Stephen Hayden Oral History Interview
Interviewer(s): Robert Klein
Interviewee(s): Stephen Hayden

Robert Klein: This is Bob Klein. Today is March 9th, 2011, and I'm interviewing Steve Hayden, who was a Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia, 1967 to '69, in an agricultural project. So let's go back maybe a year before you joined.

Stephen Hayden: Well, I joined in, in mid '67. So the year before that I was actually graduated from Pomona College and I had a job in Sonora, Mexico, as an archeologist, um, helping a professor from the University of Arizona and an old friend who was a graduate student from California.

Robert Klein: Well, let's go to Pomona now.

Stephen Hayden: Okay.

Robert Klein: Uh, that's a four year college?

Stephen Hayden: It's a four year college.

Robert Klein: In California?

Stephen Hayden: California, yes.

Robert Klein: What was your major?

Stephen Hayden: History. Latin American history specifically.

Robert Klein: Okay. And where had you grown up?

Stephen Hayden: In Tucson.

Robert Klein: And went to high school in Tucson?

Stephen Hayden: Went to high school in Tucson. Went to Catalina High School, uh, followed my older sister to Pomona. Um.

Robert Klein: And talk a little bit about your family setting, your, uh, siblings.

Stephen Hayden: Um. Two older sisters and older brother. I was the youngest. Um, I'm seven years younger than my older brother, who is the only remaining sibling.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Um, my whole family, including me at the age of two, moved to Tucson in 1946. Um. My father set out to build an adobe house down on Speedway in Columbus, out in the boonies, and we lived in army tents for the first five years while he worked on the house.

Robert Klein: Wow.

Stephen Hayden: And in the process of working on the house, some people heard the, the racket of his, his, uh, gas jackhammer digging ditches and hired him to dig their ditches. And before he knew it, he had a excavation company with 20 guys working for him.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: So he was, uh, at that time, this was post war, of course.

Robert Klein: Mm hmm.

Stephen Hayden: Um, he was struggling to make a living as a contractor. His background was in, uh, archeology before, well, starting in 1929. And his father before him.

Robert Klein: Wow.

Stephen Hayden: And during that time as well.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but he had, my father didn't have a degree.

Robert Klein: He was an amateur archeologist?

Stephen Hayden: An amateur, avocational they call it these days.

Robert Klein: All right.

Stephen Hayden: Uh, his father had a degree from Harvard.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and he was with his father on several digs in Nevada and Arizona and, um, during the Depression. It was all Depression work in those days.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, he developed quite a reputation for himself as a first class field man in archeology, with or without a degree.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So when he came to Tucson. Well, prior to coming to Tucson, he had worked in this area for the University of Arizona, at Snaketown, at Ventana Cave, at University Indian ruins, um, at Pueblo Grinding. Um, so he had, the point of all this is that, uh, as we were growing up, my parents' friends were all of that, um, uh, group of people in the 40s and 50s that were archeologists, anthropologists, ecologists. Um, so our house was full of people of that ilk growing up. So I came by the interest in other cultures.

Robert Klein: Right. In, during your high school years, what kind of extracurricular activities do you do? What kind of travel?

Stephen Hayden: Um, not a lot of travel.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, a little bit in Mexico. Um, I was a, you know, a.

Robert Klein: On digs or?

Stephen Hayden: No, no. Just little, little travels.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Um, we didn't really travel much because dad's, uh, business kind of kept him tied to the, tied to the phone, so to speak. So, you know, I chased girls and I was a gymnast. I was on a gymnastics team at Catalina, and just a pretty typical, um, uh, interests in those days.

Robert Klein: Did you learn Spanish?

Stephen Hayden: I took Spanish in, in high school.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: I took Spanish in college.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: I spent a year between my junior and senior years kicking around part of the time in Mexico. And I really learned Spanish then.

Robert Klein: Okay, so on your own.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. So I spent three months hitching around Mexico in 1963. And so by the time I got to Mexico after, after college, I was fluent in Spanish.

Robert Klein: When, when you first went into college, so what kind of goal had you set yourself?

Stephen Hayden: Oh, you know, I had no idea where I was going.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: It was a liberal arts college. It looked great. It had lots of different things. I was, you know, a bright kid in high school. So in, in the late '50s, what you did then was you became an engineer to help, you know, battle the Russkies and all that stuff. So I went to Pomona in a, in a five year program with Caltech. I was going to be three years in Pomona, two years in Caltech, and come out a fancy pants engineer.

Robert Klein: Oh, okay.

Stephen Hayden: And my first year at Pomona, I took my first, uh, uh, good history course and a required course in comparative religion, and it totally blew my mind. I didn't know that thinking about this stuff was a legitimate activity, and I loved it. So I switched to history after my first year.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I took all kinds of, I minored in geology because it was interesting to me. But Pomona was a fantastic place, and it had lots of really, really good professors. And so I took a lot of different things.

Robert Klein: Do you recall when you first became aware of the Peace Corps?

Stephen Hayden: You know, I think, well, let's see. Um, yeah, it was my sophomore year, so that would be 1962.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, because a friend of mine in my, uh, freshman year had gone to, I think it was Brazil. Um, Steve Shafran.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And he came. He was a Quaker, which I thought, I didn't know anything about any religions and I thought Quakerism was kind of weird. Um, but he came back and he was a neat guy, and we talked a lot about it. I also, there were some Brazilian exchange students at Pomona my junior year.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And this was when Vietnam was kind of heating up, is that right?

Robert Klein: Yes, yes.

Stephen Hayden: Um, so, uh, these, I remember one of the Brazilian students telling us, uh, a group of us talking about Peace Corps, that he detested the Peace Corps because it was counter-revolutionary. They were giving the peasants hope and there was no hope. So they were basically postponing the inevitable.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So that caught my eye, caught my ear. But, you know, I really didn't think about it much. I was kind of, uh, just going through the usual college thing.

Robert Klein: But as you, as you approached graduation, you must have been faced with the issue of the draft.

Stephen Hayden: I was, but I had been doing archeology in the summers up on Navajo National Monument, or Navajo National, sorry. Uh, Glen Canyon Dam.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: On the Navajo reservation.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: As a laborer and then as a technician. So, and so I naturally fell into a job after college in archeology. And for some reason, I got a deferment for it.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I was a field, uh, big foreman at the University of Arizona Field School that summer right after college, and then my year in Mexico started after that.

Robert Klein: You weren't enrolled as a student during that?

Stephen Hayden: No.

Robert Klein: Just as an archeologist?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, as an archeologist. And I probably made some motion like I was going to go to graduate school when I finished this. I don't remember.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, when I was in Mexico, it became very clear to me that I didn't want to do any more archeology. Um, I, what I loved about surveying in Mexico was hanging out with the Seri Indians on the, on the Baja coast, on the, on the Gulf coast, and with the cowboys up in the mountains. And these guys were fantastic.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, and it was radicalizing in a way, because that year, 1966-‘67, um, there were gubernatorial elections in Sonora that went sideways and the PRI was losing the dominant party, and they brought in goons from Sinaloa.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We were living in, in Hermosillo, the capital of Sonora at the time. So we witnessed a lot of the stuff that you read about now and see on the, on the TV now.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: That was really radicalizing. And what really also got my attention was that the rural folks were way up on the politics. They knew what was going on. They also knew what archeology was.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And you'd go to rural area in, in the States and they have no idea.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So it was an interesting thing. And because I was fluent in Spanish, it was, it was very rewarding. I was, of course, thinking about what would happen after this job finished. Was I going to go to graduate school or what?

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And Vietnam was looming, and I was faced with, to my mind, either going to graduate school or maybe joining the Coast Guard or something like that. I sure as hell wasn't going to go to Vietnam.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: I had a pretty clear picture of what was going on there from my Pomona days. I was not going to go there. Um, my father at that, that same year, the University of Arizona was digging Snaketown, the whole campsite up here by Phoenix for the second time.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And my father was providing the backhoes at that time.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So there was an article in the National Geographic about Snaketown. My father sent me a copy, a copy of the, of the magazine. And in that same issue was an article about Micronesia.

Robert Klein: Oh, ha.

Stephen Hayden: And there were photographs of these incredible sailing canoes and these beautiful women and these tattooed guys who, just great. And it mentioned that Peace Corps was there.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: I had already applied and been accepted.

Robert Klein: You had applied?

Stephen Hayden: Yes.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: I actually had been accepted to go to Kenya on a, in a teaching program. So that was '67.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Early '67 was when I was accepted. Um, so I wrote them and said, do you have any programs in Micronesia that I would qualify for? And they wrote right back and said, sure, we have an agriculture program, and we're sending a bunch of people out. It'll be very timely. And you can go.

Robert Klein: Of course, you came from an absolutely nonagricultural background.

Stephen Hayden: Nonagricultural background. I think one of my strengths was the cross-cultural experience.

Robert Klein: Right. Yeah. Well, you certainly are a strong candidate.

Stephen Hayden: Familiarity with simple living and stuff.

Robert Klein: And they didn't, they weren't tempted to assign you to Latin America?

Stephen Hayden: No, and it may be, I mean, I have no idea what was in their minds. I was in Mexico at the time. This was all just letters back and forth. So when they said, yeah, we have a program in Micronesia, I didn't even really have much of a clue of what was going on in Micronesia, except.

