In the fall of 1963, it was time to head east to New Haven and get my freshman year of college started. My parents drove me, along with one suitcase and my beloved portable Olivetti typewriter. Bob Dylan was starting to make it big and I was excited to hear his songs on the car radio. We attended the various welcoming and orientation events and I got settled into Bingham Hall, my residential dormitory named after Hiram Bingham, the Machu Picchu guy and the fellow who tried – inexplicably – to ban surfing in Hawaii . For some reason I had signed up for a weekend religious retreat out in the Connecticut countryside before classes began. The daily encounter groups were designed to challenge everyone’s established spiritual orientation. Whatever you believed, whatever your tenets of faith, got ripped apart and handed back to you in shreds. The result was that, for the rest of my life, I stopped praying, reading the Bible and going to church. So, really, what was the point of the whole exercise? With that bracing warmup, I returned, newly Godless, to Bingham and met my two randomly assigned roommates. Bill Prout was a blue-collar townie from nearby Branford, the son of a pharmacist, and sported a classic retro 1950s-style flat top haircut. R. Craig Woodward came from a monied, socially prominent family in Baltimore, the Gilman prep school-prepared son of physicians. Quite a mix and one which would only last the year until we were free to choose new roommates. The two freshmen next door were Wint Ritchie and Frank Clifford. Wint played the guitar and it was through his music and his stories that I became interested in blues and folk music. The songs of Huddie Ledbetter, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Furry Lewis ran through my head. The Beatles were wildly popular and we would gather around our cheap record players, put a plastic spacer into our 45 rpm copy of “I want to hold your hand” and drop it onto the spindle. I recall a freshman from another dorm who was deep into Mary Wells’ Motown sound and would spend hours at a time slouched in a chair listening to “My Guy” over and over again. With his left hand he could reach his supply of beer and with his right he was just able to reach the tonearm on his cheap little record player and, when the song had finished, move it back to the beginning. On a Friday in November, Bill and I were playing an improvised game of handball in our dorm room when Craig came in and said, “Stop it, guys, Kennedy’s been shot”.
Freshmen lived in old brick dormitories arrayed around a quadrangle whose perimeter was surrounded by a spiked iron fence. I got to know that fence up close and personal one Saturday night when I tried to scale it after it was locked. Without checking where I was stepping, I put my full weight down on a metal spike which went through the sole of my shoe and deep into my left foot. That meant a trip to the emergency room and six weeks of saline soaks and hobbling around on crutches. The really fun part was using those crutches to climb to my fifth floor dorm room multiple times per day. No elevator, of course. My right thigh muscles got such a Schwartzenegger-style workout that, to this day, they’re noticeably bigger than the muscles in my left thigh. I didn’t have a car so dating was an irregular, hit-and-miss process. There was a Cleveland girl at Mt. Holyoke College I was particularly eager to impress and I had made arrangements to see her. Taking the bus up to South Hadley would have been downright shameful, so I approached a rich kid I knew through the Baltimore gang to see if he would lend me his Corvette for the weekend. He foolishly agreed and, after he dropped the keys into my excited, sweaty palm, I had a set of world class wheels for the weekend which allowed me to pose as a member of Yale’s over-privileged elite. The social committees for the various residential colleges routinely had weekend mixers and would hire entertainment. Among other acts, I got a chance to see the early Supremes and early Ike and Tina Turner when the arc of their careers was still rising.
Although I was now much less enthusiastic about sports than I had been in high school, I did consider a choice between swimming and track. Yale had one of the best swimming programs in the country and its roster was packed with Olympians like world-record holder Don Schollander, so I felt a bit intimidated and opted for track instead, although I still wound up being surrounded by hot shots, like Olympians Jay Luck and Wendell Mottley. I did get to compete in the winter indoor season, however, which was fun. Our coach was Bob Giegengack, who was also the coach for the US men’s Olympic track team. The most memorable meet was at Madison Square Garden in New York City where we ran on a short, noisy and steeply banked wooden track, which could be promptly disassembled afterwards to get ready for a Knicks basketball game. On that trip Wendell Mottley ran a fast time at some obscure distance like 600 meters. On the bus back to New Haven, coach Giegengack looked through a book of statistics and said, “Hey, Wendell, that’s an indoor world record”. Wendell just smiled. There was no whooping and hollering because it was considered no big deal. I also ran track in the spring outdoor season that freshman year and tried the 880 yard run in addition to the 440, but with only mediocre results.
There was a sizable contingent of students from the Baltimore and the Washington DC areas who had attended private schools like Gilman and St. Albans and in the course of that freshman year, through Craig Woodward, I became friends with a number of them. Dick Van Wagenen had gone to St. Albans in Washington. Tom Chase came through Gilman and we spent a fair amount of time hanging out together. Tom was planning a major in psychology and he and an older graduate psychology student were my introduction to the growing LSD drug culture. This graduate student, along with Dr. Timothy Leary of Harvard and even the US military, considered the use of acid as an important new field of research in human behavior and regularly took it. At the time, it was legal, cheap and readily available. I can’t remember if Tom ever took it. I never did. I was totally straight and hadn’t even tried pot. Nevertheless, LSD was at the center of seismic changes – mostly started by young people in California – which were taking place in our society.
In the summer of 1964, two very different paths were traveled. One the one hand, Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters on the west coast were initiating the hippie era and drove their Day-Glo painted school bus across the country in a psychedelic fog of acid, pot and speed. On the other hand, Tom and I – clean, well-behaved and boring – put on preppie slacks and dress shirts and went to Europe together. Dad had ordered a Volkswagen bug from the Wolfsburg factory in Germany in order to save money. Tom and I would pick it up there and drive it around on tour before shipping it back to the States and then flying home. I brought along my old high school aesthetics textbook and we would read to each other about the various cathedrals and other architectural wonders we encountered. Our circular route was clockwise from Germany to Switzerland and Italy, then France and Spain before returning to Hamburg to ship the beetle to Cleveland. We flew into London and crossed over to Belgium on a ferry. Tom and I lounged on the upper deck trying our best to look like jaded world travelers. We met a young student named Rita Glombik. My memories of sections of the trip are vague. Berlin was one of our first destinations after we picked up the car. In those days Germany was still partitioned along the lines decided by the Allies at the end of World War II and to reach Berlin you had to drive through communist East Germany on a restricted highway corridor to get to the half of the city controlled by the Americans, British and French. That was before they put up The Wall, but you clearly knew you were in a divided city. To our surprise, we were allowed to drive through Checkpoint Charlie into East Berlin, which seemed drab and forlorn. We probably got to Venice because I remember stopping in nearby Ravenna, which is about sixty miles to the south. We had been guided there by my trusty high school aesthetics text which described the glories of its Byzantine church architecture. And glorious it was. My favorite was the basilica of San Vitale which has the famous mosaics of Byzantine Empress Theodora and Emperor Justinian. And, sure enough, there they were, surrounded by golden halos and their royal retinues as they gazed down at the visitor with solemn formality, confident in their dual roles as guardians of the faith and as commanders of a bejeweled, coruscating oriental empire.
