People I Never Met

Certain people achieved legendary status around the time I was in Pohnpei, but none of them and I were ever in the same place at the same time. Still I am going to write a little about them just to make my chronicle complete.

Bob and Patti Arthur built a set of huts on a peninsula in the Awak neighborhood, a few miles south and east down the road from Kolonia. I exchanged emails with Patti several times several years later, when email become a thing--probably around 1987. Their place, which was called The Village, did very well until the last few years, when a couple of problems arose. The first was that their landlord either died or bequeathed his land to his children, who then raised the rent on The Village. The other was a business venture involving pepper cultivation and the harvesting of from trochus shells, from which buttons could be made by local craftsmen. This led to litigation involving the FSM government and a lender bank in Guam. It's a depressing story, but you can read the grisly details at the following URLs:

http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/international/radio/program/pacific-beat/fsm-landmark-hotel-set-to-close-over-land-dispute/1118074

http://archives.pireport.org/archive/2009/June/06-19-cm.htm#Sherry O’Sullivan

By the time Loren drove us out to see the deserted resort, members of the Awak families were already starting to move in and re-purpose the building materials.

Matt Mix was already famous by the time I arrived at Peace Corp staging at Escondido, California. We were told his story by Dr. John Exner, who served from 1968 to 1969 as a director for the East Asia, Pacific, North Africa, Near East Regions of the Office of Selection, Peace Corps. Matt, who was with one of the first Peace Corps groups in Micronesia, was photographed walking down the moveable staircase from the DC-6 in Guam wearing a striped blazer and a straw hat and possibly a beard. Some wire service picked up the photo, which ended up in a local newspaper in Indiana or other midwestern state, where the editor paired it with a photo of a cleancut young man entering his Army Recruiter's office. The caption was something like "Red-blooded Americans go into the draft. Hippies join the Peace Corps."

This story--coming in the midst of the Vietnam War--caused an appalling public relations debacle for the Peace Corps, and Exner was lecturing all new trainees about proper apparel when deboarding their respective airplanes. Matters were made worse when Matt was apprehended planting marijuana in Kusaie and had to be kicked out of the Peace Corps by Loren Peterson. Back in Escondido, Exner's final statement to the guys is still ringing in my ears: "If you are not wearing a coat and tie when you get off the plane in Guam, I will personally castrate you with a dull razor blade."

Loren told me that Matt was undaunted by his ejection. He returned to New York, where he worked for a florist and earned enough to buy a ticket back to Pohnpei. There he became friends with Bob and Patti Arthur, described above, along with Loren and several others. By 2013 his health was failing and I missed meeting him by only a day.

You can read an interesting chronicle that includes stories of Matt Mix in book by Steve Nix called 9307. Nix mentioned that when Matt came back as a private citizen to Pohnpei to work in community development, he was employed by Carlos Etscheit, along with Matt's brother-in-law Alan Burdick, a Peace Corps attorney to assist with a land dispute. Matt and Alan were in-laws having married Mortlockese sisters.

Joseph ("Yope") Royce, the first director of Peace Corp Pohnpei, was gone before I arrived. He was born in the Netherlands and later become a tenured professor of kinesiology at the University of California at Berkeley. Loren Peterson knew him and learned about the scandal in which Royce became embroiled back in California. The link is to an article in People Magazine, June, 1989. Loren told me--though I could not corroborate this claim--that Royce was murdered while serving his prison term.

Village gazebo will standing in May 2013

The view from The Village was spectacular

Sherry O'Sullivan was "a Canadian journalist who lived in the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) for five years. She was the editor and co-owner of The FSM-NEWS (subcaptioned: No Fear - No Favor), the only independent newspaper in the FSM until it was forced closed and she was [she claims] illegally deported in 1997."

Sherry wrote at least one of the pieces about corruption in the FSM and how it had destroyed Bob and Patti Arthur's business. She also apparently made some unsupportable claims about public officials private lives that caused a scandal. Francis Hezel refers to this incident in his book Making Sense of Micronesia, but does not state her name. Freedom of the press is apparently not considered a fundamental right by the FSM.

You can read about her dismissal at

http://www.pjreview.info/sites/default/files/articles/pdfs/pjr4%20%281997%29%20micro%20censorship%20-%20cronau_pp74-77.pdf

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