Career Memories - J (R. Freeman) Butts

You may not believe it, but it was just last Friday (1999) that the final decorating of my new unit here at Carmel Valley Manor was finished. And for the first time, I have had put up on the wall several framed photographs of key events and some awards I have received over the years. Two of them deal with international events in which I was privileged to be  photographed with presidents of two countries.

The first is a somewhat fuzzy (and unplanned) photo of me introducing Julius Nyerere to Dave Scanlon as Nyerere finished speaking to the final orientation session for  the first Groups A and B on the eve of their departure for Kampala on July 12, 1961. Dave  and I had gone down to an open hearing at the UN finalizing Tanzania's independence. We  sent a note down to Nyerere on the platform asking him to come up to TC on the off  chance that he would come to speak to the group - and sure enough he agreed and drove  me up in his limousine where Dave and the rest of the group was waiting. Do you  remember that?

The other shows Jim Perkins, president of Cornell, introducing me to Lyndon Johnson on the occasion of an International Conference on the World Crisis in Education at Williamsburg in October 1967. Johnson had proposed the International Education Act of 1967 to promote international studies in American schools. But, the Act was never funded as the national revolt against Vietnam was elevating. But it still was a good idea, never  consummated.

And I have just turned up a photo of me with a third president, which I probably will never frame. It was taken in the lecture hall of the Department of Education at Makerere  where the African Association for Teacher Education was meeting in March 1971. It shows the vice chancellor of Makerere introducing President Idi Amin who gave a short speech of welcome to the association written by Carl Graham. And I am shown on the other side of the table waiting to give the keynote speech of which Idi had preempted half. It should be noted that the Makerere faculty had greeted Amin's overthrow of Milton Obote in January as a "man of the people."

But, enough of recollection of the ups and downs of the 1960s and 1970s. Let's hope we have all learned from our failures as well as from our successes. And TEA/TEEA  must surely be counted as one of our most cherished successes, even if it benefited us more than it did our counterparts.

In case you are wondering where I came in, it was because I was thrust into the  picture as Director of International Studies at TC just in time to go with Dave Scanlon and  Gray Cowan of Columbia's African Studies to each of the East African countries in February of 1961. We got signed undertakings that they wanted TC to do the job under AID. We arrived home exhilarated and exhausted on February 28th, only to wake up the next morning to find that JFK had appointed Shriver to be head of a Peace Corps that would send teachers all over the world. No wonder AID had moved so fast!

My thanks for your efforts and those of all the others you mention in your letter.