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came under their tutelage? I think it probably was. It was the best decision I have ever made as it also provided the introduction to an incredible woman who served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines and is the mother of our three sons.

In any event, I completed the rigorous training that included cold war informed political studies, Spanish language instruction through the immersion method, and most fun of all, physical and mental survival skills in the Puerto Rican rainforest. Since we were among the first groups to go overseas, there were no returned volunteers (PCVs) to give us any clues as to what we might encounter. In hindsight, the training went way overboard; erring on the side of safety.

Five months later, I ended up in Panama; stationed in Bocas del Toro, the northwestern province of the country and in the midst of the town that served as home to the Chiriquí Land Company, a division of the United Fruit Company. That is the company that I think gave the term Banana Republic to the English language. For those of us who can still remember certain things, think of Carmen Miranda, the Chiquita Banana entertainer spokesperson.

As far as I know, I was the first WC grad to embark on such an improbable adventure. I hope there have been many others, and if so, I’d love to hear from them.

The assignment was fraught with challenges from both ends of the political spectrum. I was charged with working to help develop a solution for a cocoa cooperative that had encountered what was believed to be a huge problem. The world price of cocoa, the farmers’ cash crop, had sunk so low that it no longer covered the 522 members’ expenses to produce it. This particular group of co-operative members and their neighbors were viewed with suspicion by the management of the Fruit Company. They lived on the wrong side of the Fruit Company’s train tracks that conveyed Chiquita bananas from the inland plantation to the Almirante port town where I lived. Labor unrest was an issue at the time and the inhabitants of the Patois Town section of Almirante, as it was and is called, supplied most of the dock workers who loaded the bananas from the boxcars to the awaiting steamships.

The American Manager, who was a Wharton School grad as I was, though much older, accused me of being a communist. Perhaps it was to test my reaction to the accusation; perhaps it was because he couldn’t imagine why a Wharton grad would want to waste his time on such a thankless and arguably hopeless task.