiosyncratic factors were the fates of thousands of lives determined. For many years, there was a common phrase in Japan … the luck of a Kokuran. This was the equivalent of the luck of the Irish.

We all have our favorite vignettes. Some 17 days before his first inauguration, a disgruntled immigrant, Giuseppe Zangara, attempted to assassinate FDR in Miami. Unfortunately for him, Anton Cermak, then mayor of Chicago, leaned into the open air car of the President elect at that moment, thus throwing Zangara’s aim off. Cermak died and five others wounded while Roosevelt lived to bring the country out of the depression, to successfully fight totalitarianism in Europe and the Far East, and to forge the U.S. into a global superpower. Had Roosevelt perished that evening, John Nance Garner would have held our highest office during this critical time. A staunch conservative and racist, this man was no FDR by a long shot. America (and the world) would not likely have fared so well (comparatively speaking). Perhaps we would all be speaking German now.

Then again, we have an incident during the height of the Cold War that could have altered history. It was 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The U.S. Navy had set up a quarantine line around the island to keep nuclear weapons from being operationalized some 90 miles from the American shoreline. A Russian sub had violated the quarantine line. Depth charges were dropped to get the sub to leave or to surface. Those on board this vessel were operating in 120-degree heat and had lost contact with the other Russian ships. They thought that, in all liklihood, World War III had started. The officers on board were poised to launch their on-board nuclear missiles in retaliation for what they thought was all our war.

In that moment, the world stood a breath away from nuclear disaster. Protocol demanded that 3 senior officers unanimously agree to launch their atomic weapons… the ship captain, the chief political officer on board, and the sub fleet commander (who by fate was on board this vessel). Two decided to launch. One held out. That single (and lonely) decision stood between the peaceful resolution that resulted and an unspeakable tragedy. On such thin threads is history held together.

Or take the time longer ago that the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was on a state visit to Sarajevo in the summer or 1914. Bosnian independence fighters were out to assassinate the autocrat-in-waiting. As Ferdinand and his wife were driven through crowded streets, a bomb was thrown at his car. Several bystanders were wounded, but the principles escaped unharmed. Soon, the Archduke impulsively decided to visit the hospital where the wounded were being treated. At this point, another providential accident of history unfolded. The driver of the car took a wrong turn, then stalled as he attempted to redress his error. Another Bosnian terrorist (Gavrilo Princip) had been sitting glumly at an outdoor cafe, believing that he and his comrades had failed in their mission. Then he looked up and, to his utter astonishment, sat his target just a few feet away in a stalled automobile. He calmly stood and fired, killing both the Archduke and his wife.

On this act, World War I unfolded. For many, this War and the Second World War were considered part of a single cataclysmic event that transformed our world. Monarchical dynasties disappeared (or were diminished in stature) as the world evolved into a bipolar contest between two competing philosophies. The price for all this change was untold suffering and some 70 to 100 million deaths (depending on how you count things). Of course, all of this may have unfolded had the Archduke’s driver not made a wrong turn, but who knows. Perhaps what happens is inevitable or nothing is inevitable.

When I was doing policy, I watched my colleagues try to find certainty in a highly uncertain world. They did gold standard experiments (random assignment methods), did sophisticated observational studies on large data sets, and performed clever investigations where natural experiments were possible (careful to statistically account for confounding noise). All was done in the pursuit of causal relationships. Did A cause B and in what ways.

Yet, understanding collective human behavior remains elusive. Even interpreting the research results is subject to idiosyncratic values and differing normative values. Social science is much harder than the so-called ‘hard’ sciences. I recall one ‘brown bag’ (of the hundreds I attended). The presenter offered dozens of research results on the crowd-out effect of expanding government run and financed health care options. That is, how many families would abandon private insurance in the face of a public alternative. The estimates apparently ranged from a 0 substitution estimate to something on the order of 75 percent. I can just imagine the response of public officials to such uncertain and inconclusive results.

My good friends in the dismal science (economists) provided me with the best laughs of all. They created homo-economus as a way to understand how the world worked. Essentially, complex humans were stripped down to stick figures motivated almost entirely by utilitarian-maximizing motives. In their simple world, money made the world go round. On occasion, I would do some work to show that the real world, and actual human behavior, was far more complex than pavlovian responses to alternate marginal utility regimens. This is why even simple exercises such as projecting public costs and/or take-up rates are often hilariously wrong no matter the sophistication of the models employed. You can’t always anticipate the unanticipatable.

This probably is why I enjoyed my career. It was part science, part craft, and a lot of imaginative feel and analysis. In the end, you knew there would be no final and right answers. Perfect for someone like me. The chase was always preferable to catching the prize.

I was going to move on from the theme of my recent blogs (reminiscences on earlier times). But then I had my most recent visit to the dermatologist yesterday. They dream of customers like me … those who provide a continuous source of high-cost work on patients with good health insurance.

Observing the scar from yesterday’s cutting and hacking at yet another bout of basal cell carcinoma (see photo anove), I mused on what got me to this sad 😔 point in life. Essentially, I am paying the price of the many good times that were enjoyed in my misspent youth. Back in the 1950s and 60s, no one told us that worshipping the sun was a bad thing. In fact, a tan was seen as a sign of robust health back in those days.

In that innocent time, few were aware that an excess exposure to the sun eventually would result in cancerous growths on the surface of one’s body. Nor did anyone mention that some forms of surface carcinoma might spread throughout the body in lethal ways. We are not simply talking aesthetics here. We are possibly talking life and death. However, we were ignorant of such consequences at the time.

