10/22/2023
After graduating from Watertown High School, I went to UW, spent my junior year abroad in Germany, and graduated in June 1967 with a degree in history and international relations. I had gotten quite stoked by John F. Kennedy who said not to ask what your country can do for you, but to ask what you can do for your country. That was about a year after I had gone to the courthouse in Janesville where I had to stand up in front of a judge, raise my right hand and pledge my allegiance to America in order to become a U.S. citizen. When my family first came to the US in 1951, we had been classified as World War II refugees from Germany and I was a big Kennedy fan, making me think that becoming a citizen and spending a junior year abroad would be a good way to improve my chances of becoming a Peace Corps Volunteer. Glad that I was selected, I spent my first year of service as a high school teacher in Ethiopia, but due to rising anti-American sentiment there I was transferred to Ghana for the second year as a teacher trainer. Life wasn’t always easy, but the entire experience certainly gave me a good idea of some of the difficult conditions and different cultural practices still prevalent among much of the world’s population today.
The best thing about my year in Ethiopia, though, was getting to know a fellow volunteer named Lynne Sanford, a native of Alabama whose family had moved to Baltimore, and who was also a Peace Corps teacher. It was difficult for me to say goodbye to her, but absence makes the heart grow fonder. I flew back to Ethiopia over the Christmas break, and together we took a two-week tour of East African game parks, went swimming in the Indian Ocean, and became engaged. We call it our "0ut of Africa Moment". At the end of our second year of service, Lynne and I met in Europe to be married in the same small chapel in northern Germany where I had been baptized. We then returned to the US, moved to Madison, and went to graduate school: I studied European and German history, and Lynne studied developmental psychology. The result was a challenge often faced by academic couples, finding two faculty jobs at the same college, university, or location, plus finding childcare for a growing young family. In our case, this led to frequent moves to new locations such as Princeton, NJ, Greensboro, NC, Munich (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), Washington DC, and finally for almost 30 years at the University of Montana-Missoula.
And then there’s the inevitable issue of making a decision about where we would want to live in retirement. There was certainly reason to stay in Missoula, a lively college town in western Montana at the base of the Rocky Mountains between Glacier and Yellowstone National Parks. Why would want to leave a wide circle of community-involved colleagues and friends in Missoula, surrounded by such natural beauty? It was largely a matter of the distance between us and our two sons and their families, with one in Cambridge, Massachusetts and the other in Bethesda, Maryland — both also beautiful towns but not easy to visit from Montana! The winner finally was Cambridge, and a quick decision was made in response to the unexpected availability of housing immediately next door to our son there. Since Feb. 2022, we’ve had the pleasure of being much closer to our 4 grandchildren on the East Coast, and it’s truly a delight to feel more involved in their lives!
