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Jeff Thaler

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He would never talk about his family, really. He would drag it out of us but he was not going to disclose anything. He would tell us occasional stories when we’d get together, about his bombing the wrong island, for example. So he would occasionally tell those little jokes about himself.
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What I think he told us was, when they would get hot and tired they would pull up to a hotel. They wouldn’t check into the hotel. They would just go and use the swimming pool for free.
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What Mr. Gaudino told us — among his few stories he would tell us — was that when he ran for Student Council president in college that he ran this race and he lost to a cheerleader. And so he would always tell that as sort of a joke because he couldn’t even beat a […]
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I was startled one day to learn that one of his favorite songs was “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” I thought, you know, Bob Dylan, wow, that’s impossible.
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Clearly Gaudino had evolved this over a number of years in the ’60s leading up to Williams-in-India and then the story was that while they were in the mountains, in the Himalayas, talking about how the different experiences were they realized that all these guys really didn’t know their own country very well and Gaudino […]
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It’s the Village Beautiful.
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The first time I met him was in his office when he was interviewing me before he decided whether and who he was accepting. I jokingly mentioned that my grandmother had doubts about my missing a semester of school. He immediately pounced on my remark, and peppered me with numerous questions – who was my […]
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There’s nobody in the world who could have gotten me to read Hannah Arendt. It’s still probably the most dense material I have ever read, On Revolution. He assigned us all those books to read the summer before, “Small Town in Candor?” something like that. [Small Town in Mass Society.] Books on education. Robert Coles. […]
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My parents, there were some questions like sort of “Why?” And the interesting thing was that Gaudino made a real effort to include the parents, to educate them a little bit. We had a couple of sessions where parents were invited on campus, to his house and he really wooed the parents and was writing […]
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I think in part he figured: OK, Deep South is going to be different for most of these students, the black-white racial issues; Kentucky, Appalachia, the poverty, the rural; the Iowa farm I think was just agriculture and I think the theory was small farmer, even then, contrasting it with maybe bigger business; and then […]
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CHAPTERS

Introduction
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Final Note
credits