Robert Klein: You had the National Geographic.

Stephen Hayden: I had the National Geographic thing, you know. So we, so I was accepted. And when we got done with the job in, in Mexico, that was in June, I think, or July of '67. About a month later, I was in San Francisco shipping out.

Robert Klein: So, all right, so you're accepted in the Peace Corps and where did you train then?

Stephen Hayden: We trained in country.

Robert Klein: Okay. So by then they had shifted over.

Stephen Hayden: We were the second group to train in country.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: And I'm so glad for it.

Robert Klein: Yeah. So your fifth day in the Peace Corps, you're in Micronesia.

Stephen Hayden: Micronesia, yeah. We spent about a week in San Francisco, you know, weeding out the lunatics and the terrorists and whatnot. And then, and then we.

Robert Klein: How many, how many, about how many were in the group at that point?

Stephen Hayden: Um, well, there were, there were separate groups for each of the six districts of Micronesia.

Robert Klein: Oh.

Stephen Hayden: In the Chuuk district, there were I think, um, 13 or 14, 13 people.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, ten of them, I think, were agriculture. And a couple of them were in small business or something like that. But it was specifically the general thing was agriculture. So each, each, uh, district had this. The island that we trained on was in the big lagoon in, in Chuuk, and it was in, on the island of Udot. And Udot just happened to have six villages. So they designated each village as a different district. So the volunteers that were heading for one district or another would be in the same village.

Robert Klein: Oh, I see. Okay.

Stephen Hayden: And they'd get their language training and whatnot down there.

Robert Klein: Okay. So now, was it a charter flight or how did you get to Micronesia?

Stephen Hayden: It was a commercial flight. It was a commercial flight.

Robert Klein: It must have been long.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, we flew to Hawaii, then we flew to, and didn't spend any time in Hawaii. Flew to Guam and, and then. Gosh, I don't remember if it was a, I think it was a, it was a 727 that took us to.

Robert Klein: What was the reaction of family, friends when you made the decision?

Stephen Hayden: Well, my parents were totally thrilled.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: My father had always wanted to go to Tahiti when he was my age, and he didn't because he met my mother and married her instead. So this was perfect. He just thought it was great. And I was totally, totally excited to be going there.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, the farthest thing from the desert I could imagine. And, uh, and isolated.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Just seemed like perfect. And you know, the, my friends, you know, I really didn't talk to a lot of people about it because I was in Mexico. And then I came back for a month and I was gone.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Um, so I didn't really talk to people until I come back.

Robert Klein: So it was pretty much an individual thing for you.

Stephen Hayden: Oh yeah, absolutely.

Robert Klein: Do you recall, uh, meeting the other volunteers? You know what your impression was? You know, now you join. Now here's another.

Stephen Hayden: The rest of them?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Well, um, in San Francisco, it was pretty much a blur.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, you know, here I, I remember. The most memorable, um, event on those 3 or 4 days we were there was when we were getting on the bus to go to the airport, and we were waiting around in our usual waiting mode. And a lovely young woman came up to me, I'd never seen her before in my life, and said, where, you look kind of pensive, where are you going? And I said, I'm going off to Micronesia. And we just struck up this amazing conversation. I would have stayed with her had she asked me to, and she would have gone with me had I asked her. It was just love at first sight kind of thing. And then off to the edges of the world, you know? So that, that seemed quite appropriate.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Ships that pass in the night.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. I did have a girlfriend from college.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And after college we had gone to have our individual adventures and.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, and I think in retrospect, she was not particularly thrilled that I was going off but.

Robert Klein: She wasn't tempted to try to join at the same time?

Stephen Hayden: Not initially. No, no. She was, she was in Alaska and Seattle while I was in Mexico. So we really weren't in real close contact then.

Robert Klein: So when you get to Micronesia now, uh, I'm guessing that most of the group did not have an agricultural background?

Stephen Hayden: No, I would guess maybe five out of the 75 total.

Robert Klein: Now, the 75 then is broken into six.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, right.

Robert Klein: And that's, the breakdown was according to where you would be assigned once you became a volunteer?

Stephen Hayden: Right. In terms of the district, but not within the district.

Robert Klein: Okay. Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: That turned out.

Robert Klein: Now is that six different language groups?

Stephen Hayden: Yes, six totally different language groups.

Robert Klein: Okay. So then it was important. Uh, all right, describe your experience in getting to the village where you're going to train.

Stephen Hayden: We, we, we landed in, in the big, on the big airport, which was a dirt strip, coral strip about a, seemed like about three, three times as long as a jet.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, you know, screeched to a halt with mud flying everywhere. And we're ushered almost directly, uh, into a landing craft which took us across the lagoon to the island.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Dumped us on the beach. We all got out on the beach.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So.

Robert Klein: And you really know you're in a different part of the world.

Stephen Hayden: We're in a different part of the world. And of course, on the, on. So people were getting to know each other a little bit on the landing craft. Some people were scared to death. Some people thought it was really fun.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I was in the latter group there.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And then to get to our village, we walked. So I can't remember now who, who met us.

Robert Klein: How large was the island?

Stephen Hayden: Oh, gosh. Well.

Robert Klein: It's like 20 by 15, it's not like?

Stephen Hayden: No, no, no, it's not that. It's more like five miles by two miles maybe.

Robert Klein: Okay. Okay. So it's a relatively small.

Stephen Hayden: It's small, yeah, it's a small. It's a quote unquote high island and it's got some elevation a little bit.

Robert Klein: Had Peace Corps been in Micronesia?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. They'd been there, let's see. I was the one, two. I think I was the third group.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Um, yeah. Third group. And they had been on Udot the prior training.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Which is only about six months prior to our getting there.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: They had trained a bunch of teachers. So the Peace Corps had, in each of the villages, had built a couple of small houses, um, nice little, um, plywood concrete block houses.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And they had arranged with the families, uh, individual families within the villages to provide, um, cooking and clothes washing.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And the Peace Corps would provide the food, of course, and pay them a certain amount. I don't know what it was. Um, pretty simple living conditions. Um, it was a cement floor house, about 4 or 5 rooms, kind of small rooms divided up with plywood.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, we slept on pandanus mats, which weeded out several people right off the bat.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I happened to live in one of the houses that an existing Peace Corps volunteer who was a, what do they call it? A cultural advisor or something like that. He lived, he was in the same house I was. And that was also my good fortune, because he was from the very islands that those pictures in the National Geographic were from.

Robert Klein: Oh, ha ha.

Stephen Hayden: I had no idea. I didn't know Truk from the Marshalls from the.

Robert Klein: Right. Right, right.

Stephen Hayden: So here's my housemate who was from those islands and knew those guys.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, and, uh, we hit it off, uh, he and one other fellow who was from Chicago, of all places. And, and we determined early on that I should be going to the outer islands.

Robert Klein: So let's stick with training now.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah.

Robert Klein: Um, so you, your living conditions were reasonable. And, uh, who's running the whole show at the village you go to?

Stephen Hayden: Well, that's a really good question. And reading my letters home just recently, uh, it brought a lot of it back.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, the training was, in retrospect, the technical training in agriculture was, was pathetic. We were, the language training was good. We had 4 and a half hours of language training a day.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And, and it was, um, it was taught by a native language, a native speaker.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And it was, uh, Trukese as a second language, routine, you know, just repeating, repeating, repeating.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And our families that we lived with delighted in testing us and playing with us, those of us who were brave enough to go out and mingle around.

Robert Klein: So even though you were in this, uh, specially built housing, you had a family?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. Yeah, it was like the houses weren't right next to each other. They were, I think there were two in the village we were in. So there must have been 6 or 7 of us in each house. And the family that was taking care of us was right next door in their traditional house.

Robert Klein: So that's the family you were referring to?

Stephen Hayden: Right.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Right. It was a small village, so we got to know a lot of people. And in fact, we got to know people in the other villages, too, because we did a lot of walking.

Robert Klein: Now, Micronesia, was it independent or a?

Stephen Hayden: It was a U.S. Trust Territory.

Robert Klein: Okay. That's what I thought.

Stephen Hayden: The whole deal here was that it was the last trust territory from World War II.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And the Russians were making hay in the UN about the imperialists and colonialists and all that stuff. So they dumped hundreds and hundreds of volunteers into Micronesia, I presume to prepare the natives for independence or for, for their next, um, for their next.

Robert Klein: The next stage.

Stephen Hayden: Relationship. Uh, I didn't know it at the time, but, um, since then it's become quite clear that the plan was not that Micronesia would become independent, but it would become, uh, it would formalize its relationship somehow with the U.S.

Robert Klein: Like Puerto Rico maybe?

Stephen Hayden: Like maybe Puerto Rico, um.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Maybe Philippines.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but it didn't work out real well for the Philippines.

Robert Klein: You weren't aware of that at the time?

Stephen Hayden: Not right at the time. I became aware of it during the course of my two years.

Robert Klein: During, during the training phase, did anyone define a role for you other than the agricultural role that's coming? You know, you're here to help prepare them?

Stephen Hayden: No, not really. Not really. Um, there seemed to be precious little coordination in the training itself.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: The language stuff was good.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, the cultural, so-called cultural training we got was really, um, just hanging out in the villages. Basically we lived in a village for ten months, ten weeks?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And got a lot of language training. Um.