We then drove west across northern Italy through the south of France. All I remember about Marseilles was a meal at a harborside restaurant and a waiter whose thick Provencal accent made him nearly incomprehensible to those of us with pale, dainty textbook French. In his thick patois, words were swallowed and slurred together in a gumbo almost as dense as the bouillabaisse we were eating. As we approached the Spanish border, we stopped for lunch in Canet Plage, a very unremarkable little seaside town. I must have found some redeeming qualities there, however, because when I got back home I wrote a travel article about it and sold the piece to the Cleveland Press for $15. That was the beginning and the end of my paid journalism career. From Canet Plage, we crossed into Spain and headed to Barcelona, where we stumbled across Antoni Gaudi’s Basilica of the Sacred Family. It wasn’t in my aesthetics text but we stopped for a look. It looked like the love child of a Gothic father and an Art Nouveau mother . After more than eighty years of gradual and underfunded work, only four of the planned eighteen spires had been finished. There were just a few workmen on the site and progress was occuring at a medieval pace – glacially and almost imperceptibly slow. In the Barcelona hostel where we stayed, a group of German cyclists had everyone in stitches with their comically polite table manners. Pamplona may have crossed our path but I don’t recall dodging any bulls so we didn’t channel much Hemingway. However, we did see our first bullfight. The show centers around a bull who has been unwillingly put into a ring surrounded by a crowd of shouting humans where he confronts a man who acts brave, waves to the crowd and wears tights and a beret. This man provokes the bull with a cape and eventually kills him with a sword. It seemed like a cruel and pointless activity. Why torture the bull? Why does the matador have to prove he’s tough and brave? As an alternative, he could lay on a bed of nails or hold his hand over a candle flame as Gordon Liddy did.
Our path continued west across northern Spain until we reached the Atlantic coast and entered French Basque country. We stopped in the mountain village of St. Jean Pied de Port in the western Pyrenees. While strolling around the village, we met some local girls and chatted them up. I had parted company with Hillary by that time, so there was no loyalty issue. They seemed moderately impressed at meeting two American college students because they ducked into their homes and came back made up and wearing nice dresses. They spent the afternoon showing us around town. One of the girls was named Jacqueline Vergez and I conversed idly with her about Bearnaise sauce and her local accent. She was very cute. Tom took a picture of the two of us standing in the doorway of a little chapel. I got her address – Rue de la Citadelle – and later corresponded with her. In the French countryside along the Atlantic coast, concrete pillboxes and other fortifications from the German occupation still dotted the landscape. The largest we saw were the massive U-boat pens at St. Nazaire with their twelve foot thick concrete roofs fully intact.
Mom had been in touch with French architect Jacques Barillet through the Stickles and had wangled an invitation for us to spend a weekend with them at their summer home in Brittany, a few miles south of St Malo, where they escaped the heat of Paris in July and August. For us two grubby travelers, this seemed like a true serendipity. We were tired of our road diet of baguettes and cheese alternating with unidentifiable cafeteria food in hostels. Maybe we would finally have a chance to do some laundry and clean out our car. I guess we were expecting a rustic bungalow just big enough to accomodate a few extra guests. Our Michelin map and some vague hand-written directions took us through lovely sunny countryside and down little roads lined by thick hedgerows of the kind that slowed the Allied advance so badly after D-Day. We eventually reached the little village of Trigavou and turned off the highway onto a dirt lane which led to a collection of small houses, but none of these turned out to be our destination – the Barillet’s maison d’ete. Finally, as we emerged from a grove of trees, our eyes bugged out on stalks as we got our first glimpse of their actual home. From that moment we were pulled up into a vortex of high culture and five hundred years of French History. Before us was a massive moated castle, a stone chateau in steep-roofed Norman style whose two storey front ran two hundred feet from side to side. It wasn’t as big as the famed chateaux of Chambord or Chenonceau, but it was still really an eyeful. In the center of this great facade, a fifty foot causeway crossed the moat to the main entrance above which rose a four story square central tower. We could see where the mechanisms had once been in place to operate the drawbridge over the moat and we half expected to be challenged by guards dressed in chainmail and carrying broadswords, although the design was clearly residential and not meant to withstand a fusillade of cannon fire. Instead of a military confrontation, the door opened and there were the Barillets – pere, mere et fille – dressed in casual attire, beaming and chatting and happy to see us. They gave us a warm and sincere welcome to Chateau du Bois de la Motte. In addition to their cook and maid, they had another guest, a cheerful and talkative American college student named Daphne, so that great estate echoed with conversation and laughter during long and memorable meals accompanied by glasses of excellent red wine. Since the place had about forty rooms there was space for everyone to spread out if they wanted. Despite the hot summer weather, the interior of the Chateau du Bois de la Motte was kept cool and pleasant by its high ceilings and thick stone walls. Antique country furniture, tapestries and modern art blended harmoniously together. Many rooms had great fireplaces with no central heating evident, suggesting that back in the day during a harsh winter most of the chateau must have been cold and drafty. Monsieur Barillet had a prosperous architectural practice and combined that with a passion for history. A fresh audience of young American visitors gave him the opportunity to regale us with his thoughts and opinions. He started with me. After dinner, while Josie and Tom lingered at the table over a final glass of wine and unravelled the mysteries of French politics and American foreign policy, Barillet pere and I walked through the formal gardens behind the house to enjoy the evening sounds of insects, the damp earthy smell of the surrounding woods and a lavish sunset that painted the sky with streaks of pink and blue. He quickly warmed to his favorite topics. Since he spoke excellent English and was a natural raconteur, he held me spellbound as he took me back in time to recount the building’s history. It began in 1433 when a nobleman built the chateau over the course of several years and thus became the governor of his own castellan domain whose surrounding lands were worked by serfs who – under the system of feudalism – owed their lord a portion of their produce and, in turn, received protection from him.
M. Barillet had evaluated the chateau’s surrounding topography and then carefully reconstructed the planning and the thought processes of the architect – his professional ancestor – who had selected the site and drawn up the chateau’s plans. That person had chosen land with a small, unnamed stream running roughly from the southwest to the northeast. The castle was built just to the north of this stream, and, after a sweating army of underpaid peasants had dug a massive trench around the edifice for an intended moat in front connecting to a small lake in the back, the waters of the stream were diverted to fill the space and create the desired sylvan effect before draining out to the northeast on its original course, which eventually takes it to a small river named the Le Fremur which, in turn, makes a rendezvous near St. Malo with the English Channel [La Manche], the Jersey and Guernsey Islands and the Celtic Sea. Monsieur Barillet paused a moment, lost in reflection, then smiled at me. “The past is alive, don’t you think?” I had to agree.
