Pictures taken of various locations in Thailand after I graduated from high school.... read more

After furlough from 1964 to 1965, I returned to Bangkok, Thailand where Dalat School had been evacuated to that Spring. I attended the Fall semester. Bangkok was hot and humid, and the air conditioning couldn't keep up with dorm rooms that had two triple deck bunk beds in them. By the time the Spring semester started, Dalat School found new home at the Eastern Hotel in Tanah Rata in the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia. This had also been a hill station for British colonialists to get away from the heat and humidity of the lowlands. Only these highlands were very humid; so much so that the school had to send the laundry down to mountain to dry. The Cameron Highlands had a very British Smoke House Restaurant and the Cameron Highlands Hotel with a nine hole ... read more

Following the spring semester at Dalat it was time to go back to the States for a year furlough. This would be our third time around the world, but by commercial jet (Boeing 707’s or DC-8s) this time. We flew from Bangkok to Beirut, Lebanon, which was before their civil war. The city was similar to any wealthy touristy city along the French Riviera. We took a day trip to Byblos, a Phoenician city founded in 5000 BC, the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. We enjoyed touring the archeological sites. From Beirut we flew to Jerusalem, the eastern half of which was part of Jordan at the time. We toured all the holy sites and then crossed through the Mandelbaum Gate, which was the only crossing between Jordan and Israel. The crossing could only ... read more

Dalat School was beginning a major transformation. A new boys’ dorm was constructed to the left of the old boys’ dorm which was now the administrative building with an expanded dining hall. The lower piece of property to the left of the girls’ dorm was bulldozed for a track and playing fields. U.S. Army advisors were assigned to teach at the Vietnamese Military Academy, and they brought their families with them. U.S. Army dependants from Saigon also came to Dalat School for their education. We had children whose parents were with foreign embassies and foreign aid organizations; including a boy from Egypt. So the student population was becoming quite cosmopolitan. My dorm parents for this five year period were Uncle John and Aunt Esther. Until about 1960, driving from Saigon to Dalat was safe, but after ... read more

I was six, almost seven, so it was time for me to start school. Missionaries in Southeast Asia sent their children to boarding school at Dalat, in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. Vietnam was part of French Indochina until 1954 when it was divided into North and South Vietnam, with Ho Chi Minh and his communists in charge of the government in the north, and Ngo Dinh Diem as the president of the supposedly democratic South Vietnam, but he was really a dictator. Many Catholics moved to the South to avoid persecution by an atheist government. In 1956, when I first started at Dalat School, the communist Viet Cong had not yet organized their terrorism campaign to overthrow the south so traveling to Dalat was pretty safe. My parents and I took the train to Bangkok, ... read more