So, we spent hours at the beach, on the golf course, and playing all forms of outdoor games. At best, we would rub on baby oil, which did nothing for you except provide a false sense of security. Well, it did serve a useful purpose if you were permitted to rub the oil on a girlfriend’s body, assuming you had one of these rare treasures. I was not so blessed. Hell, I could only dream of being so lucky. 😪

And yet, while I complain about the sins of my youth that ultimately led to numerous trips of late to the horror chamber known as my dermatologist’s office, I have few regrets. I watch today’s youth. They appear totally engrossed in virtual cyber worlds and thus full of crushing anxieties and debillitating neuroses. My peers and I, in hindsight, were much blessed. We came of age in a simpler time where we enjoyed the outdoors and, shockingly, one another’s company (at least for the most part).

On days not in school, my parents would kick me out of the house, usually telling me not to come home until the street lights came on, or supper was ready … especially in the longer days of midsummer 🙃. We would go marauding through the streets while playing endless games of war, or cowboys and Indians, or brave astronauts exploring mysterious worlds, and other like adventurous diversions. Or, we made up simple athletic games that could be played in the streets. One involved a tennis ball and any available steps. By angling the ball correctly off the edge of a designated step, you could simulate a primitive baseball game ⚾️. It was all a matter of using your imagination. If you did that in creative ways, boredom was never an issue.

As we aged a bit, we would migrate to the local park, a 75 acre wonderland of baseball diamonds, tennis courts 🎾, and basketball arenas 🏀. Admittedly, the tennis courts were never employed for their designated purpose. They were perfect for another form of baseball called stick ball, a game played with a tennis ball and sawed off broom stick. There always seemed to be an endless supply of other kids who were available for chance games of athletic competition absent adult supervision. We interacted among ourselves and created our own world of fun. Today, I walk through parks with not a kid is to be seen, unless with an adult or participating in some formal program.

Yes, there was a structured Little League organization but that was a small part of our world. Our parents were not driving us to endless organized and over-regulated events. We were responsible for our own fun 😁 . We relied upon our own ingenuity and worked out patterns of collaboration and dispute resolution without adult oversight. As a result, we advanced rapidly toward adulthood with initiative and some confidence. Okay, it was disheartening to be selected by one of the team captains (the best athletes available) after the kid in the wheelchair but I would eventually recover.

Still later, I took up golf. As I mentioned, my parents drove me nowhere. So, I would heft my clubs over my shoulder and walk several miles to the nearest course, then play 27 (or perhaps 36) holes. And get this, the final mile of the hike to get there was straight uphill. At the end of this sun-drenched day, I would hike back home. You could play all day for one dollar. I could have been kidnapped and taken three states away before anyone would notice I was missing. But no one seemed concerned back then. Perhaps my folks were hoping a miscreant would abscond with me. But they were out of luck. Apparently, no one wanted me.

In my later teens, we might avail ourselves of vehicular transportation. We would borrow someone’s car from their parent (none of us teens had our own car). Then, we would drive to Cape Cod for golf and then some time laying about in the sun, perhaps hoping against hope of coming across some desperate girls with low self-esteem who might not find us totally repulsive. No luck there 😞. It seems that our fortunes on the course and in romance were equally dismal.

If there were a common denominator to all this, we were outside a lot. We were not attached to computer screens or smart phones. Rather, we were exposed to endless hours in the hot sun. My fate as a future dermatologist’s dream was likely set by the time I turned 24, helped along by spending 2 years in a Rajasthani desert in northwestern India. Now, that was a hot and sun-drenched place. My skin damage likely had already been done by my mid-20s.

Yet, all of life is a balance of tough choices. I could have stayed inside more as a kid and young man. But would I have exercised my imagination as much? Would I have developed the interpersonal skills so essential to later adulthood? Would I have toughened myself in endless competitions with my peers? I doubt it. So, maybe a little hacking and cutting in old age is a small price to pay for such a productive and adventurous youth. I tend to think so.

Then again, I am not totally certain of that. I have yet to experience the full measure of the penance I must pay for my exuberant youth. Time will tell if there is more pain to be exacted for my early sins.

No male of my generation came of age without facing the crisis associated with the Vietnam conflict and the military draft. It was an obsession for nearly all of us, dominating our young lives as we came of age during the 1960s and early 1970s. Today’s kids, absent a compulsory military draft, cannot fully appreciate the angst we endured back in the day. Our young lives appeared to be at risk and, for too many, they were.

Yet, our existential dilemma was about more than mere survival. It imvolved a desperate and fundamental struggle to define our personal core values. For my generation, unlike more recent cohorts if survey results are to be believed, ‘formulating a personal set of beliefs‘ was a critical undertaking in those tumultuous 1960s. We sought to understand what we stood for and for what, if anything, we might be willing to perish.

Like many others born during, or immediately after World War II, I grew up embracing the United States as a beacon of hope and righteousness in a deeply divided world. From the defeat of fascism and state-militarism, totalitarian models that dominated much of Europe and the Far East by the 1930s, there emerged a bipolar world … a seemingly Communist monolith bent on world domination versus a ‘free‘ world led by the new American superpower. It seemed like a titanic struggle to the death.

As a working class Catholic kid, I had fully absorbed the cultural tenets in which I was immersed in those times. We were in the midst of the Cold War. It was a binary world to our minds. You were either on the side of God and truth or you had embraced evil. No neutral ground was permitted, no nuanced interpretation of events could be entertained. I was studying to be a priest in a Catholic Seminary when the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted. I can recall seriously considering leaving my studies to join the military, assuming I would return to my service to God when the good guys had triumphed (if I survived that is).

