We continue our series of memories from the 1960s with recollections from Ginny Radford, Nigel Roberts and Tony Hartevelt.
From watching the Moon landing on a shaky TV to seeing John F. Kennedy at the White House – the 60s were an exciting time to be an AFS student!
Ginny Radford (USA 1968-69)
(As a result of her outstanding volunteer service, in 1997 Ginny was presented with a ‘Queen’s Service Order’ for her service to Girl Guiding, and in 2015 she added to this with the ‘Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit’ in the New Year’s Honours. She was awarded Life membership of AFS NZ in 2023 and is also a Life Members of Girl Guiding NZ.)
My year in Minnesota was one of contrasts and new experiences. From a small girls’ school to a large co-ed senior high; from Wellington’s relatively even climate to three months of snow and burning summers. I loved the contrasts, and enjoyed different subjects at school: American history, drama, and typing (a great lead-in to years of keyboard use!).
My host family introduced me to canoe trips, cross country skiing, a Nixon political rally. My host father took me into the curtained voting booth to share the way in which votes were indicated by positioning levers, and then the total set were recorded mechanically.
Our year-end bus trip took us through further states, hosted briefly by very different families, including some with photos of sons lost in the unpopular Vietnam war. Those bus trips ended together in Washington DC with a gathering to hear Arthur Howe Jr, the AFS President. (Arthur succeeded the long-time Director/President Stephen Galatti, who died in 1964.)
In addition, the NZers were invited to the NZ Embassy, and watched the first moon landing there, with live pictures on a shaky TV! A further special memory was returning to my school 50 years on from graduation and rekindling the link with my host sister when we were both in our 70s.
On return from my AFS experience, I was involved in my Chapters with Selection for several years. Volunteering became integral to my life not just with AFS but also in Guiding both here in NZ and Internationally. In the 90s I had the privilege, as a volunteer, to lead the World Association of Girl Guides and Girl Scouts and I was nominated in 2007 by AFS NZ for the International Board of Trustees and after election I served as a Board Member and as Vice President until 2014.
Two of the things that I credit that exchange year with, are:
• the courage to make new starts, particularly leaving the teaching profession after 10 years, to be a student again and gain an MBA, and then enter the business world; and
• the ability to follow my passion about the impact volunteers can have, giving back to my community as an AFS volunteer, a leader of a global organisation of 10 million, and more recently as a Justice of the Peace and a trainer.
68-69 was certainly a pivotal year!
Author’s Notes:
Ginny stated: “It was when I returned to the US for the 50th anniversary of my class graduation that I realised what a life-long direction AFS had given me: refreshing 50-year-old friendships so easily! I decided then that it was the time to pay back in a different way again – through sponsorship to ensure today’s students get to experience what I did.”
Several fortunate students have received scholarships provided by Ginny since then and AFS NZ and the participants are extremely grateful for her generosity.
Nigel Roberts (USA 1962-63)
(Nigel is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science. He was made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) in the 2010 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.)
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: AFS was liberation for me. I went from apartheid South Africa in the early 1960s to the United States. I went from a whites-only, boys-only, private boarding school in Johannesburg to a mixed-race, boys’ and girls’ public high school in Ohio. I had two host families: the first were Democrats, the second were Republicans. Both families were exceptionally kind and helpful. I saw President John F. Kennedy in person twice – once at a campaign rally; the second time at the White House. I also watched him live on television when he gave his October 1962 Cuba missile crisis speech and his June 1963 civil rights address. It’s no accident that I went on to become a political science professor!
It’s now more than six decades since my AFS year ended. A simple measure of the impact that it had on me is the fact that I am still in touch with (and fairly frequently see) members of my first host family (all the second are sadly no longer alive), Ohio high school friends, and fellow AFSers from around the world.
For me, AFS has genuinely been a case of “Walk together; talk together.”
An August 1962 newspaper photograph of Kurt Liske (right) telling Nigel Roberts – newly arrived in Ohio as an AFS student from South Africa – about the rules of basketball (which was then a totally foreign sport to me). Kurt was one of four children in Nigel’s first AFS host family.
I am still in touch with (and, when possible, visit) the Liske family, who were my first host family and still live in Ohio. In this photograph taken 51 years after the picture of Kurt telling Nigel about basketball, Nigel’s on the right standing beside Kurt, Kurt’s wife Margy, and Karl, the oldest of the four Liske children that Nigel lived with during the second half of 1962.
After I left the USA, I also kept in touch with my second AFS host family. This photograph of Janice Meeker, my host mother and I was taken when I visited her in a retirement village in Florida in 2003: Janice was 90 years old at the time.
Peggy Wall was a senior in the Ohio high school that I attended. My family and I have often visited Peggy and her family in the US, and she and her family have visited New Zealand several times. Our two families are keen long-distance trampers: this picture of my wife Heather and I (on the left) was taken with Peggy and her husband at the Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, in 2017, after they’d completed a 13-day, 244-km walk from Porto, the second-largest city in Portugal.
Tony Hartevelt (USA 1965-66)
In August 1965 I left New Zealand for a year in Western Pennsylvania, USA. I was not conscious of it at the time but my participation in the program was momentous for my parents who, with two small children, had emigrated to New Zealand from the war ravaged Netherlands in 1952, not a lot more than a decade earlier. To them, my selection for AFS was a massive milestone in their quest to find a better future.
Although my selection as an AFS winter program student from New Zealand to the USA was a huge deal in our family in 1965, just how big of a deal it was for my parents did not really dawn on me until many years later when my wife and I farewelled our own first-born child from Wellington at the start of her journey to begin an AFS year in Belgium.
My childhood in New Zealand in the 1950s and early 1960s had been about as different from that of my parents as it was possible to be. There was no better place on planet earth in which to grow up than Mount Maunganui, New Zealand. Then, arriving in the United States, my eyes were opened – wide.
Welcomed and accepted by a warm, generous, and open hearted family and a wealthy, successful community, I became immersed in, and changed by, commerce, politics, education, history and cultural experiences that were all new, different and influential. Everything was different. My life became a steep and occasionally bumpy learning curve.
In September of 1966 I returned home with a clear goal to get an accounting and economics qualification and make a career in commerce. I returned home with an interest in geopolitics and a strong appreciation of home and family. In short, I had grown up.
Over the years since that life changing experience our family has also had the great good fortune of having an AFS daughter, Barbara from Brazil, with whom we are in regular contact to this day. Over the years Barbara has returned to New Zealand to be at her AFS elder brother’s wedding, and we travelled to Brazil to attend her wedding.
My own AFS family we visited in Pennsylvania a number of times, to introduce my wife Jane, and then in later years our children. Time does not stand still for any of us however and inevitably almost all of the family have passed on. That includes the sad and premature death of my AFS brother Jim.
I guess, at the age of 78, I am fortunate to be able to look back and appreciate how lucky I have been.
Footnote: Since completing this note I have received an invitation to attend the 60th reunion of the class of ’66 of my US High School, to take place in August. My wife is encouraging me to accept.