Happenstance

A bastard boomer negotiates the maze of postwar America. Wrenched from his working single mother, and brought to Camp Pondosa by his grandfather who was Woods Manager for McCloud Rv. Lumber Co. After his WAC mother became X-ray tech at the McCloud hospital, and acquired a husband, the new family moved to R. A. Long’s “planned city” of Longview, Washington. A shocking change for a country-bumpkin kid. He attended Catholic School in this pretentious mill town with its socially stratified culture of mill workers, overlords and timber barons. Catholic indoctrination led to the Franciscan Seminary. He survived into his 6th year at the college of San Luis Rey, CA, when love won out. This young man left the pursuit of the priestly vocation to pursue the woman he had dated since his fifteenth year.
First collegiate in his family, he and his girl entered the daunting halls of ivy at University of Washington. Engaged to his high school sweetheart, graduation approached in the turbulent years of 1969. A youth’s options were few during the Vietnam War. Having taken his Naval Officer Candidate School exam, he also applied for Peace Corps. The NOCS did not reply, but the Peace Corps invited him to Kenya. Parting with his xenophobic fiancé, he served in the idyllic Hills of Taita where began a romantic involvement with a Taita woman … and her 3 children. Their happy two years together ended when he was exiled from Taita by his military induction notice. By happenstance, Richard Nixon had changed the course of his life.
One young man’s account chronicles the most turbulent growth in United States history. These were expansions in technology, global influence, wealth, power, popular unrest, and human rights. These changed America from a isolationist, racist enclave, to the present confusing, liberating, imperialistic and ideologically-divided envy of the world.