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Touch
of Gray - May / June 2002
The
Griffins Remember Afghanistan
Two Talented Musicians
Women Who Served in World War Two Remember
Employee Scholarship Winners
Helaine Plaut Receives 2002 President's Award
Empire of the Sultans
Carolina Meadows Winners in Senior Games
The
Griffins Remember Afghanistan
Carol
and Willis Griffin, who now live at Carolina Meadows, clearly
remember their first glimpse of Afghanistan. The view was
through the windows of an ancient unpressurized DC-3 twin-propeller
aircraft, smelling of uncured karakul pelts and the residue
of airsick passengers, as it flew through the towering mountain
spires on the air route from Karachi, Pakistan. The scenery
was compelling, as was the warm welcome accorded to them by
Willis’s future colleagues of a Teachers College Columbia
University mission, when they landed there in the early morning
light in September, 1956.
Willis,
a Teachers College, Columbia University Doctorate and an associate
professor in Teachers College, was en route to Kabul as assistant
director of a mission sponsored by the U.S. State Department
to work with Afghan officials to modernize their public education
system. When Griff presented the prospect of an assignment
in Afghanistan to Carol, her response was quick: "Let’s
go! Where is it?"
The
entire family of Willis, known as Griff, Carol, Cynthia, 7,
and Timothy, 4, made the long journey from New York. The original
assignment of eighteen months was at Griffin’s request
extended to four years. In Kabul, a new home awaited them.
One of the few two-story homes in Kabul, it was a spacious
concrete house, surrounded by a wall for security and privacy,
owned by a retired Afghan general and leased to a succession
of American expatriates. It came equipped with a household
staff of male servants prepared to cook and serve meals, keep
house, take care of the laundry, provide security, and help
to educate the Griffins in the folkways and customs of their
new neighbors.
Each
of the visiting American experts was assigned an Afghan counterpart,
who was expected eventually to go to America for further training
before returning to Afghanistan to work as a specialist in
some field of education. Griff’s counterpart was a young
Afghan known as Mr. Formaly, who came from a remote village
and had learned about America mainly from the movies. He was
sure that all the Indians in the US lived and worked in Hollywood.
Although
Griff had served in the China-Burma-India theater as an Air
Force communications officer in World War II, life in Afghanistan
still held revelations stemming from the complex history of
Central Asia. Through three wars in the 19th and 20th centuries,
the Afghans had successfully resisted British efforts to graft
Afghanistan onto the Indian Raj and Czarist efforts to bring
it under Russian sway. In the mid-20th century, following
the reigns of several modernizing monarchs, the Afghans were
opening themselves more broadly to Western influence. For
archeological studies they turned to the French. For science,
they borrowed from the Germans, and now they were seeking
American advice to help them improve their schools.
Carol,
who had grown up on Long Island and attended the University
of Michigan, was making her first foray outside the United
States and finding herself enchanted by the strange old country.
Later, in an account of the family’s adventures, she
wrote:
"I had never lived among mountains. To look up and see
barren heights encircling the city gave me a feeling of shelter
but also sequestered and remote. The mountains fascinated
me as they altered in shape and color, mist or clouds shadowing
or obliterating the peaks, light seeking crevices, gray changing
to black to purple to pink to tan to white crowned peaks that
slowly stretched downward during the winter months like the
lowering of a veil. At 6,500 feet the city air was light and
dry and the sky spread close, like the inside of a tent top."
The
contrasts with her previous life went far beyond the scenery
and the climate. "The numerous cultural differences were
more startling," she wrote. "Strict Muslim law governed
the country. No Afghan woman could be seen outside her home
without the chadari, a long, usually light blue gown that
hung over her head and down to her ankles with a slight lattice
work slit from which she viewed the world but was not seen
or identified by others….We foreign women were careful
about our dress, never wearing pants in public or sleeveless
dresses or shorts in the summer. Even so our uncovered heads
and bare legs drew stares and comments."
"When
we were invited to an Afghan home, the foreigners sat in one
room with the men of the house, while the women prepared food
and discussed us as they peered through carved wooden screens
in the walls. Often the children and I were escorted back
to the women’s quarters; we foreign women were fortunate
in having the best of two worlds, being with the men as well
as having access to the female area."
As
curious and interested visitors, the Griffins tried to take
in as much as they could of the country surrounding them.