In 1433, people believed the earth was flat. The Renaissance was underway in Italy but northern France – still medieval – was winding down the late middle ages. Columbus was only eighteen years old and Magellan wouldn’t start his global circumnavigation for eighty six years. That year Sigismund – whoever he was – had himself crowned Holy Roman Emperor, and Zheng He, that small-town-muslim-eunuch-made-good, was emperor of China and launched the last of the Ming Dynasty treasure fleets which had roamed as far as the east coast of Africa. Constantinople – which was all that then remained of the once vast and glittering Byzantine empire – would not fall to the Turks for another twenty years. The Duchy of Brittany was then a vassal state of France in the latter stages of the Hundred Years War but still clung to its Celtic identity. At that time, most of the people spoke Breton, not French. The human population in Europe was low enough that large stretches of primary forest still held packs of wolves and herds of great wild cattle called aurochs. According to some folk legends, there may still have been small relict populations of Neanderthals in western Europe, so it’s just possible that as construction got underway on the chateau, one day a hairy, heavy-browed hunter with a club in one hand and a dead aurochs calf in another peered through the bushes at masons setting great blocks of stone in place. Monsieur Barillet noted with pride that the building had been designated as a national historic monument in 1951 and that Maurice Henensal, a local Breton school teacher and poet, had written a poem about the chateau.
The days which Tom and I spent with the Barillets were filled with many pleasant diversions. There were hikes along trails through the fields and woods surrounding the chateau. We cleaned out the car and took Josie and Daphne on excursions into the countryside, including a delightful afternoon in St. Malo where, after a leisurely lunch at a seaside cafe, we strolled on the beach with seagulls crying and wheeling overhead in the salt air. Tom and I felt a little outclassed by all this international style and, at farewell, I mustered just enough French to say to Madame Barillet, “Je regrette que je ne connais pas les belles mots pour vous remercier”, to which she graciously replied that she was just happy we’d had a good time. We then got back on the road and resumed our vagabond life. Pretending to be journalists, we persuaded the supervisor of a slaughterhouse to give us a tour of his operations. He led us through a large room which had the metallic smell of blood and death. We viewed disemboweled cattle hanging from large metal hooks. Sullen men in bloody aprons cut off entire haunches with a few strokes of their scimitar-like knives and took no notice of us. The next day we stopped to inspect a mountain of rubble from a recently demolished church. I pulled out a 10″ x 15″ carved wooden floral arrangement, a piece of very mediocre decorative art done in fake gold leaf. It was a perfect tacky souvenir, so I dusted it off and threw it in the back of the car. It was a bit disappointing since I wasn’t actually stealing it, but I let myself believe that this was real cultural plunder, so with some satisfaction I snuck it through customs back to the US and kept it for many years. One delightful interlude was a visit to “Le Palais Ideal”, a bizarre little castle built by an eccentric French postman named Ferdinand Cheval. It never got favorable reviews from the likes of Architectural Digest but it had a kind of naïve, childish charm to it that made you smile. After paying the small admission fee at a rundown booth, I talked with the bored ticket girl and laid out my various opinions about the creative process. She seemed skeptical about my insights, shrugged her shoulders, pouted her lips and just said, “Bien sur, mais qu’est-ce que c’est la creation?”. I had no answer. One of our most obscure art destinations in central France was a little country chapel renowned for its frescos. By following hand-painted little signs, we found it deep in the countryside on a small farm at the end of a long dirt road patrolled by chickens. This chapel was on private property and not the least bit commercialized, but the farmer’s wife graciously came out in the rain to unlock the chapel so we could have a look. The frescos were lovely and medieval and the setting was damp and lonely. I can’t remember if she asked for money but I hope we gave her some. The trip wound up with a long and tiring drive to Hamburg where we dropped our bug at dockside to be shipped back home. Somehow we made it to London and flew back to the States from Heathrow.
Beginning in our sophomore year, we moved to one of several residential colleges. I was headed for Jonathan Edwards college, named for a dour eighteenth century Yale-educated theologian, whose most famous revivalist sermon was “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”. To help us plan our sinful behavior, we had our own library, dining room and a little quadrangle. My new roommates were Peter Miles and Frederick Reginald Warren-Bouton. Peter was from Marblehead, Massachusetts and was a few years older since he had been in the military. He and I shared bunk beds in one of the two bedrooms in our little residential suite. Rick Warren-Boulton had the other bedroom all to himself and his official job was expounding theories of far left political science and relating tales of his childhood. His mother was American but his father was born-in-India British and had been an executive with the Kirloskar steel company. Rick had travelled extensively with his family and had been sent to a private school in Australia for several years. He had had more girlfriends than there are grains of sand on the world’s beaches and we all listened in awed silence as he gave us the details.
Brushing up against the rich and famous and over-privileged comes with the turf at Yale, and I had a glancing encounter with British glamour one weekend in the fall of 1964 – before Royse and I became a gossip item in the New York Tabloids – when I somehow got tangled up with a bunch of fast-lane socialites and headed down to New York city for a weekend of dissolute behavior. All I can recall of that time was being in some trendy Manhattan bar with my accomplices on Saturday night when a group of attractive girls flowed into the establishment out of the cool night. Pheromones were thick in the air and our two groups fell on each other in an orgy of preening and mating displays. One of the girls came up to me and introduced herself as Charlotte Rampling. She was slender and beautiful, but I had no clue who she was. I was soon to learn that she was eighteen, English, and already out in the working world making a name for herself as a model and actress. I could sense that she was ambitious and always had her Opportunity Radar switched on. Well, opportunity-wise, she must have been having a bad night, or lacking better prospects, because she seemed interested in me, perhaps wanting to know just who I was and if I was rich and could possibly be of use to her. We sat there at the bar and chatted each other up and I would say that, for a short time, there was a modest amount of positive chemistry going on between us. Fairly soon, however, it became clear to her that I was just a penniless college student and couldn’t pipe her aboard my yacht or invite her up to my penthouse for afterhours. Thus, as the magic spell faded, there were some awkward silences and forced smiles before she eventually stood up from her bar stool. Then, not really to my surprise, she slowly became transparent and dematerialized before my eyes. She went on to have a very successful career in film and television (complete with the obligatory two failed marriages), and it’s my extreme conceit that our chance meeting in that bar – though a nonstarter – brought her good luck and that I imparted some of my abundant positive karma to her and perhaps left a few grains of pixie dust on her shoulder. I’m quite sure that, to this day, she thinks of me in her long sleepless nights and calls out my name as she tosses and turns.
