Monthly Archives: October 2008

Harley King is my new friend and a recent commenter to A Storied Career. He shared with me his wonderful career story, which appeared in the alumni magazine of his college, Goshen College. Though Harley is a few years older than I am, I remember many of the landmark events he talks about — the pivotal 1968 election, the Poor People’s March.

I love helping to tell people’s career stories and would love to tell more. Here’s Harley’s:

What do I want to be when I grow up? Or how I found myself!

By Harley King ’71

When I graduated from GC with a degree in English, I had some vague ideas about being a writer but fewer ideas about how to make my dream a reality. My college years were challenging — largely because of political distractions outside my studies.

My first year, I flunked German because I was more concerned about fighting racism and protesting the Vietnam War and rarely attended class. In January 1968, the beginning of my second semester, I walked through Arlington National Cemetery with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of others to protest military action in Vietnam. I turned 19 the day King was shot outside his hotel room in Memphis and the streets in our cities burned.

I also went “Clean for Gene” and shaved my beard. My father worried I was campaigning for the infamous Joe McCarthy who held the anti-communist hearings in Washington, D.C., but I laughed, because I only knew the liberal Democrat, Eugene McCarthy from Minnesota, who had pledged to end the war. I cheered when Lyndon Johnson chose not to run for a second term, booed when Bobby Kennedy tossed his hat into the ring and was shocked when he, too, was killed.

In June 1968, my friend Dean and I boarded a bus in Peoria, Ill., to go to the nation’s capital for the Poor People’s March. Not fully understanding what we were doing, we saw ourselves as part of that Mennonite protest heritage dating back to the Protestant Reformation. We had been raised to believe that it was more important to die a martyr for one’s faith than to violate one’s principles.

Salvation came in the form of Study-Service Term. If I had stayed in the U.S., I am sure I would have been pulled deeper into the radical politics of the time. But instead, I boarded a plane in Miami and flew to Kingston, Jamaica, with S.A. Yoder and a group of students not nearly as radical as I had been.

Slowly, U.S. politics became less important. We did not watch the 6 o’clock news or read the newspaper. Instead, we discovered a culture that had been heavily influenced by Britain — even driving on the “wrong” side of the road! I fell in love with Jamaica and suffered culture shock when I returned to the U.S. a short 13 weeks later.

SST was a pivotal point in my college career. Instead of dropping out of school to save the world, I focused most of my attention on my studies, with occasional excursions into politics. I sought redemption in the creative spirit. I wrote poetry and gave readings, edited literary journals and Pinchpenny Press, had the role of Zeus in the Greek play, “Trojan Women,” and absorbed the genius of Nick Lindsay. I even found reason to hope for a better world in the summer of 1969, walking across campus with my first love while Neil Armstrong took a “giant leap for mankind” onto the moon.

I was the first in my parents’ families to graduate from college. I had outgrown the farm, but where did I belong? Poets were not in high demand, and neither was anybody else. In the midst of a recession, there were few jobs to be found. The war in Vietnam was still going full throttle. Even though I was in no immediate danger of being drafted, I began voluntary service at Miami Valley Hospital in Dayton, Ohio. I was no closer to achieving my dream of being a writer — I was an orderly on a psychiatric unit. Continue reading →

Happened to see the other day, pretty much by accident, that my upcoming book (due out April 2009), Tell Me About Yourself: Storytelling to Get Jobs and Propel Your Career, is now listed on Amazon. This book is special to me and to the life of A Storied Career. I … Continue reading →