Robert Klein: Were you being tested on the language?

Stephen Hayden: No. No, I don't think so.

Robert Klein: But the sense was that once you got to your work station, you would have, you would be working in Turkese [Trukese]?

Stephen Hayden: Yes, very much.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah.

Robert Klein: So that.

Stephen Hayden: I mean, at least on the outer islands, that was pretty assumed because.

Robert Klein: So that's, I mean, you're up against the gun sort of.

Stephen Hayden: In a way, yeah. It didn't seem like there was pressure. Um.

Robert Klein: Did most people speak some form of pidgin English?

Stephen Hayden: No.

Robert Klein: Okay. I don't.

Stephen Hayden: Um, at that time, I would say in our family. Well, see, we had the, we had the volunteer living with us, and he was our translator.

Robert Klein: Okay. Okay.

Stephen Hayden: And he spoke a different dialect, but he could, he could fake the lagoon dialect.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And we learned the lagoon dialect, the dialect of the, of the big lagoon.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: But, no, not very many people in the village spoke English.

Robert Klein: So actually the, the overall administrative structure of Micronesia at that time was under the, was under the control of the United States government. At what level were there Micronesians who were running things?

Stephen Hayden: Um.

Robert Klein: In other words, the people you might deal with?

Stephen Hayden: Let's see.

Robert Klein: Was there a Department of Agriculture?

Stephen Hayden: There was. And there was, uh, the guy that was running that who came in new while we were there was Hawaiian.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Almost all the major departments were run by Americans.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: There's a district administrator, and he had his whole bureaucracy and the hospital running the shipping, running the airport, all that stuff.

Robert Klein: Okay, let's jump back to the training again. Uh, there was technical training because clearly you were not an agriculturist.

Stephen Hayden: Right.

Robert Klein: Tell me about what the training was.

Stephen Hayden: Well, the project was to improve the copra production in Micronesia. Copra being the dried coconut meat.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And that was the only cash crop from the outer islands was copra. The system was that the guys on the outer island would, when they heard the ship was coming, would cut copra and sell it to the, uh, company store that's on the ship. That was, by that time I think, privately owned. It used to be Navy run, been privately owned by them. So they had, uh, a store on the, on the ship and they would come out and basically swap copra for overpriced American goods.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and that was the way it worked all across Micronesia, from the Marshalls to Palau, all across the outer islands especially.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but, uh, so, so in order to improve the economic status of the whole outfit, um, it was decided that they could improve the copra production by introducing more, um, intensive management, um, you know, brushing, brushing the underbrush out from under coconuts. A lot of, the, a lot of the outer islands, you should understand, are not planted in groves.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: There's not enough room for that.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: They're individual trees and individual families own that tree, that tree, that tree.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And that's their productive source. So, um, so the plan was and it was, it was from on high. It wasn't anything I think that developed from the grassroots.

Robert Klein: It wasn't community developed?

Stephen Hayden: I don't think much was community development.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, was to, was to get these volunteers out there, show us volunteers how to, how to plant a coconut nursery so we could get these fancy-pants coconuts from Yap, put them in a little nursery, sprout them, and then go out and cut down the old trees and plant the new trees. And this would, in 6 or 7 years, result in coconuts that were producing a lot more.

Robert Klein: So it's really a long term thing.

Stephen Hayden: It was a long term thing.

Robert Klein: If you're working in a nursery.

Stephen Hayden: Well, the nursery is like, um, it's basically just a bed where you stick coconuts and in 3 or 4 months they sprout.

Robert Klein: But as a volunteer, if you're working in a nursery, you're not going to see the fully mature tree.

Stephen Hayden: Oh, no.

Robert Klein: Okay. That.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. And that was a question in my mind.

Robert Klein: Yeah, well.

Stephen Hayden: When, when we. So during the training, um, it seemed like we got. There was not much coordination in the agriculture aspect of it. We, we did go to one of the, uh, reef islands in the big lagoon and actually all, all the agricultural volunteers went out there for about four days, five days. Lived with families and actually got to dig holes and plant coconuts and like that. So that was the training we got there. It could have been done in an hour, but it took four days and, you know, and it was fun.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, we also were expected to, um, uh, plant, uh, vegetable gardens.

Robert Klein: I was wondering.

Stephen Hayden: And in, you know, in my case we had a secondary school on the island. So the idea was, well, maybe we could get the students to do a vegetable garden, and that would be great. And it could help provide them their food and stuff like that.

Robert Klein: Um, at what point in the process did you know where you were going to go?

Stephen Hayden: Let's see. It was a ten week training, probably week seven.

Robert Klein: And on what basis were you assigned?

Stephen Hayden: I think it was because the guy who was my housemate told the Peace Corps volunteer or Peace Corps director that I'd be good on an outer island. And it was obvious that some people would not survive an outer island.

Robert Klein: Isolation and everything.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah.

Robert Klein: Um, during, during the training were people resigning and going home all through it?

Stephen Hayden: Not a lot, not a lot. It was one or two. Um, there was some, I think probably some fairly heavy weeding done in San Francisco.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: I don't know about the other, the other villages, I just. I just know about the one I'm in.

Robert Klein: It's a relatively small group.

Stephen Hayden: It is a small group. And you know, we had the psychologists come and do this little testing, this profile thing and do a few group things and.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And it was, I thought it was pretty, I was pretty skeptical about that aspect of it.

Robert Klein: Right. Was it all male?

Stephen Hayden: No, no. They were, um, well in ag program, yes. They were all male. There was one couple, maybe two couples in our village, and they. She was probably wound up teaching English, and he was a small business guy.

Robert Klein: Okay. So they weren't in training with you?

Stephen Hayden: Well, they kind of were in the language stuff and we lived right next door. They were in the house right next to us.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: But they didn't do the agricultural stuff with us.

Robert Klein: So the training goes on for ten weeks. You have a vague idea of the job you're supposed to be doing. Was there anything about community dynamics, the fact that you were going into a totally different culture that you're introducing, trying to introduce some, I mean, that?

Stephen Hayden: There was a little bit, I'm sure. The only recollection I have, uh, well, partly triggered by reading my letters recently, is that, um, we got very little realistic, um, information about what we were going into. I got more than, say, the ones that were in the district center, that stayed in the district center, because I was living with a guy who'd lived, been out there for a year and a half.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So that was really helpful.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: The people that were assigned to the big lagoon in the districts, that was a cultural catastrophe there. And it was, it was like Nogales in the worst of the worst days. It was, uh, cultural disintegration.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And people dropped out of that situation like flies. It was the second highest dropout rate in the Peace Corps.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Well, during the ten weeks, uh, what kind of Peace Corps staff presence was there?

Stephen Hayden: The volunteer, the existing volunteer who was in the house was there the whole time. Um, there was a Peace Corps psychologist who came out. The Peace Corps director, of course, came out and said hello.

Robert Klein: Where was he based?

Stephen Hayden: He was based in Chuuk. There, there were. [tape break] There was an overall director, I think. But the headquarters was in Saipan. Long, long ways away.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: But each district had their headquarters, so the district director from, from Chuuk came over and visited.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, uh, and I remember towards the end of the, of the training, there were 3 or 4 of us who really were kind of, um, disappointed, to say the least, in the quality of the training, especially around the cultural stuff.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And we complained to the, to the district administrator.

Robert Klein: Quite Peace Corps, isn't it?

Stephen Hayden: Yes. Peace Corps, yes.

Robert Klein: Yes.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but we could also see what was, what we were being set up for it seemed like. Um, because at that time, the U.S. was pouring money into Micronesia, doing all kinds of capital improvement stuff.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Giving, just pouring money in. It was not grassroots. And those of us who had been the slightest bit around the bush could see that this was going to go sideways in a big way, and we were going to get caught in the middle of it.

Robert Klein: And it's also against the background of our deep involvement in Vietnam and Saipan as a major base.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, that was in the back of the minds of everybody. Yeah, yeah, that was in the back of the minds of everybody.

Robert Klein: So at the end of the ten weeks, you're, you've been selected. You're a Peace Corps volunteer. Uh, what comes next?

Stephen Hayden: Well, then they. I was told, wait. We had a little, I think there was a Peace Corps house in the capital town on the big island where we kind of all hung out until we, until we got out to our islands.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And, uh, I didn't get out to my island, let's see, that was July or August. We got done with training about the first week in October. I didn't get out to my island until almost Christmas. Um.

Robert Klein: It must have been frustrating.

Stephen Hayden: It was very frustrating. But the shipping was irregular. Totally irregular.

Robert Klein: I was going to ask how you got from island to island.

Stephen Hayden: There were two, there were two vessels, actually three, but there were two that were regular in, in Truk. One was a Catholic motor sailer, uh, about a 40-50 foot motor sailer. Uh, just a vomit comet. I mean, it's, but great ship. And the other was the official, um, government freighter.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: You know, um.

Robert Klein: Did a regular service.

Stephen Hayden: Did a regular circuit, except that when there was a medical emergency, it got diverted to go pick up whoever it was that otherwise would have died. So there was no schedule, and there was a schedule in that they'd go to this district and then everything being equal, they go to the next one. But it wasn't like the Peace Corps could say, hey, we want to take, you take all these guys.