Within two years or so, my worldview had undergone a shattering transformation. Today, the ‘hard right‘ would argue that I had been indoctrinated after leaving the seminary and matriculating at a secular college. Yet, think as a might about those critical days, I cannot recall any professors or classroom discussions where anyone consciously attempted to shape my perspective. No, the process was way more subtle and based much more on learning to think for myself at long last.

I read widely and voraciously, absorbing all I could from history and current events. More importantly, I thought hard about what I was cognitively ingesting. Outside the classroom, I spent countless hours debating the issues of the day with other razor-sharp students. I found myself in a dizzying and exciting world of internal turmoil and self-discovery.

To my amazement, I uncovered a world that was quite nuanced, not black and white, not simply divided between evil and good. Soon, I became aware of our own domestic national sins, failings such as the system of legal apartheid that oppressed members of minority groups. I began to appreciate our own sins of commission (the overthrow of elected governments in sovereign lands that we simply didn’t like) and sins of ommission (the implicit support of heinous and murderous regimes simply because they supported our point of view).

Still, shedding one’s embedded cultural skin is not easy. In fact, it was torture and replete with self- doubt. I’ve recounted my final break on supporting our Vietnam adventure elsewhere. The final rupture came in a day long debate with a fellow student who, like me, had been awarded a summer undergraduate federal research grant. We spent a full day avoiding our work while hammering away at each other’s position. In the end, I realized he was right and I was wrong, though my process of change was well along by then. Soon, I was the leader of the liberal-left group on campus.

I cannot fully recount the character of the debate back then here. It would take a book, like the one I posted above, Oblique Journeys. Our best and brightest leaders, to my mind at least, made simple-minded errors like conflating the legitimate desire of the Vietnamese for independence with a presumed ideological attachment to the Soviet Bloc. The very notion of a monolithic block was already cracking apart if one were to look closely even then. In retrospect, nothing was more patently ridiculous than the domino theory employed to justify the killing of millions of Asians (if you include the Cambodian killing fields) and some 57,000 Americans. If the Vietnamese were to finally achieve independence after decades of fighting the Japanese, the French, and then the Americans, they were not likely to invade California. Thinking about their struggle objectively, they made our Revolutionary war (analogous to that of a small would-be nation taking on the world’s formost superpower) look like a walk in the park. And how did things turn out? Hell, Americans are now retiring to Vietnam because they like the weather, the people, the cost of living, and the food.

Yet, what does one do when one’s conscience demands that you refrain from participation in a conflict you feel is unjustified, perhaps evil, but are faced with a legal mandate to fight and kill? How far does one go in the name of principle? What price is one prepared to pay? That was the critical question that dominated my life over the next several years. It was a struggle that plagued many of my peers.

The goal for guys like me was to make it to age 26 without being drafted. As it turned out, I came very close to being swept up in the military net during my final year of eligibility. As the months slowly ticked by, I entertained many options. I consulted with lawyers, considered conscientious-objector status, and looked to Canada as an escape. Finally, simply refusing to participate, accepting jail as the necessary price for having humane values and a nimble mind, remained an option. Perhaps it was the most honest option. Such things swirled about me. Just what would I do if ultimately pressed to the limit?

In the end, I made it to my 26th birthday though it was a close-run thing. I did have to take my draft physical in Milwaukee. It proved a hilarious exercise. There was a question somewhere in the process that asked if you had ever been a member of an organization that advocated the overthrow of the U.S. government. I raised my hand and asked if S.D.S. (a leftist group that became radical after I dropped out) counted. The Seargant replied ‘you bet your ass it does, buddy.’ So,I answered yes. At the end, when everyone else was permitted to leave, I was marched to another floor to be grilled by 3 members of military intelligence. That experience did afford me a few moments of humor in an otherwise sobering experience. They would ask … will you fight any and all enemies of the United States? I would gaze at the ceiling as if thinking hard on the question before responding with … I think we need to define ‘enemy.’

Nothing sharpens your philosophical core like facing adversity. And we all made our own decisions in the end. I recall having drinks with a fellow student in grad school during these trying times. He had been in ROTC (and on the football team) at Boston College. Upon graduation, he was off to Nam as a 2nd Lieutenant. He hit the ground wanting to ‘get those Commies.’ Within weeks, he understood the folly of his predicament and of the war more generally. Now, he simply wanted to get his men out alive. His agony ended when he was shot up on patrol wounds that left him with a pronounced limp. He had become a more virulent pacifist than I was.

In Oblique Journeys, I take some of my personal experiences and challenges and turn them into a fictional story of what might have been. Writing a frictional novel based a number of actual personal experiences and on my take of the issues of the day gave me a great way to talk through that critical period of my young life. At the end of the day, such dramatic choices push us, perhaps even make us better. But I wouldn’t wish it on anyone.

Here’s a quick recollection on how I stumbled into my life’s work. Now, one might think that one would give considerable thought to what would do in life. Serious people likely did so. For example, just last night I was chatting with the son-in-law of my good female friend (he and his family are here visiting). He is a Brit (my friends daughter lives with him and their family outside of London). In terms of occupational choice, he is in finance (a hedge-manager type, I believe) and doing quite well. So, I asked him (David) if he had always known that was what he wanted to do and be since he did not grow up in a wealthy family. He smiled and told me he started his own personal bank accounts when he was about 8 or 9 years old. Yup, he knew right from the beginning.