Since he was from Baltimore, Tom Chase came to Cleveland in 1964 just after Christmas for the December 27 NFL Championship game between the Cleveland Browns and the Baltimore Colts. Cleveland won the game 27-0 (the franchise’s last championship), and from our seats in the end zone, I remember Jim Brown sweeping around the right end, shedding tacklers, as he came straight at me down the sidelines for a long gain, although this was one of the few games in which he did not score a touchdown.
Royse and I started dating in May of 1965, the spring of my sophomore year. She was a freshman at Pembroke, the women’s coordinate college with Brown University in Providence, RI, so it wasn’t a long commute to see each other. That month I started keeping a journal and made intermittent note of events and personal thoughts over the next twenty years. These musings did not cause any noticeable changes in the course of western civilization. I took to reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dag Hammarskjold and continued listening to Leadbelly and Bob Dylan. I came across a New York Times article which discussed Moondog, the blind poet-musician who stood on The Avenue of the Americas at 54th Street in New York City. He said he doesn’t work and doesn’t feel guilty. “Homer begged and so did Jesus Christ. It was only the Calvinists who ordained that no man shall eat who does not work.”
I associated certain numbers and letters with colors (3 is green, V is bronze, etc). A psychology student told me that this was an experience he had only felt under LSD. His comment was that perhaps I’m “permanently turned-on”. Ha! This means I could trip out without breaking the law or spending money.
I was on the track team in the fall of ’65 but quit after that. In the spring, for reasons unknown, I started smoking (really?!?). Tobacco-wise, it was a different world then. On a flight from New York to Cleveland, at a time when there were virtually no restrictions on inflight smoking, all the passengers were given a gift pack of five Winston cigarettes, and I smoked several of them.
At about this time I had become interested in making movies and in August bought a used 8 mm Brownie camera. I shot my first footage when Royse and I were visiting DeWitt and Patty in Maine. I got involved with the lively and informal film community on campus and got to rub elbows with some very interesting people. Stan Brakhage, a leading experimental filmmaker of that era, spoke to our group about splicing and editing in 8 mm – technical issues that were well over my head. It was clear that artists of his breed never got rich but his silent works, such as Window Water Baby Moving, were, to my eye, powerful and visionary. Later on, his students would include Matt Stone and Trey Parker – the South Park freaks. He was living at the time in Lump Gulch, Colorado and supported his family by making industrial film shorts. I got to meet Pauline Kael, the brash and opinionated film critic for The New Yorker. She always let you know what she thought of anything. One of her favorite films was Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee. It was an action western but she loved the dialogue. One day I bumped into a young girl named Talia and, of course, we wound up talking about film. She spent an evening with Rick and me in our dorm room and we filled the air with idle, pseudo-sophisticated chatter. Her last name was Coppola and she was studying at the Yale School of Drama. She was shy and seemed a bit uncertain about herself but she was clearly impressed by her older brother Francis Ford who was already directing films, though he had not yet hit it big. It would be several years before she got her first film role. Fortunately, the hand of fate steered me away from film as a career. I had neither the talent nor the business acumen to succeed in that field. In the arena of still photography, I got to know Peter Bunnell, who was getting his M.A. at Yale in art history and was destined for a very distinguished career in art and photography. He was a graduate fellow at Jonathan Edwards College at the time and his job was to be a cultural eminence grise and host soirees for film devotees. He had a very refined manner, wore a cute bowtie and served us sherry from a sterling silver tray.
In March of 1966, I spent part of spring break with my parents in Europe. We went to Sicily and looked at a lot of ruins. In Palermo, I bought a Saracen puppet head in a flea market and had a high speed encounter with a bicycle and its rider. We had parked on a sidestreet and, as I was getting out of the front passenger seat, a cyclist who had been traveling at high speed between parked cars and the curb – a moving violation! – smashed into the door I had just opened. The impact was terrific and he was sprawled semi-conscious on the pavement next to his mangled bicycle. My first instinct was to help him, which gave me moral brownie points. Dad, on the other hand, who could clearly see that the guy was not actively dying, insisted that we leave the scene immediately before the fellow could find a lawyer and sue the rude, thoughtless foreigners. We also went to Tunisia because Sicily was cold and rainy and Dad was interested in the troglodyte communities on the island of Jerba. I met some young “pied noir” Tunisians on the beach there. They’re French citizens who were born and raised in the French colonies of North Africa but are ethnic French and not Arab. I asked one of them, “Est-ce que c’est permis de tutoyer une jeune fille qu’on rencontre sur la plage?”. She laughed. I also got to Florence, visited the Uffizi Gallery to see Michelangelo’s David and met high school friend Mac Wellman there. I remember having an enjoyable and prolonged lunch with him and some other friends in a back street trattoria. We left a very messy table as a sign of our satisfaction.
I spent the summer of 1966 in New York City at the New York University summer film workshop. Rick Taft had enrolled, then couldn’t attend and gave me his slot. The illustrious professor Haig Manoogian (mentor to Martin Scorsese) ran the program and divided the students into teams to each make their own short film. Our team’s student-director lived in rural Connecticut and the whole crew spent a weekend at his house when the storyboard called for some woodland footage. I have a very strong memory of waking up in the morning to the sound of hundreds of songbirds greeting the day, an urgent and astonishing chorus the likes of which I never heard again. I was mostly the camera operator for my group which did a piece inspired by the work of French director Agnes Varda. One of our team members was impressively hip and well-connected to the Greenwich Village bohemian scene and, when it came time to improvise a sound track for our little film, he recruited the services of renowned jazz pianist Charles Mingus, who sloped His Largeness into the studio one evening, sat down at the keyboard as our film was projected for him and spontaneously brought forth a soft and moody composition which perfectly complemented the visual storyline. We also thought it was surpassingly cool that he quietly did this favor for us at a time when he was on the run from the law over some undoubtedly trumped-up drug charges.
During my time in New York City that summer, I rented a small apartment on the shabby lower east side with Warren-Bolton. With very little effort, he had secured a summer job at Pan AM’s world headquarters. What happened was that his mother simply called her good friend Juan Trippe, the president of Pan AM, and asked Mr. Trippe to hire her son. So Rick became an intern with good pay and vague job responsibilities who reported daily to Juan himself. Our apartment had a single bedroom and cost $70 per month. One person slept on the couch in the living room. With my free time I went off on excursions with fellow film students or just wandered the city. I hunted down McSorley’s Old Ale House near NoHo where e e cummings wrote poetry.