Robert Klein: And Peace Corps did not have its own?

Stephen Hayden: They didn't have a ship. Not until the second year I was there. Then they chartered, actually, or leased a trimaran, a 40 foot trimaran that came through.

Robert Klein: Okay. Well.

Stephen Hayden: That was a mixed thing.

Robert Klein: Let's stick back with. So I'm trying to get out to the islands.

Stephen Hayden: I was in the district center then for a couple of months, and, um, I did get to go out on the ship, on the, on the Catholic boat, it was called the Star of the Sea, to deliver the Peace Corps to the western islands. My atoll group was a little bit north of that, and I was led to believe right up until I got on the boat that it was going there as well. But I got on the boat and they said, oh no, we're just going there and back.

Robert Klein: Not this time.

Stephen Hayden: So I just went for the ride and that was, that was.

Robert Klein: Well, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: You know, got to see some islands I wouldn't otherwise see.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And that was the first, my first introduction to those western and non-NATO islands. So I made myself useful in the district center. We built an office for the, for the Peace Corps in Quonset huts. So we had carpentry skills and things and but mostly stuff like that. Just waiting and waiting and waiting.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So that was frustrating, um, but I did finally get out.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: On, on the, on the main, on the big freighter. Um, arrived on the island of, at that time called Ulul, but by the people that lived there called Onoun. And, uh.

Robert Klein: What do you arrive with? I mean, whatever you can carry on your back?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, I had a, I had a trunk.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: And I had a Peace Corps library box.

Robert Klein: The book, the book locker.

Stephen Hayden: The wonderful book locker.

Robert Klein: Yes.

Stephen Hayden: And probably half a dozen boxes of food and things.

Robert Klein: Okay. We did buy, we kind of stocked up in the commissary at the, at not the commissary, but the Truk trading company, this private.

Yeah. Now, this final trip, when you're going out for your assignment, is someone else going also? It's just you?

Stephen Hayden: Just me. I mean, other people are going to the island.

Robert Klein: Right, that's what I was getting at.

Stephen Hayden: But not Peace Corps.

Robert Klein: Okay. And when you get there, is there any other Peace Corps on the island?

Stephen Hayden: There was, um, let's see. Yeah, there were one, there were three actually. There was a couple who were the just prior group. And there was a guy who was, uh, Micronesia I, and he was leaving on the ship I was leaving on because he had a torn shoulder, and he went off to get medical treatment. Um, on the ship I was on was the material for a school to school project that he had arranged. Um. Uh, and it was no great loss that he left because he didn't know how to, one end of a hammer from another. And but the other two, the couple, were both teaching English in elementary school.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: So we arrived at, Onoun doesn't have a dock or a pier. Um, so we anchored out, 4:00 in the morning, and I got paddled in in a little outrigger paddling canoe. Four in the morning. Met my sponsor and went to the village.

Robert Klein: Okay. Now, who was your sponsor?

Stephen Hayden: A wonderful guy named Titus Alawus. And Titus was a health aide, and he was probably ten years older than me.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: He was ten years older, 10 or 12 years older than me.

Robert Klein: Micronesian?

Stephen Hayden: Micronesian. Spoke very passable English. He had about an eighth grade education.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: But he'd been trained by the Navy in, as a health aide. Um, and he was quite a remarkable guy. Um.

Robert Klein: Had, it had been arranged by the Peace Corps?

Stephen Hayden: By the people in the island. I mean, they decided who was going to get the next Peace Corps. But yeah, Peace Corps had.

Robert Klein: Now, the people on the island had been approached and had agreed to having a Peace Corps or an agricultural. Who did they think you were when you when you arrived?

Stephen Hayden: That's a good question. They didn't even ask for probably a month.

Robert Klein: Well, yeah, I can believe that.

Stephen Hayden: They were getting to know me, I guess. Um, well, they knew that, that they were getting a Peace Corps who was going to be working in agriculture and with coconuts and with, uh, gardens and stuff.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And so they kind of had that in mind. The prior, uh, the couple and the guy that was leaving all were teachers. So the first groups were just teachers.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and so I was the first non teacher.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So it was a little vague as to how this was going to work out. And, um, fortunately for me and for them, uh, the school to school project kind of stuck its big foot in the way and said, do me, do me, do me.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So I oversaw the building of this elementary school for the first six months I was there.

Robert Klein: Was there a commitment on the part of the community to the school project?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, they had, they provided all the labor.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: So they mixed the cement. They made the cement blocks with their, the one block things.

Robert Klein: And it was the former volunteer who had hooked up the supplies and materials.

Stephen Hayden: Right.

Robert Klein: Okay. And it was to be an elementary school.

Stephen Hayden: Yes. They had an elementary school, but it was in a, just a thatch.

Robert Klein: Oh, okay. So it was a replacement.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. So this was cement floor, um, block columns, high pitched roof.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And designed rather poorly by a Peace Corps volunteer in the district center who said he was an engineer.

Robert Klein: Do you remember his name?

Stephen Hayden: No, no.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: I never met him. I just had his sketches that he said were the plans I was supposed to follow.

Robert Klein: But you felt comfortable, I mean, did you feel you didn't have any choice?

Stephen Hayden: Um. I was happy to do it. I, I.

Robert Klein: You didn't think someone was suddenly going to appear one day and say, my God, you put the whole thing on backwards, you know?

Stephen Hayden: No, it was, um, you know, I knew enough about construction. My father was a contractor, you know, I learned a lot. Um.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Uh, and I wasn't a pro, but, um, this was not a complicated thing. And the guys on the island were not stupid either, so.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: You know, we could. We had the lumber, we put it together. It was a great project because I got to, every day, well, for the first couple of weeks, when we started on the project.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, it was five days a week, and until the, uh, and I got to work with all the men on the island. It was only about 30 able bodied, you know, adult men to do this kind of work.

Robert Klein: Oh really? Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and each, each evening I would sit with Titus, and I had learned the dialect from the lagoon. The dialect on the island was, I could not understand a word of it. They could understand lagoon dialect.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And I, and I learned quickly that I could also, once I became fluent in the, in the, nominally the dialect, I could understand lagoon really easily.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: They couldn't understand me. So I had to learn the dialect. And I was, I was good at language at that time. So I had kind of the, the form of it pretty well down.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And worse comes to worse, I could talk in lagoon and they could understand it.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: But Titus took it upon himself. I insisted that he, that he be stern with me and correct me whenever I made a mistake.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Because I didn't want to learn bad Trukese. And he was a remarkable guy. It was unusual Trukese in that he was outspoken himself.

Robert Klein: He was willing to be critical?

Stephen Hayden: He was willing to be critical.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, and in fact, he loved it. He was relieved that I wouldn't be a doofus and embarrass him.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So, so every evening we would go over what we were going to do the next day at the school. And I'd say, I need to be able to say this, this, and this. And, you know, in retrospect, they knew what they were doing, but.

Robert Klein: Well, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: But anyway, it kind of, you know, I was the, the, ostensibly I was in charge.

Robert Klein: They let you play at being king.

Stephen Hayden: Play the role. So, so I learned over that, uh, six weeks or so, well, no, six months that we worked on anything. I got an opportunity to work with all the men, and I worked right alongside them so they could see that I wasn't a, uh, you know, sit on my butt kind of boss guy.

Robert Klein: Right. And the guy who was helping you, what was it?

Stephen Hayden: Titus.

Robert Klein: Titus was kind of a mentor in.

Stephen Hayden: In the language.

Robert Klein: Well, but also introducing you to.

Stephen Hayden: Oh, yeah.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: He was, uh, he had a cultural relationship with the hereditary chiefs line. His father was hereditary chief before him. He was not in line to be hereditary chief, but he had a relationship with that hereditary chief line that made him an important guy.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And he was healthy, and he was outspoken, and he was smart as hell.

Robert Klein: What was the total population?

Stephen Hayden: About 300, 325 maybe at that time. There was a whole bunch of guys that were my age, like in their 20s, who were off island, um, in college. And some of them were training Peace Corps in Florida and Hawaii. Some of them were in graduate schools.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And so there was a kind of a generation that was missing.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Of the smart guys.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Some of them came back to be the first president of Micronesia.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: One of them is still the UN representative.

Robert Klein: But many may have stayed out of the country.

Stephen Hayden: They were, they were. He was out of the country.

Robert Klein: Yeah. So, uh, and the living conditions then?

Stephen Hayden: Titus and his family had, um, turned over their house to me. And it was a Japanese era house. Before the U.S. was the Japanese.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And it was a, uh, up on stilts. It was in the kind of maybe 300, 400 feet from the shore. So it was in the trees. Um. A wooden floor, wood plank, tin roofed house with a little porch on stilts or on logs. Um. One room. And Titus and I spent the first three days making it into two rooms and putting up screens and stuff. So we got to know each other really well in these first three days.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We liked each other instantly.

Robert Klein: That's great.

Stephen Hayden: It was really wonderful.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um. And his whole family were, he had, his wife was a little bit younger than he was. And they had at that time, like I said, about four kids, 4 or 5 kids.

Robert Klein: So were you taking meals with them?

Stephen Hayden: Um, sometimes. And sometimes I would, they would bring me food to the house. There was always people in the house.