Not yours truly, I was still rolling around in the mud at that age. If I had any longer-term ambitions back then, it was along the lines of being a cowboy, an athlete, or maybe an astronaut. The last avocation was due to the popularity of a TV and book series hero … Tom Corbett (space cadet). Nope, like all else in my aimless life, I bumbled my way into a career by chance … absent any thought or planning. How did that happen? How in God’s name did I manage to avoid debtor’s prison and a life of penurious desperation? As best I can recall, it went something like this 😳.

In college, I had to pick a major. Psychology appeared a good choice, not because I had any particular interest in the topic, I didn’t. But it was the best academic department at Clark University. After all, this is where Freud gave his American lectures and where the American Psychological Association was founded. So, why not! Besides, it did not demand a great deal of math, an academic discipline I avoided like the plague.

I liked the classes in my major well enough. Apparently, I was even tagged as an up and comer in the field since I was awarded a summer NIH grant for promising undergraduates. This award paid me to do original research under the mentorship of a senior faculty member and were rationed out with considerable care … only 4 were awarded each year. How I got one remains another freaking mystery in my life.

But I knew soon enough that psychology was not in my future though I did get as far as asking my advisor where I might pursue a doctorate in the subject. He immediately responded … Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. I thanked him for his input and quickly exited his office. Did he have me confused with some smart kid? Wow, I never would have guessed he was taking hallucinatory drugs.

I kept thinking, being a psychologist? Really? If I were a therapist, I’d have to listen to people whine all day. I’d likely whack them across the face and tell them to buck up. Becoming a researcher or teaching psychology had some merit, though such an ambition seemed beyond my reach. The advantage of that route, though, was that I could avoid people for the most part.

But reality whacked me upside the head during an unfortunate ending to my summer research project. I had to kill off my lab subjects at the termination of the project. Fortunately, they were rodents and not humans. Unfortunately, some were rather large by this point. As I sent one reluctant subject to his heavenly reward by plunging a needle containing some kind of poison into his stomach, he struck back by peeing in my face. That put a definite damper on my psychology research dreams (and on my puss).

Still totally rootless and directionless, I drifted off to the Peace Corps for two years in India. As my tour unfolded, I got a bit serious about the future. I took the SATs (in Delhi) and actually submitted an application for a Master’s program at the University of Wisconsin -Milwaukee. I think I chose the school because that’s where I did most of my PC training. I never looked far beyond my immediate environment. I chose the subject area, Urban Affairs, by mistake. I thought it would help me score with urban women. However, it turned out to be a set of classes in sociology, economics, and political science that focused on cities. But that was okay. It didn’t force me into a pigeon hole and kept my options open.

At the same time, the program did not prepare me for any particular vocational path. If I was confused about what an urban affairs expert did, so was everyone else. So, it took me a while to find remunerative employment when I was finally forced to look for a job. One day, a professor that I had worked with asked me to accompany him to Madison, the State Capital. We met with some state officials on some long-forgotten issue. My unemployment problem came up over lunch, and our state hosts arranged to give me a civil service employment application, which I completed and returned (and then promptly forgot about).

Weeks later, and after a trip East still looking for work, I got a call from my professor friend. He said I had a job interview in Madison the very next day. But when I inquired about the nature of the work, all he knew was a time and a location. I dutifully showed up and discovered it was a 3-person civil service interview for the position of Research Analyst-Social Services. I laughed quietly … I knew little about either research and less about our system of social services. This should be mercifully quick, I thought.

Weeks later, I get a call from the hiring supervisor in the Wisconsin Department of Health & Social Services. I was number 3 on the hiring list. Go figure. So, I head to Madison again while thinking this will at least be a good experience. After all, wouldn’t they hire someone actually qualified to do the job? Stunningly, she called me back to offer me the position. I had just made the 3rd place on the list, the final candidate who could be interviewed by the person making the hiring decision, because someone else had dropped out. This hiring supervisor said the candidates got better the further down the list she went. I told her it was a damn good thing she couldn’t get to number 4, they must have been dynamite. Immediately after that, I was also offered a job back East. I always wondered how my life might have turned out had the sequence been reversed.

In any case, that’s how I got into human services and research. Essentially, it was an accident. After several years (and a couple of promotions), I was asked by my boss to assist a professor from the University of Wisconsin- Madison. He was preparing a large grant proposal for a research project into welfare decision-making that only could be submitted for federal funding through a state agency. Few in the bureaucracy could imagine that an egghead could contribute anything of worth to their program efforts. Thus, they chose a low life like me to work with him. It wasn’t worth the time of anyone important.

For me, it was just another task. I rather enjoyed my State work. Civil service in the 1970s was respected (in Wisconsin). Most of my colleagues were dedicated and sharp. In addition, my agency was involved in several remarkable and revolutionary undertakings, some of which I played a role in initiating. Nevertheless, I got a call at the end of a work day several weeks down the line, long after I had forgotten the professor and his project. To my surprise, it was this very professor asking if I’d consider coming to the University to help him run this logistically complicated project grant he had just been awarded. I thought about it for 5 or 6 seconds before responding … oh hell, why not? I should note that not everyone thought this a smart move … I was giving up a civil service position for something that looked temporary and highly uncertain.

Now, I was at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, specifically at the nationally recognized Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP). By some miracle, I fell into the center of intellectual thinking on human service issues. Of course, without a doctorate, I was at the bottom of the heap. But I soon (more accurately, eventually) got the union card (a Ph.D.) and was on my way to an absolutely fabulous and fulfilling career.