One day after browsing through the Guggenheim, I was stopped by an extremely elderly and frail woman who spoke with a heavy German accent and asked me where the animals were. She said she was five hours late to meet her daughter. The Central Park Zoo was many blocks away and, since she could hardly walk, I got on a bus with her. She had the 25 cent fare in the pocket of her black dress. I took her to the Zoo’s cafeteria, looked around unsuccessfully for the daughter and finally left her there. She gave me 20 cents for helping her.
My senior year began in the fall of 1966. Yale is infested with numerous secret societies for seniors. They are cryptic organizations with secret admission rituals, secret weekly meetings and lots of secrets to keep. The purpose is to promote lifetime bonds of brotherhood and solidarity among an educated elite. The most famous is Skull and Bones. By twenty-first century standards, they seem a lot of foolish and dated silliness, but in the nineteenth century – and even in 1966 – they held a compelling fascination and were generally taken very seriously. I was tapped by a member of Book and Snake to join that society for my senior year. The member who tapped me barely knew me and admitted he wasn’t very enthusiastic about the group and only picked me because he had an obligation to select a new member and because he heard that I was involved with filmmaking and that sounded interesting. So I was admitted to Book and Snake with mysterious rites of admission that I can no longer remember, went to weekly meetings to have secret discussions and after graduation did not stay in touch with a single secret brother. What a waste of time and energy.
The war in Vietnam was raging full tilt and this had divided the nation. I got to avoid the draft and the war because I had a college deferment, which is unfair, but I accepted the situation because I opposed the war and didn’t want to serve in the military. So working class kids who didn’t have the means or opportunity to go to college were the ones who got drafted and sent to Viet Nam to slog through rice paddies and get shot. Warren-Boulton, who described himself not just as a communist but as a hard-core Maoist (don’t believe a word of it), would get virulent anti-war propaganda in the mail with photographs showing the effects of napalm and anti-personnel shrapnel bombs on civilians. He also got regular visits from a guy named Sid, a member of the local New Haven Communist Party, who would show up in a trenchcoat looking shifty and conspiratorial.
In January of 1967, as graduation loomed in the spring, planning for fall became urgent. I began investigating graduate school programs in film. My research was continually interrupted by Rick’s endless complaints that, to his astonishment, he didn’t have a girlfriend. I eventually set him up with Royse’s roommate Gordie Campbell.
Marijuana was strictly illegal in 1967 and using or possessing it came with risks. Several students in Morse – one of Yale’s residential colleges – were arrested for having the demon weed.
The academic pressure was unrelenting. I was constantly writing papers and – if I procrastinated – I would have to stay up all night to get them done on time. I never had time to create a rough draft in this writing process or time for reflection. I would just make a general plan in my head then start banging out the final version on my typewriter using erasable paper. I even wrote unrehearsed all-night term papers in French. We frequently pulled all-nighters to cram for exams. After the papers were turned in or the tests taken, we often went to a local twenty four hour restaurant called Olivia’s for breakfast. Each table had a jukebox in those days. Drop in a dime and listen to a very young version of Simon and Garfunkel.
In the spring, Royse and I were taking turns visiting each other. I would go to Providence. She would come down to New Haven. She was active in the Pembroke College dance club and I got to see her perform in concert a number of times. Warren-Boulton was now dating Gordie, so the four of us were spending an unreasonable amount of time together. One weekend we drove down to Gordie’s home in Greenwich, CT to celebrate her birthday. Her rich stockbroker dad gave us $200 in cash (a king’s ransom in 1967) so we could head down to New York City for a Saturday night on the town. We went to dinner and a play (“Cactus Flower” with Lauren Bacall), then an all-night succession of bars, discotheques, a Staten Island ferry ride (toll 5 cents) and, finally, a dawn “be-in” in Central Park with a throng of flower children. I kid you not. It was the run-up to the Summer of Love and the release of Sgt. Pepper. The park was overflowing with long-haired hippies. A girl gave me a daffodil and wished me peace. People chanted “l-o-v-e”, threw flowers at police cars and smoked pot.
I somehow survived final exams and moved on to graduation in June of 1967. My parents came to New Haven for the ceremony. A Jonathan Edwards resident, Barry Golson, gave the commencement address. Royse was there, having finished her junior year at Pembroke, and it was a fun time. In the fall, my plan was graduate school in film studies at the Boston University School of Public Communications with an internship at public television station WGBH during the first semester. I spent the summer in Cleveland and lived in a tiny attic apartment in Little Italy. I worked for the Meese Advertising Art company as an office assistant and runner. I wasn’t paid much and didn’t do much. I had access to art supplies and once in an idle moment I cut up a picture of the model Veruschka jumping across a road and repasted the vertical strips with spaces in between so that it looked like her legs were ten feet long and she was making a fifty foot leap. The odd things we remember and the ways we waste time. That June, of course, saw the release of the highly anticipated Sgt. Pepper album. I remember coming back from the Providence record store and holding it in my hands with reverent anticipation, like a gift from Olympus to a mortal. There was also the premiere of D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary film “Don’t Look Back” about Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour in England. Those were exciting times.
In the fall of 1967, I moved to Boston for my autumn internship at WGBH. The process of securing an apartment provided an entertaining history lesson. After combing unsuccessfully through the rental offerings in the Boston Globe classifieds, I started working with a little company called Le Coq Realty, which sold houses but also brokered apartment rentals. As an agent went through available listings, I saw Mr. Le Coq, the owner, sitting in a back room. He looked to be about fifty years old, tall and Germanic with a short military haircut. He was as unfriendly-looking as the two large German shepherds that kept him company. He looked like a heavy drinker, and evidently had shared his history with his agents because one of them shared it with me. Monsieur Le Coq was actually German and had been an officer in the Wehrmacht with something to hide, perhaps a Nazi official. As the Third Reich collapsed in May of 1945, he found a dead French Officer named Le Coq on the battlefield and took that man’s uniform, his papers and assumed his identity. Somehow he slipped through the post-war cracks and made it to America, an unusual immigrant success story. So with help of a Nazi, I got an apartment at 2 Buswell Street in Back Bay. My new digs gave me plenty of space but it looked bare and empty since I never bothered to furnish it. I was on a very tight budget and my stinginess was beautifully exemplified by my habit of buying chicken necks and backs for ten cents a pound. The butcher always had a look of pity on his face for what was clearly a homeless person and would throw in some extra meat for free. I could walk to Boston University but had an old Chevy sedan from my Dad so I could drive to the TV station. Since I had grown up on air-cooled VWs, it never occurred to me to administer any coolant to this car’s radiator, and eventually the engine, dry as a bone and as hot as the interior of the sun, seized up on me at 70 mph. I abused that poor junk heap further when Royse and I drove home for Christmas that year. Although I did have coolant in the radiator this time, I had blithely forgotten to check on driving conditions along the New York State Thruway and at night we encountered white-out blizzard conditions. The snow got deeper and deeper until, as I was crawling along at 10 mph, the motor conked out. I opened the front hood to find the engine compartment packed solid with snow. So there we were, stalled in a snowstorm with no help in sight. This is the kind of scenario in which foolish people freeze to death. As we were rubbing two wet sticks together to start a fire, salvation appeared in the form of a state trooper. With his help, we got a tow truck to haul us to a service plaza where we somehow brought the car back to life and continued our poorly-planned journey to Cleveland. The following spring, I made another disorganized and thoughtless trip back home. I travelled with about two dollars in my pocket and at a service plaza I could only afford to get a small bag of chips. As I sat there with my stomach still growling, I considered what to do. I was too embarrassed to ask people for money but I needed more food. Finally, when I saw a family walk away and leave several unfinished meals on their table, I put on my most casual face, strolled over and happily and shamelessly stuffed myself on their remainders. When I got to the end of the New York State Thruway and was unable to pay the toll, the attendant, with a look of contempt, directed me to the administrative office where I was able to persuade a supervisor to take a personal check.