Robert Klein: And you had come with a certain amount of supplies.

Stephen Hayden: I came with, uh, you know.

Robert Klein: Coffee?

Stephen Hayden: Powdered milk, coffee, sugar, flour.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, tin, tinned food.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um. So I did a fair bit of cooking myself. I had little kerosene stove, and I made an oven out of a biscuit tin box. So I would make things special for just whoever came around.

Robert Klein: So after you'd been there a couple of weeks, did you wake up and say, oh my God, I'm in Micronesia at the end of the world?

Stephen Hayden: You know, I was, I was blown away from the get-go.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: I, a friend of mine wrote and said, geez, you know, you ever get any marijuana out there? I mean, what do you do if you can't get stoned? And I wrote back and said, this, I've been high since I got here, and not on marijuana. I just, every time I look around, it's like.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: The, and, and so many things were happening all at once. Um, that it was. But to get back to, to the point of how fortunate it was that the school project was there in front of me, was it got me engaged. It gave me language practice, but it also put off any agricultural activities, thank God.

Robert Klein: Uncovering the fraud that you were.

Stephen Hayden: Well, something like that.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, when they finally called me to the, to the island council meeting to basically, uh, justify my existence, you know, what are you here for? You know, oh, so politely. But what are you here for? And I, and I told them about the agricultural project, and they were really excited about it. They wanted to increase their income as well.

Robert Klein: Sure.

Stephen Hayden: And the idea of having a vegetable garden for the school was terrific, you know, because they, they had to feed these kids.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So, so that was good. Um, and I was led to believe that I was going to have a nice big fat pig delivered to me and some chickens from the ag extension. The pig to improve the stock on the island, the chickens likewise.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So Titus and I also built one hell of a fine palace for the chickens, and they didn't come for about six months because ag kept forgetting to put it on the ship. They did send a pig. And ten minutes after it got the island, the islanders castrated it because it would get fatter that way. So I kind of, I, you know, I had the chickens for a long time, but I really didn't.

Robert Klein: So you immediately wrote back, send more pigs. They were delicious.

Stephen Hayden: You know, I really, because I knew absolutely nothing about that stuff.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: You know, I wasn't going to pretend that I knew anything.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So I had, you know, I had plans for a nice chicken house, and it turned out that my chickens, which were all Rhode Island Reds, were too stupid to lay eggs in that chicken house, but all the island chickens would come lay eggs in that chicken house. So I had lots of eggs.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And my chickens got eaten by the monitor lizards that lived on the island.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: That was okay.

Robert Klein: During the first six months, how was your health?

Stephen Hayden: The first six months was pretty good. Um, then I got hepatitis. Hepatitis A, I think it was. And that knocked me out. Um, but I didn't leave the island, I just.

Robert Klein: What was your communication back, I mean?

Stephen Hayden: We had radios.

Robert Klein: Ah, okay.

Stephen Hayden: Um, the Peace Corps, as one of their conditions on, to have volunteers in the outer islands, they put a big generator, diesel generator, and a radio on each of the outer islands.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: And that generator not only gave us radio contact, but it also provided lights for the schools.

Robert Klein: Oh, nice.

Stephen Hayden: And power for a slide projector and things like that.

Robert Klein: Did you, did you check in periodically?

Stephen Hayden: We had weekly, weekly, uh, communication with the district center. When, when the, when the generators were running. There were times when the generators would go on the blink. And the next time the ship came out, I mean, people would realize because they couldn't raise us.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Or somebody would go to another island and radio in, so they'd send somebody out to fix it. So there were plenty of times when we didn't have communication.

Robert Klein: Did you have any visitors during the first six, eight months?

Stephen Hayden: Uh. Let's see.

Robert Klein: I don't know how anyone would get there, but.

Stephen Hayden: The only visitors we had, actually, we had two. We had, uh, some, uh, I think they were Korean fishing boats, longliners. Uh, scuzzy, bottom of the barrel type fishing boats.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Illegal for them to be there, but they would show up offshore and people would go out.

Robert Klein: Schooners?

Stephen Hayden: No, no, these were longliners, you know, tuna.

Robert Klein: Oh, okay.

Stephen Hayden: Tuna fish.

Robert Klein: Okay, okay. Got it.

Stephen Hayden: Not, not trawlers.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Just piss pots, you know, 40, 50, 60 foot boats.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And they would anchor out and people would go out and trade them, uh, fresh, you know, papayas or limes or coconuts and stuff, uh, in exchange for hooks and American food and maybe even a tuna or two.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And that was always exciting. And there was, there was, uh, there was one that came that, um, the captain, for some reason, decided he wasn't going to let his crew trade with people. So the one of the guys on, one of our guys was on the deck, got pissed off and managed to get the nut off the main trolling pulley and threw it overboard in 80 feet of water. And the captain just flipped and took the hereditary chief, and one other guy had his guys grab him and put him in the, in the wheelhouse and said, we're going to take him back to wherever they came from if you don't get that nut, because we can't troll without it and we don't have a spare.

So the rest of us got in our canoes and went ashore, and they left me there. But every man on the island got his machete and all the little canoes, and they surrounded that ship and started banging on the ship and screaming bloody murder. And, uh, and the final shot was, and the Peace Corps is calling the Coast Guard right now! So our guys were released and that ship left.

Robert Klein: Captain America.

Stephen Hayden: So that was exciting. It was also a little scary because had they had guns, they could have done.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Awful things.

Robert Klein: I mean, it's such an isolated.

Stephen Hayden: And nobody trusted him. When we first saw him, we didn't want to let him ashore.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So that was interesting. And the only other visitor we had in the first year was a Navy ship that came on a PR thing.

Robert Klein: I was wondering.

Stephen Hayden: And they were nice guys. And we talked them into having a baseball game, and, and, uh, the islanders just slaughtered them. I mean, they played baseball, you know, or softball maybe once a year, you know, and just slaughtered them. But I remember these guys, by that time I was towards the end of the first year and I was, I was wearing loin cloth like the men did, and I was really brown. And I remember some of the sailors saying, God, how do you stand it out here? You know, there's no bars, there's no music, there's nothing to do.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I said, well, look around. My God, you know, feast your eyes. And so they of course noticed all the bare breasted women.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Notice how that that might be nice. And they said, do you have a girlfriend? I said, oh yeah, I'm engaged in fact. And in our family we had a joke.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, the daughter of the family, um, was nine years old. And she was a sweetheart.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And she did all my laundry.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So we had a little joke that she and I were engaged.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And there was a process. There's a, there's actually a legitimate process for that. But so they said, oh God, really, you know? And I pointed her out and they just backed off like, oh my God, this guy's been out here way too long. It was hilarious.

Robert Klein: Different worlds.

Stephen Hayden: They still laugh about that, 40 years later. They laugh about that.

Robert Klein: Um, so you phase into the community primarily through the building of the school.

Stephen Hayden: Mm hmm.

Robert Klein: Uh, when is your first time off the island?

Stephen Hayden: Um. Let's see, I was. I spent way too much time going back and forth. I went, I was called back in when the, for a, by the assistant director for a meeting of all the agricultural guys.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: That never happened. So I was off for about six weeks screwing around in the district center, again working on the office building and doing some other stuff like that.

Robert Klein: That must be frustrating.

Stephen Hayden: It was totally frustrating. It really pissed us off. And, and it was. He left after a while, but we got a new director who was really good.

Robert Klein: But at that point when you came in that way, you were meeting with the others who were trained with you?

Stephen Hayden: Ostensibly. I was looking forward to it. I was thinking, we're going to meet with the agriculture people. The other volunteers are going to meet with the ag extension people. We're going to have, you know, it's kind of like what they call now, I guess, mid, uh.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Mid-service.

Stephen Hayden: Mid-service training or something.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I was really looking forward to it. And it just didn't happen because they couldn't get the, the logistics together so people didn't come.

Robert Klein: But what, what, uh, in speaking with, what was, had been their experience up to that point? How did it match against yours?

Stephen Hayden: The other volunteers?

Robert Klein: Yeah, the other volunteers.

Stephen Hayden: Um, it varied a lot.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Uh, there was, uh.

Robert Klein: Micronesia had a huge number of volunteers at one point.

Stephen Hayden: About 600 or something.

Robert Klein: It must have been around this time.

Stephen Hayden: All over the place. So the people in the district center.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Like I say, they were having a hard time because there was there was violence, there was ineptitude. They had, it was like living in a colonial capital, you know, here's the Americans with their, their officer's club up on the hill.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Where you could go and get a drink and a decent steak and, and then there were the rest of us.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And the only Trukese that were up there were bureaucrats and suck ups and thieves and so.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, and so it was weird and I didn't like it at all. And those of us from the westerns especially, the western islands and the Namonuito islands, were the least westernized. Ironically, they were the most conservative islanders. They had been Catholicized, not Protestantized, as they still were very traditional.

Robert Klein: Yeah, but there were there were far fewer of you in any given situation.

Stephen Hayden: Yes.

Robert Klein: So, I mean, if there were ten Peace Corps on your island, it would have been a disaster.

Stephen Hayden: Oh God, yeah.

Robert Klein: Or even three maybe or four.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, three was, three was workable because we were doing different things.