And yet, as I wrote just a few blogs ago, I never embraced fully the academic world. I remained in academia but never embraced the culture. I went with my first love … being a policy wonk who found academia a perfect platform for doing what I loved in the manner that fit my idiosyncratic personality. I thought of myself as a free-lance policy tinkerer and a curious explorer of the toughest social challenges of that era. I also got to pick my own issues, function independently, and work with the best and brightest (in academia and government). It was like being in a candy store where I could indulge my intellect, satisfy my values, and cater to my innate disposition to make a difference in the world. And I got to pass on my ‘wisdom’ to the next generation of students. Perfect.

Somehow, without any sense of direction or planning, I managed to end up in a perfect spot in life. How did I get so fortunate? I’m not sure. Perhaps just going with the flow, not forcing things or overthinking, has merit. Typically, I went with those things that simply felt right. Either that or it was the luck of the Irish.

I’m still musing a bit about the old days. That’s what you do when you become an octogenerian, if you get that far. And there’s the rub. You look back in wonder … just how in the world did I survive? Given my lack of skills and talent, coupled with a propensity to make disastrous decisions, longevity hardly seemed a sure thing. But, as a famous sports announcer always said, that’s why they play the game. You never know the outcome until the contest is completed.

I started out my personal memoir, A Clueless Rebel, with recollections of various moments when I realized that yet another vocational path was beyond my pay range. You know, things like almost slicing my ear off in my junior high shop class. No career for me working with my hands. Or losing money on my paper route, which takes considerable talent. Better scratch business tycoon off my list of potential vocations. Professional athlete? That delusion ended when I actually stole second base one day. Then, I was tagged out when I inexplicably started back to first base assuming the batter MUST have fouled the ball off. After all, how else could I have beaten the throw to second? I still cringe at that memory.

There were many other such disasters. The list of potential future vocations was dwindling to zero. Eventually, by the process of elimination, I concluded I better try learning something in school. My prospects there were hardly bright, but marginally better than the zero which I had assigned to all other possibilities.

I started out my schooling in a run- down elementary school in a struggling part of my hometown … Worcester Massachusetts. I do remember crying when my mother left me on the first day of kindergarten … not exactly an auspicious start in the academy. Even at this point, I showed little promise even though I did excel in the cookies and milk they gave you in kindergarten. I do recall getting unsatisfactory warnings in penmanship and compartment (whatever that is). Somehow, when I entered junior high, I was put in the advanced class (must have been a clerical error). Only 5 boys made the cut while there were some 20 girls. All the girls seemed smarter than me though, in truth, I can not recall any of them by name or image. But I knew where I ranked among the five boys … tied for third place. Only one boy struck me as intellectually slower. That was a sad showing indeed.

Nevertheless, I took the exam for a selective Catholic boys high school. Not sure why I did so since I was hardly salubrious about my prospects. Perhaps my parents pushed me, though I do not recall any such action on their part. Shockingly, I not only was accepted but placed in the top class … one’s class assignment was based on how well one did on the entrance exam. Again, I assumed a clerical error had been made. And once again, my actual classroom performance showed little intellectual promise … managing to settle somewhere in the undistinguished middle of the pack.

Given my lackluster performance in the classroom, my feelings of concern about the future seemed warranted. I remember wondering how I would survive as an adult. Who would hire me? What skills and talents could I employ to secure a paid position? I thought my future prospects bleak at best. Seeing a bleak future on the streets as an unemployed bum, my best hope lay in the possibility that the army would take me. They took anyone, no? Then again, I seriously doubted I could make it out of basic training without shooting myself.

After high school, I entered a (college-level) seminary that prepared priests to do foreign missionary work. That seemed like a kind of army to me. Later, after that ill-fated effort to become a man of God, I stumbled into college. I went to Clark University in my home town because it took 2nd semester applications which the local top Catholic College, Holy Cross, did not.

Going away to school was out of the question. There was no money for that since any discretionary funds available to the family went for beer, cigarettes, and gambling. However, this was before Republican orthodoxy exerted a stranglehold on the national perspective. The American dream still was alive and well. While higher education was still a stretch given that I received virtually no financial help from my folks, I could easily (with scholarships, loans, and working 11-7) make it through a decent private school. After that, eventually getting a masters and doctorate were relatively easy.

As I detail in A Clueless Rebel, I blossomed in college. I did well in the Catholic Seminary I attended for a year plus, once again being assigned to an advanced academic status at the beginning of my second year by the officials in charge. I could never quite figure out why people kept concluding that I was smart. In my own head, I was average at best, though I did have a special fondness for English Literature and any kind of history. Anything involving math, however, was the kiss of death. Besides, I dismissed the seminary as not a real college, even though it’s academic reputation was quite strong.

In any case, Clark University took me in the Spring Semester of 1964. In the working class Catholic cocoon in which I had been embedded to this point, Clark was known as a den of atheists and Communists. I’ve written about what happened there elsewhere (likely more than once) but the musings of a blog beg for some redundancy.

The bottom line is this, my days at Clark were transformational. I entered as one person and left several years later as someone quite different. Some good friends recently pointed out that Clark was mentioned in a book about exceptional colleges as a place that takes in B level students and turns them into intellectuals who later survive and even prosper at elite research universities. That would have perfectly described my experience. [NOTE: Eventually, I ended up as a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin and the administrator of a nationally recognized research entity.]

But here is the thing. I never planned on anything. I never had a goal, other than not to starve and to keep out of the cold. I never saw myself as an academic or a university teacher or a policy wonk who would be at the center of the national welfare reform battles that raged toward the end of the last century. It all just happened, as if by serendipity. Then again, there seemed to be more opportunities back in my day. I do feel very fortunate to have come of age when I did.