At WGBH, I was a member of their film crew and learned to load and operate Arriflex and Auricon 16 mm film cameras. This was before the era of portable video news cameras, and we would go out to film interviews and background footage that would be part of the station’s news reports. One time they sent me out alone with a still camera to photograph a racist Boston mayoral candidate named Louise Day Hicks. I trailed her like a paparazzi, and when she got out of a car, she looked right at me. As she scowled, I snapped. To her dismay, that unflattering picture was used in a WGBH news feature about her candidacy. I shot some footage on various subjects at the request of the Mr. Rogers PBS show in Pittsburgh, including antique cars, native American smoke signals and rain bubbles. Not sure if they were ever used but it was fun finding locales and getting friends to help. Our film unit also did a documentary on marijuana which included filming a pot party at a home in the country outside Boston. As the party-goers sat around the living room sharing joints, the segment producer thought the action was too slow (what did she expect? – everyone was stoned!) so she made me give my camera to a co-worker and told me to play the role of a party visitor who was against marijuana. So I pretended to argue with all the potheads about the virtues of a clean life. We had supplied the evil weed for the gathering and were driving back to the station – with the unsmoked portion of our stash packed in with the camera gear – when for some unknown reason our caravan was stopped by the police on a dark country road. We were all asked to step out of our cars and, during this process, I was able to run into the woods and dump our leftover cannabis. I don’t remember going to jail so it must have turned out alright.
We had a great “theatre of the absurd” weekend in October when Royse and I drove down to Washington to participate in the anti-Vietnam war March on the Pentagon organized by Abie Hoffman and his Yippie party. Hoffman had applied in writing to the government for permission – denied, of course – to levitate the Pentagon and drive out its evil spirits. I myself didn’t present a very convincing anti-establishment image, since I was driving my pro-war Dad’s car and using his credit card to pay for the gas. Nonetheless, Royse and I were in the crowd of 50,000 people who marched across the Potomac on October 21 and surrounded the Pentagon, trying to look both peaceful and menacing at the same time. Hippies wearing love beads put flowers down the rifle barrels of soldiers lined up to stop us. I remember looking into the face of one African-American National Guardsman and seeing fear. Driving back to Providence, we had a peace sign taped to our back window. A woman in a passing car saw the sign and stuck her tongue out at us.
January of 1968 marked the end of my internship at WGBH, and I said farewells to the film unit boss Roy Brubaker and cameramen Peter Hoving and Boyd Estes. I would be taking courses at Boston University for the spring semester. In my apartment building, endless free entertainment was provided by the crazy collection of young tenants, especially Paul Greenfield and Paul Baird, who were undergrads at BU. In one of their most creative undertakings, the two of them faked an LSD trip just to screw with one of their friends. Somehow the method acting became real and they really wigged out – foaming at the mouth, gagging and ripping their clothes. What a bunch of loonies. It was hard to picture them succeeding in the straight world. Greenfield did have the talent, however, of lighting his farts with a match without taking off his pants. Certainly that was a marketable skill.
Royse and I would go up to Maine for the occasional weekend to visit Dewitt and Patty. They would eventually have a house on Oak Woods Road in North Berwick, but before that, when they were early in their art careers and poor as church mice, they lived in Ogunquit and rented a tiny cottage in Perkins Cove. When we visited, we would sleep in their living room in front of the fireplace. There were always endless conversations at the dinner table about profound topics. A friend of theirs named Ken Rosen was always deep in the mix. Everyone was short of money. One year Dee and Patty lived on $2000. It’s worth noting here that in the 1960s (and really since the invention of the automobile), hitchhiking was still commonplace. I hitched around Cleveland when I was in high school. When I took my bike trip to Europe, I remember seeing dozens of young travelers standing by the roadside with their backpacks and their thumbs out. On one occasion, Royse and I somehow found ourselves in rural Maine on a dark country road with our suitcases trying to hail a ride. Miraculously, a young kid picked us up. He was a musician and was heading to play a gig. In the present day, it seems that the practice of hitchhiking – at least in the States – has all but died out.
Some of the music we listened to – besides the Beatles and Dylan – were Jefferson Airplane, Buffalo Springfield, Fresh Cream, Donovan, Ultimate Spinach, The Fugs, the Doors and the Grateful Dead. Since Royse was a senior at Pembroke, I would drive down to Providence fairly often. She was the leading light of the college dance club and I got to see her concert performances at the Faunce House theatre, including two pieces she choreographed – “Bound” and “The Establishment and Us”.
A colorful part of our lives was the group of friends we had at the Rhode Island School of Design. As one would expect, they were a collection of creative, laid back, anti-authority types. We both smoked our first joints at one of their parties. We visited one artist as he was busy in his kitchen drying and smoking banana leaves because he had heard they were hallucinogenic.
The spring of 1968 was a turbulent time. LBJ had halted the bombing of North Vietnam and announced that he would not run for re-election. Eugene McCarthy won the Democratic primary in Wisconsin. Martin Luther King was assassinated on April 4, and Washington and Chicago rioted and burned. Royse and I got engaged and planned a June wedding but I was still eligible for the draft, which would have complicated things no end. To better understand my options, I attended meetings of the Boston Draft Resistance Group, an organization that was of considerable interest to the FBI. I remember leaving a BDRG meeting and seeing a squad of government goons watching us. One guy was taking notes and another was filming every attendee as they walked by. This suggested to me that the FBI would create a file on me, if they didn’t already have one. One weekend’s entertainment was the film “The Battle of Algiers” with its gruesome but accurate depiction of the French-Arab colonial war. So as we headed towards summer, our choices were join the Peace Corps or move to Canada. One person who helped lighten things up was the singer Tiny Tim, who was very popular at the time with his vaudeville voice “shrilling like Amelita Galli-Curci” as noted in an excellent Sunday New York Times piece in April by Albert Goldman.