Robert Klein: Yeah, okay. So you had this one break back, which was a bust.

Stephen Hayden: Then I was, uh, then I went on vacation. That was a separate trip.

Robert Klein: Between the first and second year?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. And I went to other parts of Micronesia. I went to Yap, and I went to Saipan. Um, went to Yap on a mission to buy, to look for adz blades to make because they were reputed to have the best old good German steel adz blades there. So I was sent there by the guys on my island. You have to go there.

Robert Klein: Mm hmm.

Stephen Hayden: And they gave me an amulet to carry around my neck because the Yapese ran the show with magic from way back.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So that was my protective thing. I had just gotten over, um, hepatitis. I wasn't drinking, but I was introduced to betel nut in Yap, and that was.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: That was a good substitute. And then I went up to Saipan. One of the neat things I discovered in Yap. Yap is the district that's to the west of Chuuk and the outer western outer islands of Chuuk are dialectically and culturally very similar to the eastern outer islands of Yap. It isn't until you get to the big island of Yap proper that the language changes completely. So when I went to Yap, I sought out the, the place where the outer islanders from the eastern islands of Yap hung out, and I lived with them. And could communicate pretty well with them, with the Yap. It was very interesting.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: A thousand miles or so of ocean.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: But. And then I went up to Saipan for a couple of weeks and got dewormed, as I recall, and, uh, and met up there with a village in Saipan made up of people from my island.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Which I've only in the last few years learned more about that.

Robert Klein: Yeah. Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So it was a great, great vacation.

Robert Klein: Now you finished the first year. You're going back. As you start into your second year, have you now become an agriculturalist or?

Stephen Hayden: The second year I started working down there. I mean, I had a little garden going, a little demonstration garden, and I had the chickens. Um, we, we finally got a shipment of the coconuts that were to be the good coconuts to replace all the other bad coconuts. So we did start on that. Um, at the same time, well, I'll keep things separate here.

Robert Klein: Sure.

Stephen Hayden: Um, my, my family, the uncle, one of the uncles in my family was a canoe builder, and he was building, uh, I say he, he was directing the building of a, about a 18 foot outrigger sailing canoe most of that first year, right outside my house in the community building right next to my house. So we were looking forward to the day when we could go sailing in that canoe. And that's where I learned to use an adz. And that's where I learned a lot, because I hung out with the men a lot just under, in, they call it an oot, the big thatched roof to an open sided building. So I learned a lot, and I was handy with my hands already, so they appreciated that I could learn and be helpful and.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So that was a big event for me, was that canoe building. Um, but we did finish the school. We had a big celebration and dedicated this school. Um, and then when I came back from vacation, um, we started in on, on, you know, we made the. The ship I came out on had all the coconuts, and they were from Yap, and they were big coconuts. So it looked, looked like this would be a pretty good deal. But by then I was totally aware that these guys knew approximately a thousand times more about coconuts than I did. So I, the way I pitched the pitch was, this is what I'm told. Does this make any sense?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I don't know anything, um, but this is what I'm told. And this was in, this was congruent with their cultural approach to any topic as well. I don't know anything.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: They called it mahanaho, which was humility.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Anybody who spoke up and said, I know the answer to that.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Would be kind of pushed aside.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: That was one of my big lessons.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Biggest lessons that's stuck with me ever since. Um, so we tentatively got into doing what the program called for. There were a few guys who were willing to try it.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So we cleared some areas, we planted some trees. A lot of people could understand that if you brushed underneath the trees, it'd be less competition with the coconuts and the coconuts would grow better. So that's good.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and we probably planted, I don't know, a thousand trees, a thousand coconuts.

Robert Klein: Now there would, how long would they stay in the nursery?

Stephen Hayden: Um, about four months. Three, four months.

Robert Klein: Oh, and then.

Stephen Hayden: As soon as they sprouted up to a certain height.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Then they could be transplanted.

Robert Klein: And could you survey an area and say, well, this would be a good place for.

Stephen Hayden: I left, I left that to them. Where do you want to put them?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: They know so much more about that than me.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Now, one of the unique things about the island was that it, it's kind of a long, skinny thing with a fat end on it.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: The fat end was the productive end, uh, agriculturally. And that end is where all the families had their traditional holdings. The other part, the long skinny part had been, um, not exactly commandeered. What would you call it? Um, used by a Belgian starting in about 1886 as a plantation. There's a long story behind that.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, which I didn't learn until towards the very end.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but it had been planted as a plantation and run as a plantation, um, by that Belgian, uh, up into Japanese times, into the '20s, I guess, maybe '30s before. [tape break] The Belgian, a guy named, uh, Eshiek.

Robert Klein: Not Emil Lohbeck?

Stephen Hayden: No, no.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: In the late 1800s, the, uh, the Germans had, um, had the, it was a Japanese trust. It was a, uh, sorry, a Spanish, um, protectorate, I guess you'd call it. But the Germans had the right to do trade. So in that before, just before the Spanish American War in the 1880s, this Belgian guy had who had already been in Micronesia successfully in other places, came to Ponyong and made a deal to put this plantation in. Um. After the Spanish American War in 1898, um, the Germans bought Micronesia from the Spanish. So then they were running the whole show until the Japanese took it away from them after World War I.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So, um, so, okay, so as far as the coconut project goes, um, all of the work we did, that I did, was on privately, traditionally, I shouldn't say privately, traditionally held land right in the, in the agricultural end of the island. Um, and like I say, we probably planted a thousand trees or so, um. and I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about the project because I wasn't sure that this was the right thing to do. Um, and in retrospect, I was absolutely correct. And I'm very, very glad that we didn't do what we were expected to do, which was cut down all the old trees and plant new ones.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Um, the, the law of unintended consequences works for good and for evil.

Robert Klein: Oh, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: When I revisited the Island in 2002, 47 years later.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I asked them, you know, how did those Yapese coconuts turn out? Oh, they're really, really nice coconuts. Really good coconuts. Really great. Yeah, that was really great. I said, well, how about the copra, I mean, did you guys? Well, actually, they're no good for copra. You can't get the meat out, but the hard shell of the coconut is much bigger than the ones we had. And they're really good for collecting coconut toddy. So that's what we use it for. So yeah.

Robert Klein: So people there would, they had chickens, pigs, and small gardens, tropical fruit?

Stephen Hayden: Not so much gardens. They had, uh, taro swamps.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: That were owned by families.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And, and they made those swamps. They dug down to the fresh water and filled it with leaves and stuff. And so they tended taro swamps. They had breadfruit. Uh, they had, uh, at that time they had some lime trees that were, God knows who brought those in.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and papaya and banana, uh, a few pineapple.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We were also shown in our training, uh, the quote unquote, proper way to prepare bananas for planting and pineapple for planting. And that was probably a good idea. But again, I was way out of my league, and so I didn't go there.

Robert Klein: Well, let's go through the second year then. Uh, you began working on the agricultural project with a little bit less than enthusiasm. Uh, any other activities on the island?

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. Um, about that, between. Let's see. February. Well, that whole last half of the first year, um. Because that long, skinny part of the island had, uh, the Belgian had, had the run of that. After World War II, he put in a claim to the U.S. government that, for a compensation for the loss of that, even though he never had title to it.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and the U.S. actually paid him off and in doing then.

Robert Klein: Gained possession.

Stephen Hayden: Gained possession of it on paper. So here was this piece of, you know, three quarters of the island that is U.S. owned. And the people there had made several petitions, both during Navy times in the '50s and in the early '60s, to get the island back, and unsuccessfully. But they decided to make one more shot at it, and they asked me to help. And I was invited to the council meetings. And by that time I was, between my own language proficiency and Titus' ability to translate sophisticated stuff.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I sat in on many council meetings, and this was a huge deal for the island. Um, they were, they were told that there was going to be a plebiscite and someday they might be independent. And they were looking at these lagoon Trukese, 160 miles away, who were basically going to run the show. What would they do with that piece of the island? So they wanted that clarified. And there was conflict. There were nine clans on the island, and there was historical conflict between some of the clans over who had what and who had prior rights, etcetera, etcetera.

But the elected magistrate of the island, a guy named Leon Epperson, basically facilitated a conversation between those nine clans that led to a unified position vis-a-vis the U.S. And my contribution was to suggest to them that they would have a better shot at it if they came up with a land use plan and a clear way of distributing it, so that the U.S. guys would think, oh, they have it together.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So, so they did. And it was totally amazing to watch that process.

Robert Klein: Was Peace Corps aware of the role you were playing?

Stephen Hayden: No.

Robert Klein: Had they been, would they have told you to stop?

Stephen Hayden: No.

Robert Klein: Okay, but you're interfering in local affairs.

Stephen Hayden: No, I wasn't, I was just helping out a little.

Robert Klein: Well, I mean.

Stephen Hayden: I mean, I ultimately told the director, you know, what we were doing, him, and they all knew about it by the time they got the petition. But they came up with this plan, and then they, um. Yeah, actually, then by then. How did it work? We, uh. They made a petition. In Trukese. I took it to the district center and typed it in. Or I translated it into English on the island with Titus' help.

Robert Klein: Mm hmm.

