Rose Garden Resident

News

Photograph by Vicki Thompson

Still Teaching: Peter Ross joined the Peace Corp in 1963, two years after President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order to establish the agency. Ross taught math and science in India. He still has the books he taught with.

Peace Corps affected volunteers' including local man Peter Ross

By Alicia Upano

During President Kennedy's inaugural address on Jan. 20, 1961, he challenged young Americans to join a "grand and global alliance" that would work to end tyranny, poverty, disease and war. Months before, on the campaign trail, he had shared his dream of creating the Peace Corps.

Kennedy's words that January day resonated with young men and women across the country: "And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country."

On March 1, 1961, Kennedy signed an executive order establishing the Peace Corps.

At the time, Peter Ross was completing his bachelor's degree in math at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. By the time the first Peace Corps volunteers set out for Ghana and Tanzania that August, Ross was beginning a master's degree at UC-Berkeley. The Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba that fall sparked the fear of war on the East Bay campus.

"Most of us on campus thought World War III would bring nuclear bombs, and one of the targets could be the San Francisco Bay," says Ross, who lives on the border of the Rose Garden.

For Ross, however, the idea of war inspired him to become a soldier for peace. He joined the Peace Corps upon finishing his master's degree in the spring of 1963. The first group of volunteers had yet to return from their two-year service.

"When people asked us why we were going, there wasn't a simple answer," Ross says. While part of the inspiration was the adventure, Kennedy's prompting made many in his generation embrace public service.

"We wanted to give back. In America, we're the most affluent country in the world. We were then, and we are now," he says.

After extensive language and cultural training, Ross was sent to southern India with the first group of volunteers. At the time, India was the poorest country in the world, with a life expectancy of 38 years, he says.

Ross was assigned to teach science and math at a secondary school in the village of Calingapatnam. The school was just beginning to teach courses in English.

The education system was based on rote memorization, but Ross instituted a simple act typical in an American classroom--raising the hand to ask questions--as a way to encourage his students to learn. Many of his students' fathers were fishermen who went to sleep at dusk, and the boys could not study without light at home. He invited the students to his porch, which had electricity, to study in the evenings.

Ross says these small, but important, innovations were supported by his headmaster.

"Our locations were selected because someone wanted to institute change and use us as vehicles," he says.

He once went with the school headmaster and students to the headmaster's village, which remained untouched by modern technology. There was no electricity, and the villagers had never seen a foreigner before. They came up to pinch his pale skin.

"One person had asked if the British had taken over again," says Ross, laughing at the memory.

Yet one memory still saddens him. On Nov. 23, 1963, Ross was walking from his bungalow to school when a student ran up to him, yelling a scrambled message, "Rossgaru, Rossgaru, Mrs. Kennedy shot! Mrs. Kennedy shot!"

At the school, teachers and students gathered around a shortwave radio when Ross heard that it had been President Kennedy, and not the first lady, who had been assassinated the day before.

With time, Ross says he learned that Kennedy was not the saint he imagined, but in 1963 it was the falling of a hero who had created the Peace Corps. The headmaster offered to cancel school in Kennedy's honor, but Ross declined, saying it would be against the Peace Corps' mission.

Ross expanded his teaching experience into academia. He is a senior lecturer in math at Santa Clara University.