Post date: Aug 11, 2014 3:56:18 AM
8 November 1964
My plans for the big trip are gelling well. we are three now, and we will probably go north in Nigeria first, so as to be among friends if trouble arises early in the game. I rode to Onitsha Monday and back Tuesday, five hours in the saddle each way, to check up on the plans, as the mails are too slow. [Johnny Von Foerster, my travel partner, was stationed near Onitsha.] I have the major part of my equipment accounted for. I can easily carry a cot with mosquito net. We will carry extra gas and water, stove and food (tho we hope we don't have to cook much), and money. The Peace corps is giving me $262.50 for this vacation, plus my regular allowance of $150. By the time we get to Yaounde we will know if we feel like a side trip to Gabon to see Schweitzer. Also know if we feel like climbing Mt. Cameroon. I sure do miss a trip to East Africa with its game preserves and a hike up Mt. Kilimanjaro with snow. That will have to wait until I am a rich executive or something. Some of the kids are trying to hitchhike there, but with all the trouble in Congo and Sudan [some things never change], they may never make it or may have to fly back.
We are in final exams for the lower classes, and fifth form is reviewing for School Certificate exam, which starts with my practical exam on 16 November. After that I hope to go to Lagos for visas and return by Thanksgiving. Then I go back to Benin City for a chemistry teacher's meeting. If I have time, I will go to a wedding in Ogoja on 14 Nov. In this month I will probably record 1,500 to 2,000 miles on the Honda! At forty miles an hour, that is 50 hours. Oh, my aching behind. If I stop often it is tolerable, but the back of my neck gets sunburned.
As I may have mentioned, I may go into business when I come back to the States. The fellows in Seattle have re-offered. They want to buy out an old organ-building company in Seattle whose owner is getting old. He is the only one in the business now who knows what he is doing and there is no one else to sell to. If we bought him out we would have to fulfill his present contracts (which wouldn't be so bad, sort of get our feet on the ground) before anything new started. Trouble is I'm kind of half way around the world, and I don‘t know how much of a hurry Glenn is in. Also don‘t know where the money would come from. If I do get into this I want to be an owner and profit sharer, rather than an employee. Anyway, right now David is in Spokane teaching, so probably nothing will be done until at least June. A large part of this business, we hope, will be research and acoustical consulting to architects. The quality of music is so much tied with the acoustics of the building that we would be a flop if we couldn't insist that the church be built acceding to some reasonable standard. Also, getting in with the architects gives us an ‘in' with church organ committees, or at least building committees. I can think of at least three large churches in Seattle with big music programs which are largely colossal flops because the church just will not acoustically support music. (Usually the organ is a loser, too.)
I have rewritten my latest [church organ] epistle again, and await the final editing by Mick before I type it and send it off to you. This one is 18 pages!
Hah, Mary [my girlfriend when I left Seattle] wrote, mentioning that I had written of ‘human sacrifices‘, and hoping that I was not serious. Hah, well, no one can be certain about these things, or else the police would put a stop to it, but there are several indications that there are still human sacrifices in Aro. And everyone is very casual about it here.