Many a times I have mused on the seemingly random circumstances that shaped the trajectory of my life. What if I had not detoured into the Seminary after high school? I surely would have gone to Holy Cross and stayed within my Catholic cultural cocoon. What if I hadn’t stumbled into Clark almost by accident? What if others hadn’t kept insisting that I was smart in spite of my own personal view and my lackluster class performances. What if I hadn’t come of age in the 1960s, at a moment of when encrusted cultural and normative beliefs were being questioned. Most important of all, what if I had shown any skill at anything as a young boy. Perhaps I would have led a conventional life. Perhaps I never would have enjoyed a life of intellectual exploration and the pursuit of social change, and all by default.

Wow, what powerful words … what if?

In the previous blog, I explored the zeitgeist of that era in which the Peace Corps volunteer experiment emerged. Freed from pressing economic want, and spurred on by a lessening of both financial insecurity and inequality, the youth of America (a reasonable number at least) turned their minds and hearts to nobler aspirations. With that peculiar and illusory optimism only found in the young, they (we) believed an even better world was possible.

After all our training and preparation, I can still recall my first moments in Delhi. The July heat was like a blast furnace. But we were able to ignore that momentarily in light of our recent brush with death. The cowling of one engine fell off our Air India flight as we entered Indian airspace. This unsettling incident warranted a news article in the next day’s Times of India. What we were less able to ignore were the cacaphony of sights and sounds that assaulted us. You can be told over and over what to expect. Reality, however, is always much more real.

We spent a few more weeks trying to become farming experts. My group (India 44-B) was initially trained to be poultry experts. Then, half way through, we were switched to agriculture. That should have been clue number one that the planning for our exciting adventure might have been a tiny bit flawed. Despite the rather obvious confusion at the top, our training staff was superb. The preparation we received was intense, innovative, and remarkably immersive. In the end, we all learned an extraordinary amount about who we were and what we might accomplish in our service and, more importantly, beyond. I think, all things considered, we experienced far more change than anything we effected in India or the sites in which we were placed.

Some 50 years after the formation of the Peace Corps, there was an anniversary celebration in Washington. The Indian Embassy had an event for all former PC volunteers in town. The top Embassy official noted that the PC contribution to India (which came to an end in the mid 1970s) was less in terms of any technical improvements and much more in terms of cultural connections. We learned from our hosts, and they learned from us. Despite our shortcomings and mistakes, we showed Anericans and America in a better light. Well, that’s my story, and I’m sticking with it.

For example, before heading off to our villages, we played several games against a team from the local Udaipur college. (See pic below). Arguably, we held up the honor of American round ball before enthusiastic local crowds until they brought in some ringers from a military unit. On that day, we lost big time, both on the scoreboard and in the physical punishment we endured. The locals were delighted at our being thrashed, but we all ended on good terms. In fact, the local ball players invited me (along with two others from my group) to join the Udaipur team to compete in the all-India tournament to be held in Jaipur. The local team erroneously concluded that adding the hot shot Americans would improve their tournament chances. Alas, not to be. Soon enough, we found out that the rest of India could play the game at a high level (we were out quickly). But we all had a great time.

I can’t relate the actual Peace Corps experience in a blog or two. Only a few impressions can be touched upon (or you can get a copy of Our Grand Adventure). In the pic below, you can get a feel for our situation in the field. I was stationed about 45 to 50 miles south of Udaipur in what can only be described as a desert wasteland. I lived in government housing attached to the local Panchayat Samiti (government development office). All the other officials chose to live in town, for reasons obvious to me. I never had running water, electricity was only installed after 6 months of promises, and I crapped in a hole located in a room attached to my humble abode.

The experience was challenging in many ways. We all were struck with a variety of physical ailments … some in my group became very I’ll (either hospitalized or medically discharged). I had giardia, ringworm, and lost so much weight that my mother (seeing pictures of me) was tempted to call our Congressperson to have me rescued. But health wise, I escaped relatively unharmed, encountering relatively few bouts of dysentery and no serious ailments. I did live in fear of the dreaded guinea worm. These started out as cysts to be ingested from local well water which grew into long worms that eventually would pop out of an arm or leg. All these years later, I still have nightmares.

The real challenges were the isolation, the loneliness, the heat, and the demands associated with an inscrutable culture. There was no way to negotiate the complexity of the social rules there without error. At the least, one had to consciously think about what to say and how to behave when in public. You have no idea how hard that is. Normally, we rely upon well-worn social scripts and rules yhat are well understood. It was not until we were back in the West on our way home that we comprehended the cultural pressures we had experienced.

In addition, the isolation seemed crushing over time. There were no cell phones or visual media or easy ways of contacting the outside world. There were a telephone or two at the government facilities, but one could not escape the sense of being totally on your own. I recall realizing how much I missed the college sweetheart I left behind (being quite commitment-phobic). I wrote often, but she wound up marrying a post-doc at Harvard where she was working at the time. Who could blame her? Decades later, we reconnected. It was only then that we realized we had loved one another back then but were too damaged to recognize that fact. She speculated how different things might have been had there been modern communication technologies. Roads not taken and all.

Most disconcerting is that we volunteers never felt confident in our primary role. You can’t become a farming expert in a few weeks (especially when expected to learn a new language, cultural nuances, and the complexities of village life). Most of us never escaped that nagging sense that we were frauds. What rendered that sense particularly critical is the awareness that our mistakes might have profound consequences.