Earlier in the year we had applied to the Peace Corps and expressed an interest in South America, Micronesia and India. The slow government machinery that evaluates candidates began to turn. There was a mandatory background check and it transpired that one day an unsmiling man in a dark suit knocked on Jane’s door and said he wanted to talk to her about Peter Crall. This agent disclosed in a confidential whisper that the Peace Corps was very concerned about the subversive underground filmmaking I was involved in. Jane quickly reassured the Man in Black that I wasn’t talented or smart enough to be a societal threat. Thus, happily, in the first week of May we received notification that we had been selected to enter training to teach English in Libya. Training was to start in Arizona in early July. This was a welcome development since I didn’t want to tote a rifle in Vietnam if I could avoid it. Ironically and inexplicably, I had also gotten a letter from the National Security Agency inviting me to apply for employment there. Really? The selective service board had already gotten me down to my underpants once, so the Peace Corps was an attractive and legal alternative. I knew (barely) where Libya was, but, for a while, Royse thought (to her delight) that Libya was Liberia and that we were headed for the jungles of sub-Saharan Africa. In short order, however, we both understood that we were destined for a Muslim oil kingdom – and former colony of Italy – on the arid southern shore of the Mediterranean.
We had given some thought – but not much – to our aptitude for teaching. The Peace Corps, which was founded on the concept of amateur voluntarism, had looked over our applications and seemed to think we could manage in the classroom, but who really knew? I was just glad to be able to avoid military service and neither of us was following a deep-seated urge to teach. Our primary assets were being native speakers of English. The host nation wouldn’t be paying much for our services and probably thought we were a bargain. The reality check – working week after week in classrooms filled with kids – was yet to come.
During the month of May, there had been week after week of street rioting in France between workers/students and police. Warren-Boulton and his long-time girlfriend Liz got married June 1 in Princeton, New Jersey. Royse and I were best man and maid of honor. Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated on June 6. Our nation’s violent streak was on full display. We were headed into a presidential election in the fall with Eugene McCarthy and Nelson Rockefeller on the left and Richard Nixon and George Wallace on the right. Much debate on gun-control. Change was needed but nothing ever got done.
We headed back to Cleveland and I stayed with my parents at their house in Gates Mills as I prepared for our wedding. Barry Golson had been affianced to one Cynthia McKenzie and stayed with me for two days on a trip from Chicago to the East. During this time we got mandatory pre-Peace Corps dental work done at the Case School of Dentistry. In 2019 I still had some of those gold inlays. Since we were both near-sighted, we got the required low-cost, wire-rimmed glasses. All the new volunteers had them and, with our improved vision, we could spot one another from across an airport concourse.
On June 21, we celebrated Royse’s birthday at her house. Her grandmother Teetah was there, exuding Southern charm. My parents showed up and joined us for an evening of dinner and gift-opening. On the 26th, we got married at St. Christopher’s Church in Gates Mills with a wedding reception at the Hunt Club across the street. A good selection of family showed up and a bunch of friends – Gordie Campbell, Ted Drake, Bill Laufer, Allan Silberberg.
My dad sprang for the honeymoon and so we flew off that afternoon (via an overnight at the Plaza Hotel in New York City) for the Water Isle Colony Club in the town of Charlotte Amalie on St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. It was a beautiful place for relaxation but, with our young anti-establishment mindset, we couldn’t help but notice the stark disparities in wealth between black and white. The grinding poverty we saw made a mockery of the Virgin Island’s slogan: “American Paradise”. Since we were headed to our Libya training in Arizona, we were very interested to pay a brief visit to another Peace Corps training program which was being run close to our hotel.
After our honeymoon, we flew from St. Thomas to Jamaica to see Warren-Boulton, who was working in Kingston for the Ford Foundation. We had lost his contact information and so we spent a weekend in town wandering through dangerous neighborhoods, staying at fleabag hotels, eating in dirty restaurants and swimming at befouled beaches. I remember speaking with locals whose accent was so thick and strange that their speech was incomprehensible to us. On Monday we finally caught up with Rick and Liz and had several fun days with them. They had a car and drove us around. We even got to see some of the tourist sights in Montego Bay, including Dunn River Falls, which has a series of cascades that can be climbed.
We flew out of Kingston on July 13 and, after stops in Miami and New Orleans, arrived in Tucson where we spent the night in an airport motel. As an indicator of the approaching change in life style, we air freighted our fancy wedding clothing back to Cleveland.
July 14, 1968 was the first day of pacifist boot camp and sensitivity training – officially the Libya II program – and it got off to a slow start. The plan was for all incoming trainees to assemble at the Tucson airport, and it took all day for everyone to trickle in. Finally, we jammed ourselves and our luggage onto buses for the trip to Bisbee. In those days, the Peace Corps allowed newlyweds to enter training programs fresh from the altar, but we heard a rumor that, because of the high divorce rate, the policy would be changed to require a year of marriage. There were 126 of us – more than expected. There was a second site in Utah with another 110 trainees. That makes a total of 236 candidates for a final delegation of 175 volunteers. It’s clear that the program directors feel that the candidates would have to scale a very steep cliff to complete the training. We were all required to meet regularly with staff psychiatrists to have our heads shrunk. Some of those shrunken heads would roll through the weaning and “de-selection” process. Naturally, trainees felt under pressure in a situation like this and, in my case, I reacted by surrounding myself with a bubble of optimism and brave talk. I convinced myself that if someone got axed, it wouldn’t be me. I had made a mental investment in succeeding – I had to succeed. Survival instincts told me that, as I tackled the individual components of language, culture and teaching, I would need to appear as a capable and confident future volunteer teacher, regardless of how much fear and anxiety might be stewing inside me. Basically, my goal was to give them what they wanted to see.
Bisbee, the little burg blessed by fate to be the site of our training, was a rather funky place. A run-down mining town owned by the Phelps Dodge company, it featured the world’s largest open pit copper mine – the Lavender Pit – with all the associated mountains of “dump rock” and environmental damage. Every day at noon they would set off explosives that loosened the ore and rattled windows. Trainees were distributed among several seedy hotels in town. We lived in the Golden with other trainee couples and a colorful selection of intoxicated transients. During this time, I had my one and only relationship with a musical instrument. I bought a nice Hohner harmonica and learned to play several songs, but by the time we reached North Africa that phase of my life was over.