Disregarding warnings of bandits and warlords, they drove
the precipitous rock-strewn narrow road from Kabul to the
Kyber Pass and on into Pakistan.
The
Griffin children, Cynthia and Timothy, were enrolled along
with children of American and other foreign families in the
International School. The wife of a French archeologist had
founded the school, and while most classes were taught in
English, the teaching of French was strongly emphasized.
In
what was regarded as a cultural breakthrough, on the national
holiday the king, Zahir Shah, and government officials appeared
in public with their wives who had abandoned the traditional
chadari, signaling a mandate to cast aside the veil. "This
was a major event," says Griff. "It was an indicator
of the direction in which the country was headed, and among
other results, it led indirectly toward the expansion of schools
for girls." Afterward, middle class and upper class women
felt free to appear in public in western dress. Many women
of more traditional families, however, continued to wear the
chadari.
One
of the objectives of the Columbia Team efforts was to widen
the teaching of English. There had been English language teachers
in the country since the early ‘50s, and the Teachers
College program recruited a linguist expert and several teachers
of ESL (English as a Second Language) to help spread English.
Carol was asked by the Deputy Minister of Education to teach
English to young women at the Women’s Faculty (University).
These students, all members of the upper class, had attended
a girls’ secondary school where the language of instruction
was French, but many of them hoped to go for higher education
to the US, England, Pakistan and India or to accompany future
husbands on diplomatic assignments.
Griff
and his colleagues found strong support for their project
in the Ministry of Education, and especially with Dr. Mohammed
Anas, the deputy minister of education, who became a valued
friend of the Griffins. Another very close friend was Musa
Shafiq Kamawi, who had studied at Al Azhar in Cairo as well
as at the Institute for International Law at Columbia University.
In 1964 he headed a special commission to rewrite the Constitution
and to explain it to the provinces throughout the country.
The Loya Jirga, the governing Council, was to have its members
elected directly from the various provinces. In the past the
members had been appointed by the Shah.
Later
the Teachers College Project focused on improving the textbooks
available to Afghan schools. Griff reflected that much of
the work done in Afghanistan was lost during the Soviet occupation
from 1979 to 1989 and the following years of internal conflict
and rule by the Taliban. Under the Taliban, education of girls
was virtually abandoned and the teaching of boys was largely
limited to madrassahs, the religious schools that taught little
but rote memorization of the Koran.
After
a few years in Afghanistan, Griff was awarded a sabbatical
leave and a grant from the Asia Foundation to do a six-month
study at the American University of Beirut. There he wrote
a report which he called "There May Yet be Time,"
a title inspired by a statement from Musa Shafiq when attempting
to find the way Afghanistan could retain its basic Islamic
values while undertaking progressive reform. After another
eighteen months in Kabul, Griff returned to Teachers College
to help recruit and train people to continue the work of the
Afghan Project and a similar project in India, which he subsequently
joined for three years. A third child was born in India. On
returning to the United States, Griff joined the Center for
Developmental Change at the University of Kentucky. He and
his family lived in Lexington, KY, until he and Carol moved
to Carolina Meadows three years ago.
Meanwhile,
following the defeat of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan,
Teachers College is now gathering a small working group and
exploring the possible resuscitation of the Afghan Project
and exploring new ways to reach the Afghan people. As Barry
Rosen, director of External Affairs at Teachers College put
it, "The textbooks created by Teachers College and the
Afghan Ministry of Education separated religion from the other
disciplines and used the Socratic method to encourage thinking."
The
work of Griff and the other professionals involved in the
original Afghan Project was documented in the archives of
the Milbank Memorial Library at Teachers College. These records
are currently under study for the guidance they can provide
in a new educational effort in Afghanistan.
In
the last twenty years time ran out for Afghanistan’s
people. Perhaps now the new Afghan government and international
endeavors can yet provide the means for THERE MAY YET BE TIME,
the hopeful theme of Griff’s 1959 paper and the dream
of the late Musa Shafiq.
-- Robert Parker, Resident
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Two
Talented Musicians
An overflow audience enjoyed Connie
Rachlin's presentation of Becky Wagner's harp recordings
in The Fairways some weeks ago. Don Hamm, who organized
the event, pointed out Becky and Connie were lifelong friends
and fellow students at the remarkable Curtis Institute of
Music in Philadelphia, the all-scholarship school that produced
so many outstanding musicians over the years.