On the other hand, we got to experience something unique. The town located about a mile from our isolated accommodations was called Salumbar. It was of decent size (though still a comparatively smaller town) that was situated amidst a harsh and unyielding desert. While some affluence was to be found, many farmers in the area ecked out a marginal existence on tiny plots of land. It was a level of want and vulnerability I had never witnessed in my young life, nor since.

I could never quite escape the sense that I was living in the past. To me, Salumbar looked like a western frontier town of the 1870s. On occasion, farmers drove their water Buffalo through the streets or rough looking men would ride though on camels while sporting rifles and wearing cartridges across their chests as if off to war. Was Pancho Villa preparing a raid?

But mostly we did try to ply our trade as best we could, trying out several ideas we thought might prove useful. We erected a chicken project demo, raised money from my college back in the States to restock the local school library, and developed a home garden demo, among other initiatives. Mostly, though, we tried to convince local farmers to try new forms of hybrid seeds that would greatly enhance yields. This was part of the ‘green revolution’ launched in the third world by Norman Borlaug. It was seen as a possible rescue for an India facing exponential population growth with constrained resources.

We did have successes. You can see in the pics above a successful demo plot along with me tending our demo home garden. Frankly, being a well-known klutz, I cannot believe I erected a chicken coop on top of our home. Astonishingly, I successfuly raised several vegetables. Who was that guy?

Still, the challenges were many, too many to recount here. One will suffice. These new hybrid seeds demanded that the farmer adhere to a set of strict protocols including how to plant the seeds correctly, how to fertilize the crop, when to water, and so forth. In the past, these marginal farmers could throw out some seed left over from last year yield and (usually) get a crop that would enable the family to survive.

These new hybrid seeds we were hawking held the promise of previously unheard of yields. To obtain this bounty, however, the local farmer had to make an upfront investment of money and follow a set of practices that demanded unusual care and attention to detail. Even then, success could not be guaranteed. For example, the promised wonder seeds might have been adulterated along the way (good seed stolen to be replaced by crap). Corruption was endemic.

That left us volunteers in a dilemma. Should we work with the poorest of the poor. I wanted to. But they spoke a local dialect (Mewari and not Hindi which I had learned). The chances of miscommunication were great. Worse, if something were to go wrong, there was no plan B. There was no crop insurance nor a government safety net. Which of us could bear the guilt of pushing a marginal farmer (and his family) over the financial edge. So, we tended to work with better educated, hoping that change eventually would trickle down to all. In the meantime, we risked exacerbating local inequalities.

Did we do any good? Who knows? I will say that India was a grain importing nation in 1967 when we started our tour. It was exporting grain by the early 1970s. Of course, that turn around was more likely due to the return of the life-giving monsoons than to our poor efforts.

I can recall feeling very pessimistic about the future of the country back then. I could not imagine how these marginal farms would survive over the next generation or two. Most farmers had large families. In the past, they needed many offspring so that there would be surviving males to support them in the future. But with improved public health, many more children were surviving to adulthood. The existing family farms were too small to split any further. How would these children survive? What would they do?

Was an apocalypse in the making? Fortunately, that did not happen. The bottom half of the picture of our local home above presents what that same place (our government site) looks like today. The desert has been replaced by growth, new buildings and developments, and green fields brought to life by irrigation. India is taking its place among the more developed countries in the world.

Above, we have most of the survivors from India 44 (A and B) taken at a reunion some 40 years after our return in 1969. By way of explanation, India 44-A was a public health group (mostly female) who were assigned to the State of Maharasthra (near Mumbai, Bombay back in the day). We guys in India 44-B were yhe so-called Ag experts. We were dropped in the arid land around Udaipur in southern Rajasthan. But we all trained together and formed a common bond.

I doubt whether our brave band who ventured forth in 1967 can take much credit for any observed successes. But we all know that each of us took so much away from that experience. As mentioned, the accomplishments of these volunteers have been remarkable. It is hard for me to decide whether Peace Corps did a remarkable job in selecting talent or something about the experience added value to our subsequent lives. Perhaps someone else can solve that conundrum.

I can yet recall sitting on top of our house at night, the roof could only be accessed via a rickety ladder. Nothing but desert could be seen from our vantage point. The evening would be most pleasant after another scorching day with temps oft pushing 110 or higher. But the night air was refreshing, and the sky would be blazing with stars. The pace of life about us was glacial … so much time to read and think and simply appreciate a world that we (so busy in our western, adult lives) tend to ignore. All in all, it truly was a time out of time.

It is too bad that more young people do not have access to such an opportunity.

In June of 1966, close to 100 eager young college students gathered on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They were part of an experimental Peace Corps program that would expose them to an enhanced preparation regimen. These wanna-be volunteers would tackle a rigorous training ordeal that summer, return to finish their degrees, then be subject to more preparation the following summer before heading to India for two years. Many, actually most, would never make it. Some would be asked to leave. Others self-selected out during training. Still others withered in the challenges offered by India or succumbed to illness or disease. By July of 1969, at the end of our tour in one of Peace Corp’s most challenging environments, around two dozen tested volunteers would finish up their service. For these survivors, it was to be a Grand Adventure. (Check out the book below for the full story.)

In the picture below is a partial shot of the young and eager college kids who signed up to spend two years in far off India. Little did they know what awaited them. If you have any interest, I am the geeky-looking guy with glasses in the second row on the far left. As I look back at these faces, I am reminded of how different the world was back then. This all happened when the very concept of overseas volunteering was still fresh and a largely unknown venture. Peace Corps, as a concept, was yet evolving through trial and error. Those early years would later be called the wild west era of the program.