There was a good-sized contingent of Libyans on the training staff to teach us their local Arabic dialect and to introduce us to their culture. They did hard, tiring work in the classroom teaching us lump heads, but were always cheerful and good-hearted. They were a mix of Libya’s various regions – big city and remote village, Mediterranean coast and desert oasis. Most were brown-skinned in various shades, but a few were jet black like sub-Saharan Africans. My personal theory was that these blacks came to Libya as part of the trans-Saharan slave trade in centuries past. In the villages, women stay at home and never socialize with men outside their family, but in our program we had two single women from Tripoli – Aisha and Fawzia- – who didn’t fit this traditional mold. They were college-educated, emancipated and confident, and stood as professional equals with their male peers. You sensed that this made the Libyan men slightly uncomfortable but the zeitgeist in training was to be modern and forward, so they dealt with it. The women, however, were not so progressive that they played soccer. Instead, they cheered from the sidelines as the Libyan men played several exciting and hilarious pick-up matches against some locals from Bisbee.
The aptitude for learning language varied considerably among the trainees, and Royse and I were strictly in the middle of the pack. One of the linguistic hot shots in our program was Jay Shetterly, who already had several languages under his belt. He picked up Arabic faster than the Libyans could teach him and reminded me of Richard Francis Burton, the nineteenth century explorer, who had mastered twenty nine tongues. Jay was also an enthusiastic amateur entomologist who had an uncanny knack for discovering previously unknown bugs and already had several species named after him by the time he came to training. In later years, he practiced law in the Boston area and ran the risk of bumping into our son James since they had a shared interest in insects.
The Westinghouse Corporation, which was known for making kitchen appliances, had decided that they could also make money selling training services, and that was how their Learning Division came to be the primary contractor for running our program. They ran a tight ship and day to day there was very little free time after the relentless demands of Arabic classes, TEFL instruction and cross-cultural indoctrination. They even managed to throw in motorcycle training for the guys since some of us would be assigned schools in more than one town. We got some hands-on practice in teaching real students with classroom sessions across the border in the desolate, sunburnt village of Naco, Mexico. I’m not sure those little Latino kids learned anything but they were eager and we gave it our best effort. The Naco village elders showed their appreciation by hosting a pulled-pork feast for us and hiring a mariachi band. The best things the Libyan men liked about Naco were the whorehouses Mostly, after a typical day of activities, we just staggered back to our hotel and fell asleep. Trainee Harold McElhinney had a background in journalism plus an unusually high level of energy. He started a mimeographed weekly newsletter for the edification of all us information-hungry Bisbee pilgrims. It was called “Al Agreb” [The Scorpion] and carried marginally interesting articles about training life esoterica. On rare occasions we got out of Bisbee. One day we teamed up with another couple and hitched a ride to Tombstone courtesy of a couple of GIs returning to Fort Huachuca from a weekend of brothel-hopping across the border. They dropped us near the OK corral where Wyatt Earp had his thirty second shootout. Hitching back to Bisbee, we waited a long time in the rain before finally getting a ride from a nurse who somehow recognized us as Peace Corps. We talked about gully washers on the way back to town.
Neither the US government nor Westinghouse wanted any of us carefully trained charges getting sick and dying once we got to our in-country assignments, so they went to considerable lengths to make sure that we left Bisbee healthy. We got so many shots that both shoulders and both gluteus maximi were symmetrically sore. The real killers were the giant gamma globulin injections we all got multiple times in the butt. Medical safety procedures were shocking by today’s standards. The physician who gave us our shots would take the used syringes and make a game of tossing them several feet – uncapped – into a wastepaper basket. It was, however, a form of recycling. The needles went out to the local dump, readily available to local heroin addicts.
During language class one day, I caught a fly in mid air with my bare hand and popped it in my mouth. Now, I didn’t do this because I was hungry and had become an insectivore. It was simply a case of showing off too successfully, and there is a perfectly logical explanation for this unusual event. We were seated in our chairs in a semi-circle waiting for our Libyan instructor to show up. My fellow trainees and I passed the time in our usual manner by loafing, talking nonsense and not paying much attention to anything. A girl was having a conversation with herself in Arabic. One guy talked about buying a fancy car. Another bragged that his hands were faster than Muhammed Ali’s. When I heard that, I said, “Oh, yeah, watch this!”, and grabbed at a fly in front of me and pretended to pop it in my mouth. Of course, no one was watching when – to my surprise – I felt a buzzing on my tongue and then opened my trap to see an offended bluebottle escape to safety. I never had an audience for that once-in-a-lifetime grab, but I did prove to myself that I had pretty quick hands, and perhaps could “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee” as well as Ali, and didn’t need the long, sticky tongue of a chameleon.
One activity which is prominent in my memory was the twenty four hour isolation experience designed to toughen us mentally and encourage self-reliance. Each trainee was driven into the mountains near town and left there in the mesquite and sagebrush for a day with a tent and minimal supplies. I saw a bobcat. A skunk strolled into Royse’s tent in the middle of the night and curled up on her sleeping bag. Both of us recall the wind and the silence, and the realization that we didn’t see another human for an entire day. One trainee made the observation that people in such situations are seldom inclined to engage in idle philosophical contemplation about the meaning of life until they have taken care of more urgent issues like, where am I going to sleep, what’s my next meal, and will I become a snack for a mountain lion.
A finale to the training was a day-long picnic retreat for staff and trainees at the Cochise Stronghold Memorial Park high up in the Dragoon Mountains about fifty miles north of Bisbee. We all piled into a chartered bus for a hair-raising trip up into the hills on narrow switch-back roads. The driver said he knew the route quite well and didn’t need to slow down or exercise caution. The Libyans thought the danger was a lot of fun and they all sang and clapped their hands in unison, shouting “Ya, sawag!! Ya, mezhnoon!! (Hey, driver!! Hey, crazy!!). We cooked couscous and got to watch the North Africans slaughter two sheep for the party. Butchering animals is second nature to them, but for us delicate little white kids, it was a bit of a shock – a gory and fascinating process. Afterwards, I had fun blowing up a pair of sheep lungs like a balloon.
As expected, some trainees fell involuntarily by the wayside during the selection process, some left of their own accord, and the remainder received site assignments. Those survivors were excited, if a little apprehensive, at the prospect of a teaching job in what was truly terra incognita for us all . Most of us made brief dashes home to say goodbye to family. With farewells completed, we all rendezvoused at New York’s Kennedy Airport for the flight to North Africa.