I,
for one, never before realized the versatility of the harp
as a musical instrument until I heard Becky's beautiful interpretations
of so many classical favorites. Did you know that these particular
recordings had been long forgotten and lay dormant in the
vaults of the Curtis Institute of Music for almost seventy
years? When Becky became ill two years ago her eldest son,
Herbert Theodore, unearthed them and transferred them to CDs
for our renewed enjoyment.
Most
of us realize that Connie Rachlin, too, is quite a performer
as a pianist in her own right. Connie is a frequent accompanist
in the auditorium for many campus events, ranging from memorial
services to Sunday concerts. She is also the official accompanist
for CM's male vocal group, the Elder Statesmen who hold their
regular rehearsals in her villa. Did you know that Connie
(then Connie Russell) was a child virtuoso in her native Washington,
DC, starting at the age of five and performed on the radio
as young as six? You should see her scrapbook of youthful
appearances, including her playing at the National Society
of Children of the American Revolution Convention in Continental
Hall when she was twelve years old.
-- Des Riley, Resident
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Women
Who Served in World War Two Remember
For many of us living in Carolina Meadows,
World War Two was the defining event of our lives. As we honor
the men who took part, let us not forget the 100,000 women
who also served in the Armed Forces. We asked eleven of these
veterans living here to think back sixty years and recall
some of their experiences.
Gert
Kohn, now approaching her 87th birthday, has been a Carolina
Meadows resident since 1986. Hailing from Michigan, she had
a long and distinguished career in nursing. In the forties,
while serving as a school nurse in her hometown of Palmer,
Michigan, she ran into old school friends who had lost limbs
in battle. She wondered if some of their limbs could have
been saved with more nursing attention and decided to enlist.
She
served with the Army Nursing Corps in the Pacific Theater
and as she put it, "did what nurses do - take care of
patients. We had American and Chinese servicemen and frequently
Japanese prisoners." Her most unusual wartime experience,
she recalls, was meeting with the Indian leader, Mahatma Gandhi.
But
the memory that really stays with her was entering New York
Harbor about ten in night in 1946 at war's end and seeing
the Statue of Liberty so brightly lit. "We anchored for
the night," she remembers. "The excitement of all
the tugs and vessels giving salutes in the morning and the
crowd waiting on the dock - the band playing and the Red Cross
there giving us free milk, a long awaited treat."
In
1941, Emily Newcity signed on with the WACs as a secretary.
But when assigned to service at Fort H. G. Wright in New York,
they discovered that she was a singer and she became an entertainer
to the troops. Hers was the first WAC contingent to go to
the Southwest Pacific. She was assigned to the Counter-Intelligence
Section of GHQ. Her unit was first stationed in Brisbane,
Australia and then moved up as the war progressed to Hollandia,
New Guinea, Tachoban on Leyte and finally to Manila in the
Philippines.
Recalling
those Far Eastern postings, she still remembers how she loved
Australia, was intrigued by New Guinea and shocked by the
devastation of Manila. She remembers meeting some of the Americans
taken prisoner by the Japanese at the outbreak of war. "They
really lived a nightmare," she comments.
Nowadays
at Carolina Meadows every Friday Emily's husky, alluring and
still strong voice joins Ed Hasselblad at the piano for our
Health Center Happy hour. The Ed and Emily Show proved so
popular that a second one takes place on Wednesdays, at The
Fairways, our assisted living center.
Dorothy
Ferster graduated from Case Western University. When war broke
out she joined the WAVES. With her background as an English
major she was trained as a Communications Officer. At the
Navy Department she encoded and decoded messages and delivered
Secret and Top secret messages to Navy command posts, to the
Pentagon and even to the White House. "I sometimes went
on foot, sometimes on a tricycle along the corridors of the
Navy Department and across the temporary bridges than spanned
the reflecting pool in front of the Washington Monument,"
she recalls.
What
was her most striking memory of those years, we asked her.
"Most interesting from a personal standpoint, "
she commented, "was that I met my future husband at a
dance for military personnel in Washington. We danced the
rest of the evening together. We have been married 56 years
and have been dancing together ever since." That is true
enough. Dorothy and Paul were among those who began the Carolina
Meadows Club Med-Oh!s weekly dance programs here ten years
ago and they still take the floor on Friday nights.