Stephen Hayden: Took it to the district center the next time I went in. And I can't remember the, the timing of that, and typed it up. And then there was a guy from one of the other islands in the atoll who was the education director for that area, and he spoke very good English. So he took my typed version, retranslated it back into Chuukese, and then he and I went out together on the ship, and he read it back to the council. And the people said, did he get it right?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And we made a few corrections and then typed it up and 120 people signed it and we sent it in with the other volunteer, Kent Reediman and Jan Reediman. They were going somewhere. Sent that in, and it was forwarded to the high commissioner with a letter from the district, the district administrator supporting it. And that's the last I saw of it or heard of it until 19, or until 2002.

But in the meantime, we continued our work out there. Um, the new district administrator came out to the island to visit and brought an entourage of bureaucrats, one of whom was a was an engineer starting up. And he stayed with me. And so he arranged for me to get a alidade and a plane table so we could map the villages and then map the private land. We never got to the private land, but we did map the villages, and this is all part of lining up to be able to make sure that the, that however this land was, um, divided would be fair.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: First we have to know who has what.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So that was really a fun project, and that was right down my alley because I learned how to do that as an archeologist.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah. That's great.

Stephen Hayden: So I could actually contribute something that they couldn't do.

Robert Klein: They couldn't do what you doing.

Stephen Hayden: Even though I didn't like the idea of laying out the villages in squares, never mind that.

Robert Klein: Some compromises.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. So I did a lot of, I did that kind of thing. And it turned out in, I mean, over, over time that, that that petition to the high commissioner was by far the most important thing I've ever done in my life.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: By far. Um, but I didn't know it at the time. I was just doing what was in front of me, you know? Why not? This is kind of fun.

Robert Klein: So now you come to, coming to the end of your two years?

Stephen Hayden: Not yet.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: So, um, so then I get a notice from my draft board that I'm to go to Guam and get a physical.

Robert Klein: Really?

Stephen Hayden: I was 25. I'd had a deferment the first year. They decided they figured out I was turning 26 a day after I got out, I think.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And anyway, so I had to go to Guam. That took a bunch of time. Of course I was 1-A, came back. I, like I say, the, our district director, Howard See, was a fantastic guy and I was going back out to the island, so I arranged with him to, that we would keep in touch by radio. He was going to do everything he could do to, to divert that, um, that thing and get me deferred too. Um, and meanwhile, I was making arrangements with my girlfriend who was in Washington state to go to Canada if worst came to worst.

Robert Klein: Huh. Okay.

Stephen Hayden: This was heavy because I was miles away from anything. This was all over the radio. Howard and his wife were very, very good about sending her notes that I would dictate over the radio and vice versa.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: The heaviest part about that was, of course, I had to tell my parents what was going on.

Robert Klein: Ah.

Stephen Hayden: My father was a conservative. And he wrote back and said, if you do that, you're no son of mine. Never darken my door again. You know, a man of principle would, would obey the law and go to jail if, you know, blah blah blah.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I just reread the letter I wrote back to him, and I must say, I don't think it probably had much of an effect, but I was, I was definitely not going to go home.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and then I got appendicitis. So this was in May.

Robert Klein: Were you way out on the island?

Stephen Hayden: I was on the island. So, May. I was supposed to terminate in August, I think. So in May, I got appendicitis. It took four days for the ship to get out to get me, because they were on the other side of.

Robert Klein: So this was an emergency?

Stephen Hayden: It was a, it was a four day emergency. Yes.

Robert Klein: Oh my God.

Stephen Hayden: Um, so we, fortunately our radio was working.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And so the.

Robert Klein: Fortunately you didn't die.

Stephen Hayden: And so, uh, so I finally got into the district center on the ship. I took the commercial flight to Guam, and I was in the Guam Naval Hospital for three weeks maybe.

Robert Klein: That long?

Stephen Hayden: Almost a month. I was in intensive care for about ten days. And then I was.

Robert Klein: It must have been.

Stephen Hayden: It was bad.

Robert Klein: Touch and go. Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. And, uh, when I got out, of course, I took all the paperwork from the hospital and went right over to the, to the recruitment area and said, I want another physical. And they said, oh, just leave that paperwork with us. We'll take care of it. And I went back to Chuuk and there was no ship to the, back to my island. And I had found out that the assistant director on the notice that I was probably going to die up there, had radioed the island and told the new volunteer that had come a few months before I met him to pack up all my stuff and send it in the next ship. Really pissed me off.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I had been setting up, I had been planning on re-upping and staying and doing the training for the next group, and I was, you know.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So this really this whole, um, getting drafted thing really screwed that up.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but I tried to get back to the island in the worst way. And so there I was, you know, all 130 pounds of me, you know, with big sutures and all this shit and somewhat of a hero in the fact that I survived, but nevertheless not in the best of shape. And three sailing canoes came in from the island. And they hadn't come in a long, they hadn't made that sail in a long, long time.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: They came in ostensibly for cigarettes. And so I went to the Peace Corps director, and I said, my guys are here, I can go. Can I go? And he read me the riot act, of course. Peace Corps are not allowed to sail the open ocean on outrigger canoes with no life jackets and no nothing.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And so as he turned and walked away, he turned around and he said, I know what I'd do if I were you. And he just walked away. So I got on and we sailed off. And that was, that was a memorable, a memorable voyage for a lot of reasons.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We almost died on that one too. We got lost.

Robert Klein: Wow.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but we survived, obviously.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And it was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful getting back to the island. I was there for about a month, and then.

Robert Klein: That's real basic travel. I mean, going basic.

Stephen Hayden: It's a, it's about a five day trip.

Robert Klein: Yeah. So now you're, you're, you got back.

Stephen Hayden: I got back to the island, basically just finishing up stuff. And there was nothing, you know, we did a little bit. I was weak.

Robert Klein: Yeah. But at least you had the satisfaction of leaving on your own terms rather than.

Stephen Hayden: Yes, yes.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: It was, it was. That would have been the worst to have left without being able to say goodbye.

Robert Klein: So now, by the time you finally leave, you're 26 and.

Stephen Hayden: Just turned 26. I got back to the district center. I'm going to fly home.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: I'm going to fly, actually I'm going to fly to San Francisco, meet my girlfriend and head to Canada.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And there was a letter from, uh, from my draft board saying, forget it.

Robert Klein: Yeah. We don't, we don't want you.

Stephen Hayden: On the spot I had to go like this, rearrange my whole future. So.

Robert Klein: So you came, flew back.

Stephen Hayden: So I came home.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, spent a week with my girlfriend on the California coast and then came to Tucson.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: And went out there for 3 or 4 months, and total culture shock. Absolute culture shock.

Robert Klein: I would think, I mean, doubly so for living on an island with 300 people coming back anyplace in the U.S.

Stephen Hayden: I so vividly remember meeting my girlfriend in San Francisco. She had a '56 VW Bug about as big as this table.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And we went to Fort Bragg, which was, I don't know, a couple hundred miles.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: We drove and drove and drove and drove and drove.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: It was, um. Anyway, I did come back to Tucson, and I kind of disappeared into the back, backyard. I had an old woody station wagon, so I spent a good deal of time just restoring that.

Robert Klein: So you must have really, I mean, you'd been through so much, and it had been such a dramatic experience and satisfying that you're at a point in your life now, well, where do where do I go now?

Stephen Hayden: And it was, you know, I had kind of had it scoped out. I was going to stay another year. I was going to do this training. I might go to Fiji or Tonga after this.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I might go in the Peace Corps and everything was thrown in the trash barrel by this goddamn draft thing.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And by this heavy duty stuff from my parents.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Which, by the way, we never talked about.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Ever.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Never again.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but I did talk to him on the phone when I was in the hospital, and I think that kind of. I would love to have been a fly on the ball, but, when they had that conversation.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: But anyway, um, so I came back and then I thought that I was very interested in linguistics. I think I told you this story over there. Very interested in linguistics. And I had some acquaintances that were linguists at the University of Arizona. So I contacted one of the professors who was a pretty good friend, and he invited me to sit in on his graduate classes, which I did for a couple of weeks. And it was really interesting and I thought this would be good, you know, I could learn some stuff here and I could go back to the island. Because when I left, before I left, Johan, the canoe builder, and Titus both told me that their, their children were either not old enough to learn the stuff that they knew or weren't interested. The, uh, the cultural change was already happening on the island.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And Johan in particular was a very educated man in, in traditional culture. And he told me, you know, you come back and I will teach you everything I know.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And my God, what an offer.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And so linguistics was one of the avenues. And I went to this guy's grad classes and it was interesting. And then he invited me to a Saturday night poker game, and I went and there were 5 or 6 graduate students under his tutelage. And I, you know, not too far into the evening, discovered that he was cheating and nobody was saying anything. And I thought, well, fuck this, you know?

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I wound up going to Alaska and fishing.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I just couldn't do that kind of thing.

Robert Klein: How soon after you left did the status change to independence?

Stephen Hayden: Uh, gosh.

Robert Klein: Within a few years?

Stephen Hayden: Oh, almost 15 years. It was 1980, about 1981 or 2. I should know this cold that I don't.

Robert Klein: Well, that's all right.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah.

Robert Klein: So what kind of ongoing contact were you able to have?

Stephen Hayden: I had very little. Um, there was.

Robert Klein: I mean, given the isolation generally I could.