There was a sense of institutionalized naivete that permeated that early program. It was assumed that smart American kids could be recruited off college campuses, given some training, and then dropped into remote sites without any resources other than their wits and good intentions. Oddly enough, in hindsight, officials actually assumed we kids actually could change the world. Some of us did … a little at least. But any small accomplishments were accompanied by frustration, disappointment, and often a sense of personal failure. India, for many reasons, was widely known to be one of the most difficult Peace Corps sites. Of course, we did not know that on the day this photo was shot.

This really was a special time in many ways. America was in the midst of such dramatic change. The conformist, conventional 50s had begun to crack open in the early part of the 1960s. The Civil Rights movement, with scenes of Blacks being persecuted for seeking an end to racial apartheid, was followed by Kennedy’s assassination and then the escalation of a far-off conflict in Southeast Asia. Such shocks drove many of us out of our personal torpor.

While I was quite political by the time this photo was snapped, many of the others undoubtedly were at the onset of profound personal changes. I was well along in my own transformational journey. Just three or so years earlier, I had been studying for the Catholic Priesthood (a foreign missionary order) after being raised in a conservative working class environment where independent thinking was frowned upon and divisive prejudicial attitudes the norm. God and country were paramount. Not surprisingly, I entered college as a product of my cultural cocoon. Change did not take long. By 1966, I was a veteran of antiwar marches who led what amounted to the leftist organization on my campus. I even joined the far-left Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), at least before it went over the radical edge.

Each of those kids pictured above had their own stories. Many (like me) were first-generation college students. They benefitted from a booming economy and a virtual explosion of new opportunities. A number went to the best schools … Berkeley, Columbia, Yale, and so forth, virtually all on scholarships or with easily accessible financial assistance. The costs of higher education in that period were laughably cheap. I could easily afford a private college with work, scholarships, and loans that were not back-braking. Others came from dirt poor backgrounds like share-cropping families who would make their ways successfully into mainstream society. As I look back, the talent found in this group was amazing … the accomplishments of the ones I know about have been astounding. Among the group survivors, it would be impossible to randomly select such a talented and accomplished group.

Many of us talk about the 60s with a kind of hushed reverance. In truth, it was a special moment in time. Not only did African -Americans wrest a degree of dignity from a reluctant majority, but several other ‘rights’ movements emerged … for women, for migrant workers and Latinos, for Native Americans, and for the disabled (along with movements for the environment and nuclear disarmament, etc.). The young questioned our military adventures abroad. Our national government declared a war-on-poverty. The arts went through an explosion of innovation. Everything was questioned. Most importantly, the search for a fair and just society was a-foot. Many in this pic traced their decision to apply to PC back to President John Kennedy (JFK) and his iconic challenge … ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.

The cultural zeitgeist back then was decidedly different. When college students were asked what was most important to them, developing a personal philosophy topped the list. Making money was much lower down. Some one-third of Yale law students tried to volunteer for crusader Ralph Nader’s consumer interest organization. The SDS organization I mentioned above only declined into nihilistic self-destruction in later years. It started out as a few University Of Michigan students sought a more meaningful future (see the Port Huron Statement). They were searching for a just cause about which to structure their futures.

That search for larger meaning is reflected in the early response to the Peace Corps concept. As I’ve noted elsewhere, the concept was first publicly presented by Candidate JFK during a late night stop in Michigan after a TV debate with his opponent… Richard M. Nixon. Dick had gotten under JFK’s skin by asserting that the Dems had been the war party while the GOP favored peace. In response, Jack stewed in the plane ride to his first post-debate stop, Ann Arbor Michigan. He challenged the mostly student crowd (it was near midnight when he landed) to be willing to sacrifice a year or two abroad to make the world a better place. It was a throw-away line at best, totally off-the-cuff.

Jack could never have imagined what happened next. That suggestion roared through the imaginations of the youth in that audience. In those days of primitive communications, word spread of this new volunteer opportunity … by posters on college kiosks, via early telephones, and through face to face conversations. Still, the word spread like wildfire from campus to campus. Even while the campaign was in full throttle, Kennedy’s staff was overwhelmed with requests from students and young people trying to sign up for this new program that did not exist. The response was so overwhelming that, when elected, JFK felt compelled to create the Peace Corps by executive order on March 1, 1961.

That enthusiasm had not abated when I sent in my application in late 1965. The D.C. central staff were still being inundated with applications, way more than they could possibly accept. The youth of that era (my era), while making many poor decisions in retrospect, were generally driven by the better angels of their natures. Many truly wanted to leave the world in a better place. Those were the prime sentiments that drove me. That was why I tried to become a missionary priest, why I worked with poor and disadvantaged kids, and why I became an orderly on the 11-7 shift in a large, urban hospital. Even during my college years, I wanted to make a difference.

Sure, we lived during a golden economic era. Poverty and inequality were falling. The possibilities, even for relatively poor working-class youth like myself, were getting better. While we worried about nuclear incineration for sure, we somehow believed a better world was in the offing. We simply had to ensure that it happened.

If you had been there that day in June of 1966, you would have felt that faith, that optimism. I taught college students for many years. Sure, many impressed me with their idealism, intelligence, and commitment. But nothing matched those heady days when we were eager to set off to the ‘other side of the world‘ to make things just a little better. During that era, there existed a philosophical leitmotif that was quite special. Moreover, I suspect we were among the best of that unique generation.

I will pick up this theme in future blogs. Stay tuned!