Pauline
Brimhall was a school nurse in Eastern Michigan University
when the war broke out. She enlisted in the US Army Nurse
Corps in 1943, reporting to Camp McCoy in Sparta, Wisconsin.
Along with 18 other nurses, 20 medical officers and other
enlisted men she served on the staff of the 35th Field Hospital
overseas, serving in the European, African and Middle Eastern
Theaters of war. Her most vivid memories were of Southern
Italy where she spent most of her war years. After four months
in a field hospital in Erchie in the toe of Italy, she was
asked to head a platoon of nurses to move 46 miles away to
Lecce on the Adriatic to set up her own 100-bed hospital to
serve the 98th Bomber Group.
"It
was here that we suffered one of the worst epidemics of hepatitis
in the world, according to the team of doctors sent from Washington
to investigate," she recalls. "Many of the military,
including all my nurses except one, and even I, myself, became
acutely ill and had to be sent to a General Hospital in Bari,
Italy, for intensive care. I was hospitalized for over a month
before being well enough to return to duty." As the war
moved into central Europe in 1945, she and her staff were
sent to Naples, awaiting orders to be shipped to the Pacific.
"And then," she remembers, " came the long-awaited
news that the war was over!"
Margaret
Disney was secretary to the Dean of the Baltimore College
of Dental Surgery when the war began. The Army mounted a recruitment
effort called "Blue Angels for Purple Hearts" to
recruit nurses' aides for wounded soldiers and Margaret joined
up. She says that she received much more than she gave from
her time in the service. The x-ray training she received made
a big difference later in her thirty-year working career in
Maryland's Chronic and Rehabilitation Hospitals.
D'Ann
Craven loves to water-walk in the swimming pool and you will
find her there almost daily. It seems like a long time ago
since she served as an Ensign in the US Navy Nurse Corps in
World War Two. "Lots of my friends served overseas,"
she commented, "but all my service was only eighty miles
from home - at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station."
One day she does not forget was when her unit took part in
the Navy Day Parade in Chicago and was reviewed by Admiral
Halsey.
Carol
Lasher Miller, a recent arrival at Carolina Meadows and an
artist of note, was at the University of Georgia when the
war began. A year later she joined the WAVES, as many of her
friends were in the Navy. Her college degree had trained her
in drawing and painting so she became a Lieutenant JG working
as an illustrator in the Bureau of Aeronautics in Washington
D C. She also had duty on the Navy Pier in Chicago where her
group built models and highlighted Navy activities to encourage
citizens to invest in War Bonds. She recalls meeting Hollywood
producers and artists there who were involved in the project.
Phyllis
Sternschein was an executive secretary at the Screen Cartoonists
Guild in Los Angeles in 1941 when war broke out. Many of the
young men in the Guild were enlisting. So Phyllis reported
as a private to Monticello, Arkansas, and was sent to Russellville,
Arkansas to learn Army procedures. She moved on to Camp Lee,
Virginia as a WAC and was enrolled in OTC for officer training.
She served as a Second Lieutenant at Fort Lee and later as
Company Commander in Fort Meade, Maryland. Here she met her
husband, Irving, also an officer.
Amber
Aberson, a resident of Building One since 1997, is now in
her eighties and still an active and accomplished golfer.
She was living in England with her parents and working in
a canteen for the British Armed Forces in 1939 when Britain
went to war. She enlisted in the WAAF, the Women's Auxiliary
Air Force, in 1940. She became a "plotter" in the
operations room of a RAF fighter station. All through the
Battle of Britain she posted the flights of British and German
planes overhead. Later she was commissioned as a Code and
Cipher Officer with the RAF. Her most vivid wartime memory
was of traveling to Yalta on Winston Churchill's staff for
the Crimea Conference. "Going to Yalta we lived on a
ship in Sebastopol," she recalls. "Churchill and
his daughter traveled back with us by sea to Malta."
Ruth
Goldwasser, another very active golfer at the Meadows, has
wartime memories too. She was living at Southwestern University
in Oklahoma in December 1941. Her father was in the Army and
she was recruited for Physical Therapy. She first served in
the WACS and then trained for a Physical Therapy commission
in the Medical Department in 1941. Her wartime service was
at Halloran General Hospital on Staten Island in New York.
