INTRO
So how did I come to create this family history website and write this wandering, loosely-organized tale of Crall doings?
Friends and relatives weren’t clamoring for it.
There were no eager publishers pushing seven-figure advances on me in anticipation of my next best-selling oeuvre.
The truth is I was simply a passive victim of circumstance.
It transpired that one day in the fall of 2019, as I was sitting around being my normal unproductive self, I received a letter from a gentleman named Randy Hobler. He had been a Peace Corps volunteer in the same Libya II program in which Royse and I had served. He wanted to arrange a telephone interview with me as part of his research for a book he was writing on the Peace Corps Libya program. I e-mailed him back and said that I would prefer to write up a narrative and send it to him since this would serve as a replacement for the journal which I had kept during our year in Qaminis but which I had subsequently lost when we were vacationing in Greece.
Although I wrote a great deal of mostly academic stuff in high school and college, since then, for many years, the only things I’d written had been Christmas cards and checks. Frankly, I wasn’t sure what I could produce. Nonetheless, having made the promise, I sat down at my computer and started tapping away.
After about a month, to my surprise, I had concocted a fairly long retelling of our time on the southern shore of the Mediterranean teaching English and trying to speak Arabic. In fact, I found that I rather enjoyed the process of calling up all those memories and putting them into a readable form. The document I sent off to Randy was over 12,000 words. He folded my narrative into his book and when “101 Arabian Tales – How We All Persevered in Peace Corps Libya” was published in 2020, many vignettes of Peter and Royse’s life in Barqa (Cyrenaica) province were included.
Having sent off that first effort and while going through a box of papers, I found “East of the Marble Arch”, an eighty-page mimeographed collection of essays written by volunteers in Libya’s eastern province, including my description of attending two village funerals in our village of Qaminis. The entries were all presented anonymously, but they still seemed to be quite a valuable historical record. I sent photocopies of it to Randy and to the American University (which maintains a digital Peace Corps Community Archive) and neither of them had ever heard of it.
Perhaps I had held the only surviving copy.
As I basked in the unfamiliar afterglow of these rather modest accomplishments, I realized that having done the Libya account, I wanted to keep going. Thus, over the next ten months, the muse of nostalgia and temps perdu took possession of me and I cranked out additional – and extensive – recollections of our three years in Thailand. I sent those Peace Corps chronicles to the American University and they are now published online as The Peter Crall Collection. What a boost to my ego.
Little moi, a published author.
After that, my hunt-and-peck juggernaut continued. Having developed this literary head of steam, I then moved on to Crall family history, creating a series of narratives almost entirely from memory. Additionally, I edited and organized a few stories that my parents had written, always using my own personal biases when I had to rewrite or embellish any material. There remain, untouched, several shoe boxes full of family letters, journals, and even a formal family history from my paternal grandmother. They are a treasure trove of information, but I simply haven’t brought myself to read and organize them.
This website is meant to be shared and remain as an open and growing repository of photos, stories, and memories. Please add to it or revise it as the spirit moves, and pass it down to succeeding generations as a collective heritage.
Thank You!!
