Handbook N-P - Fulton County Public Library

Ol
following the wheat harvest from Manitoba to Oklahoma and working as a fire tender on the Erie-
Lackawana Railroad.
When the U.S. government offered young teachers the opportnity to apply for positions
in the Philippine Islands, then an American protectorate gained in reparation from Spain after the
Spanish-American War, he saw a teaching opportunity that would satisfy his wanderlust. Making
the offer even better was the compensation--$90 per month, outbound and inbound transportation
to the States every three years and guaranteed full-time employment plus incentives. Not realizing
he would spend 35 years in the archipelago still partially populated by headhunters and in dire
need of schools, he headed for the Far East.
En route, his ship stopped in Yokohama, Japan, and, according to a letter he wrote his
mother, he planned to see Tokyo and Kyoto before making his way around the peninsula to
Nagasaki so he could rejoin his ship when it docked. He estimated that by riding the narrow
gauge trains, hiking, taking horse-drawn carriages and a Japanese version of rickshaws, he could
make the trip in three days. “That adventurism was typical,” says his son Jim.
“He didn’t know the transportation modes available, nor the condition of the roads and
railroads; he just knew what he was going to do. He was a stranger in a strange land who didn’t
even know where he was going to sleep at night. He just knew he’d figure out a way.”
Over the next 28 years, armed with a smattering of Spanish, German and the Visayan and
Tagalog languages of the Central and Southern Philippines, he advanced from high school
principal to school superintendent in four successive provinces and figured out a way to organize
127 schools. It was work he thoroughly enjoyed. “I’ve been in the business so long I doubt if I
could be satisfied teaching my own people,” he wrote his brother.
In his spare time, he traveled--mostly by tramp steamer--to Hong Kong, mainland China,
Macao, Manchuria and Singapore. On one trip, he bargained to shovel coal in the boiler room of a
rusty ship in order to get back to his teaching job. The only Occidental among Chinese coolies
blackened by months of exposure to coal dust, he had to admit it was very hot, hard work.
But the man who remained fearless, even when wanted “dead or alive,” had a weakness.
“I was a Jonah’s Whale all the way,” he told his brother, using his favorite euphemism for
seasickness, an affliction he never conquered.
On land and with camera in hand, he traversed much of the Philippines, stopping to visit
the Igorot tribe in Bontoc Province. “They’re cannibalistic,” he reported, “but only against enemy
tribes.” He hied the dangerous Benquet Road, “just for the experience” and watched dogs being
beaten to death, then eaten.
“He used to hike the interior of Luzon, from one headhunters’ tribal territory to another,”
Jim Oliver recalls. “Why someone didn’t kill him for making friends with everybody, including
enemy tribes, I don’t know.”
Also a commissioned officer with the U.S. Army, he organized 128 companies (about
1,200 men) of young trained military cadets in a period between 1918 and 1933 that provided
future soldiers for the Philippine Constabulary, the genesis of today’s Philippine army. By 1920,
he was able to write to his brother, “We find that military drill is very beneficial to students,
particularly when the Army calisthenics are given! The boys like to parade.”
While working in Iloilo, he met Flora Carbonell, an educator who had been appointed
Supervisor of Normal Schools in southern Mindanao, one of the two largest of the Philippines’
7,100 islands. The U.S. educator was fascinated by the young woman of Filipino-Spanish descent,
but the contrast between them was vivid.
He had no roots except for family ties in Indiana; her philosophy was to be grounded with
an established home in a nice area, various investments, including a second home in Davao City
and a small plantation in rural Mindanao.
Refined in the Old World manner, she loved opera and symphonic music. Jungle-smart
and resourceful, he possessed a streak of adventure that would strike fear in most men. But they
shared many similar qualities, mostly in regard to education, and a romance blossomed.
They traveled together to the States in 1933, he for further study at Indiana University,
she to obtain a master’s degree in English at the University of Chicago. By the time they returned