After 30 years at Ohio's Oberlin College. John C. Kennedy, 57, last week left his job as alumni recorder, rented his 15-acre farm, and drove off with his schoolteacher wife, Miriam, 53, to join the U.S. Peace Corps. At Pennsylvania State University, the Kennedys began a seven-week cram course with 153 other recruits from 42 states, the biggest single corps group yet launched. Their goal: two-year jobs as teachers' aides in the rural Philippines. "All our lives we've wanted to do something like this," said Quaker Kennedy. "We've talked about doing something personal for peace. This is our chance."
John Kennedy is the oldest trainee at Peace Corps boot camps, now operating on seven U.S. campuses, from Harvard to Berkeley. Most recruits are in their early 20s; the Kennedys know they may wash out before they ever reach the Philippines. But so may others much younger. If the Peace Corps fails, it will not be for lack of talent to choose from. At the rate of 100 a day, some 12,250 Americans have now volunteered. For brains, looks and verve, those chosen so far would rank high in any enterprise.
Sixty Hours, Six Days. Penn State's contingent had no need for the word of welcoming brass that the Peace Corps is to be no immature "kiddie corps.'' Arms aching with shots for everything from typhoid to TB, they began studying 60 hours a week on a six-day schedule (plus exams on Sundays) that is twice the load of ordinary Penn State students. In the Philippines, they will mainly teach elementary science, serve as models of spoken English. But to prepare, they are tackling everything from Philippine history, culture and economics to family habits and sex mores (advice from one Filipino lecturer: "No touch.")—plus first aid, nutrition, U.S. history and world politics. Said one awed Penn State professor: 'I wish we had a whole university with folks like this. They're pushing the life out of us to get started.''
So it went last week at all the other centers:
¶ Farthest along are 78 Colombia-bound volunteers (all men) at New Jersey's Rutgers University. Sponsored by CARE, they have spent six 60-hour weeks studying Spanish, U.S. and Latin American culture, how to play soccer and how to ride a horse. Next month they shove off for two years of digging wells, building roads and schools in remote mountain villages.
¶ Newest trainees are 18 men and women who started work late last week at Iowa State University. Directed by an organization called Heifer Project Inc. (which since 1944 has shipped more than 800,000 farm animals and chicks to 60 countries), Iowa State's farm-wise corpsmen will spend a month boning up for a tour of improving soil and livestock production on the West Indian island of Santa Lucia. One of Iowa State's volunteers is Madge Shipp, a Negro schoolteacher from Detroit whose age, 55, almost matches Penn State's Kennedys. She quit her $6,600-a-year teaching job because "I feel that people in the highly developed countries have lost their sense of purpose. The Peace Corps is a chance to get away from the materialism of everyday living."