"The wonderment of helping handicapped men in uniform
improve was what I most remember about those years,"
Ruth comments.
"I
was working as a journalist in Baltimore when I heard of the
Pearl Harbor attack on the radio," Jane Connelly, now
89 years old, remembers, "Two weeks later I volunteered
for the two to six a.m. shift, three nights a week, at the
local Aircraft Warning Center." She stayed at this job
till the following June when the WAAC (Women's Auxiliary Air
Corps) was established. She attended the first US Army Training
Camp for Women in Fort Des Moines, Iowa. By the time WAAC
became WAC in late 1943 Jane was a second lieutenant working
in Washington, DC. In December of 1943 she joined three other
WAC officers to sail 17 days to the French owned island of
New Caledonia to the headquarters of the famous Admiral "Bull"
Halsey.
While
the other three WAC officers were secretaries for the generals
in the South Pacific sector, Jane, with her journalistic background,
had the more interesting assignment of working with a team
engaged in top secret radio communications. Their responsibility
was to report on the movements and intelligence reports on
Japanese forces and attempt to break enemy codes.
Jane
vividly recalls June 6, 1944, when she and many others were
at a social gathering near Admiral Halsey's headquarters in
the South Pacific. As the Admiral arrived all waited anxiously
for word of the D-Day invasion on the other side of the world.
"Suddenly Halsey raised his glass", she recalls.
" A silence swept over the great room - glasses were
filled. - He looked at his watch and verified the time with
his aide - and in that faraway place under tropical skies
his southern voice spoke strong and sure 'To Victory - God
bless them all!'" -- Betty Kent and Des Riley, Residents
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Employee
Scholarship Winners
Four
Carolina Meadows employees have been awarded $500 scholarships
under the Residents' Association Scholarship Program, now
in its third year. This year's winners are: Patrick Bennett
and Marcus Edwards, who work in Dining Services, and Kristin
Ferriter and Stephanie Hodges, who work in the Health Center.
The scholarship program has assisted a total of eleven employees
since it began in 2000. Carolina Meadows congratulate them
all on what they have already achieved, and on the dedication
to their scholastic goals.
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Helaine
Plaut Receives 2002 President's Award
Dick
Ballard, president of the Residents Association, awarded the
2002 President's Award to Helaine Plaut, founder of the Community
Outreach Volunteers Committee. Through this committee, which
she has chaired for the past two years, Helaine started the
highly successful Volunteers Fairs and the OPC (Orange, Persons,
Chatham counties) Summer Camp Meadowoods for developmentally
handicapped children.
Active
in the United Nations Association, the Triangle chapter grew
from 30 members to 300 under her leadership. After moving
to Carolina Meadows she has held monthly luncheons and an
annual UN celebration event promoting environmental, population
and other timely issues.
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Empire
of the Sultans
On
May 23rd, Carolina Meadows residents enjoyed a gala Turkish
Dinner followed by a slide presentation by the NC Museum of
Art. Upon entering the lobby of the Club Center guests were
met by a camel and a made-in-Carolina Meadows model of the
Sultan Ahmet Camirs Blue Mosque of 1616. After dinner residents
enjoyed a presentation by John Coffey, Deputy Director of
Curatorial Services at the North Carolina Museum of Art, on
selections from over 200 antique objects on display in their
May exhibition.
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Carolina
Meadows Winners in Senior Games
Several
Carolina Meadows residents won medals in the Orange-Chatham
Senior games recently, and thus qualified to compete in the
North Carolina Senior Games to be held in Raleigh.
Claire
Butcher won gold in cycling the one-mile and the 5K events,
while her husband, Jim Butcher took silver in the corresponding
men's races. The bicycling events were run in Farrington Village.
In
men's swimming, at the Triangle Sportsplex in Hillsboro, Jim
Butcher won gold in the 100-yard backstroke, the 200-yard
backstroke, and the 200-yard breaststroke.
In
table tennis, staged in the Chapel Hill Senior Center, Margaret
Fallers won gold in women's singles and also in mixed doubles
while partnered with Maurice Gold. Maurice took gold in men's
singles. In tennis, Arnie Post won gold in men's singles,
while Jim Pope took the silver. The team of Post and Pope
then took a gold in men's doubles.
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