Stephen Hayden: I was basically living hand to mouth when I went to Seattle.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I went up to meet my girlfriend thinking I would get married, and I didn't know what would happen after that. That didn't happen for another ten years. Um.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So I carpentered, I house painted, I fished, I just cobbled it together.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, I took for a while some free university classes in film, uh, cinematography.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Because that was what I was really thinking would be neat to do, go back there and document some of this stuff. But I didn't have enough money to, to keep that up.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: I was, I was not at all inclined to get a real job. Um, I just didn't. I was, I was still in culture shock.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Fishing in Alaska was as close as I came to actually having a real, a real job, and I enjoyed that a lot.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but I didn't have, you know, after the first couple of exchanges of letters, I realized that this was going to be, I was going to be required to be sending them stuff. And I didn't have the money to send them stuff, and I kind of lost contact. And, now I left in '69. In '71, the island was almost wiped out by a typhoon. Typhoon Amy.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Leveled this.

Robert Klein: Wow.

Stephen Hayden: And I mean, nobody was killed, and everybody survived, but it changed the whole island.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: They got massive government aid for quite a few years.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: After they changed things. And then.

Robert Klein: So it's living on the dole, sort of.

Stephen Hayden: On the dole.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, uh, and then some machinations started happening. This was in, by mid '70s. In 1975, it turns out in retrospect, I mean I learned this afterwards. In 1975, so that's, uh, seven years after we made the petition to the, to the high commissioner, the court, the high court of, of Micronesia granted them ownership of the island.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Thanks to the petition and to the efforts of a Legal Aid attorney who came in the mid '70s and was handed this project from unknown to push us on through.

Robert Klein: Was it a Peace Corps volunteer?

Stephen Hayden: No, Legal Aid.

Robert Klein: Oh, okay. Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: His name was, uh, Laur Halpern, who goes by Elie Halpern now. I, we.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, uh. And so, so when, uh. Well, I don't know where to go from here. There's, there's the history of the island, and there's my own history, but.

Robert Klein: Well, let's, let me, uh, I'd be curious. You said you have gone back. Let's pick it up from, you know, from there.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah. Let me, let me put in one other thing because this, this is Peace Corps, returned Peace Corps stuff. When I came back, I wound up in Port Townsend about 1974.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: With my college girlfriend, we finally got married.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We bought a little house in town. Um, and I was doing the same thing, just cobbling together business. I started working in a little co-op, a little food co-op there, which eventually became what would pass for a career. But, um, also some political stuff was happening. There was some land use issues that were major land use issues, and we got involved and not, being totally naive, never having gotten involved in anything like this before, I called the mayor of this small town, who ran the liquor store. He was a retired Marine, and, uh, and I was very polite and just requested that the city do an environmental impact statement, whatever the hell that is.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: On this big development that's going on at the lagoon. And he said, why don't you and your wife just get out of town and leave these decisions to the important people? Bam! And I thought to myself, you motherfucker.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: I was in the Peace Corps. I saw those poor bastards in the hospital in from Vietnam, and they weren't there fighting for this kind of shit. You just stepped on your dick.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And so my wife and I went to war with, and some others, of course.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And we won.

Robert Klein: Great.

Stephen Hayden: It took us 15 years.

Robert Klein: Well, it's.

Stephen Hayden: There's now an 80 acre nature park in, in Port Townsend that wouldn't have been there.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: This is relevant because in that process, of course, I got involved in a lot of other, um, environmental stuff, at the same time working in the cooperative sector.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: So I was learning the business, I was learning facilitation, I was learning consensus building, that kind of stuff, and community organizing and legal, legal stuff. So. So then we get to the next chapter because in between I just kind of did all that stuff.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, my wife passed away in, in 1999. In 2000, I, and my father had passed away a couple of years before that. I came down to Tucson to take care of my father's stuff and basically seized the opportunity and moved from Port Townsend to Tucson, back to the family home.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Where I met my current partner.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Who was an old friend of my father's. And she came up with me to Port Townsend to help me close out the house and have a humongous yard sale. And I showed her the slides, slides I had from Micronesia. And she said, oh my God, we should go there. And it hadn't even occurred to me because my wife had, my late wife had no interest in doing that, and we didn't have the money anyway.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: But I'd sold the house in Port Townsend, so I had plenty of hot cash in my pockets. So we went in 2002. And on the way we stopped in Hawaii at the arc, where they have the archives of the Trust Territory, and looked up to see if we could find anything about what happened with this petition thing.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Well, in this lousy, lousy microfiche.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Was part of the petition, with some of the signatures, and also the judge's, um, verdict.

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: Or directive.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: With the name of the attorney that had done it.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Well, so I made copies of a bunch of stuff.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: To take with me to the island, just because why not?

Robert Klein: Right.

Stephen Hayden: And I had a copy of the petition that I had sent home from the Peace Corps.

Robert Klein: Okay.

Stephen Hayden: So I had taken that with me too just thinking, you know, this will be good for a laugh.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Well, I got out there. We arrived in the, in the district center in Weno on the big island and stayed in a little hotel. And, uh, Kiki, the, the eldest son in my family who was 14, 12 or 13 when I left.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: He was now the health aide. His father had passed away.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: He came to visit us in the hotel. He'd come in from the outer island to, to get us.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We had no idea what was going on out there, no idea even if anybody would remember us. But of course they did.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And he proceeded to tell us the sad, sad story of what was going on in the island the last 35 years, which was a story of corruption and chicanery and, um, pardon the phrase, but heinous fuckery.

Robert Klein: Yeah, yeah.

Stephen Hayden: As they say.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, it was a hell of a story. And I said, well. And the upshot was that one of the families, two of the brothers, like I said, in the '60s had gone off to college, and one of them had come back to be the father of Micronesia. That family had become, um, the hereditary chief line, and they were sucking the capital from those provided by the U.S. It wasn't even getting to the island anymore. It was going right into their pockets.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, this was a very, very big deal. And. And they were claiming that the island belonged to them because they had bought it. They had given $75,000 to the U.S. back in whatever.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So I had all these documents. So it was like the Golden Fleece. It was the Golden Fleece.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So we went out to the island and did some guerrilla organizing. I mean, they, the family, our family had some guys in it that were ready to kill.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And oh, we've got to have a big meeting and tell everybody this. And I said, no, no. Well, one thing I've learned over the last 30 years is you do it one piece at a time, so you've got to get everybody lined up.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So by the time we go public, we'll have them surrounded.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So we did. And it took, uh, the old magistrate that had, that had, uh, facilitated this whole thing was still alive.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: 80 years or 82 years old. And so I took the head of the clan in our village to him. And, and this, the clan leader was, is my age. He's still alive. Speaks pretty good English.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: We went to see Leon. He had no idea about this because he was off in Florida teaching Peace Corps volunteers.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So we went to Leon and had this long conversation, which I taped, and the upshot of which was Leon said, he's right. This is right. This guy's are wrong. They should have an election. We should fix it.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: So on the strength of that, they launched a new election. The bad guys didn't give up easily at all. It was seven more years before, um, Kiki finally was installed as mayor officially. Um, we went back in 2005 anticipating that this would all be taken care of by then. Uh, Leon died two months later, and then the shit hit the fan again.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, but we, we told them when we left in 2002, we'll be back on April 25th, 2005. That'll be your 75th anniversary of your independence.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And, and so we got there and they were ready for us. And the son of a bitch who was the FSM rep to the UN, family, filed an injunction against the election and started this whole brouhaha.

Robert Klein: Never ending.

Stephen Hayden: So it's, he's, he's about the only one left in the family now. Three other members have died in the passing seven, seven months, I mean seven years. So we went back again this last summer, it's our third trip.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And we've just gotten thoroughly reengaged with the island.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, with the overcoming of this oppressive, oppressive corruption stuff on the island is just kind of uncovered a whole cultural miasma that is going to take a lot of work on their part and everybody's part to overcome.

Robert Klein: But it's more than just like a tourist going back. I mean, you're, it's very much part of your life and you're very much part of their life.

Stephen Hayden: Absolutely.

Robert Klein: So, I mean, it's kind of not unique, but it's just, you're lucky.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, I am. Yeah. There aren't, tourists don't go to the island. There's no tourist facilities. The only reason you would go out there would be if, uh, well, you've got some official capacity or you're a family member.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: Um, and the first time we went out in 2002, they were. They were happy that we came. They were surprised. They took great care of us.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: The second time we went out, it was like, wow, they really must mean it that they do love us and respect us and want to help.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: This last time and we went, the second time we went out, there were some very tragic things happen. A guy got killed, got stabbed, and we were very close to everybody involved. It was a very traumatic thing for the audience. So yeah, when we left that time, we knew we were going to be going back. And when we went this time it's like, I'm an, I'm an elder now.

Robert Klein: Yeah.

Stephen Hayden: And I'm the fourth oldest man on the island. And I know things that nobody else knows because I was there when I was younger.

Robert Klein: You're a piece of the history.

Stephen Hayden: Yeah, I got the history.

Robert Klein: Will you likely go back again?

Stephen Hayden: Oh, yes. No question about it.

Robert Klein: Good.

Stephen Hayden: Got things to do.

Robert Klein: Good.

Stephen Hayden: Got things to do.