By Janet Cline

Special to the News

Dr. Alice Kethley, 1952 graduate of Stephen F. Austin High School, left this week on her second Humane Society photographic safari to visit the exotic animals of Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, before returning home to Hawaii. She’d been visiting her brother, Jack Kethley and wife Dixie in the LaBelle community over the holidays.

To look at Alice, now in her 80s, you’d never guess the adventurous soul that lives within; but when one just talks to this Port Acres-born and bred woman a few minutes, one finds she’s not only adventurous but has given a lot to the world: teaching in both civilian and military schools, serving in the brand-new Peace Corps, and helping to found an institute on aging in Cleveland, Ohio.

As a young person, she attended what was then Lamar College and Sam Houston State, graduating with a bachelor’s degree in education.

“One day I asked if I could borrow my parents’ car,” she said, “and I went looking for pine trees and hills and creeks.” That drive led her to leave off for fishing trips with her Mom, and move to Warren, Texas, for four years.

While grading papers one day, she saw an advertisement for teachers to go overseas to teach in military schools.

“I filled out the form in red ink,” she said. “After all, I was grading papers.” She got the job, in spite of receiving strict instructions never again to fill out forms with red ink.

She ended up going to Okinawa to teach ninth-graders in five classes of world history of 30 or more students each. “I had more military kids than Okinawans,” she said. “I loved it. I was a head taller than anyone else, and I also loved going out to markets and villages.”

There was talk then that Okinawa might become an American territory, she said, but it became a part of Japan instead. “I agreed,” she said. “There was too much of a gap in resources and culture. It would have been a problem for young people. What are you going to work at? You don’t get to be a millionaire if all you can do is wait on tourists.”

“I went back on my 80th birthday,” she said, “and visited everywhere I’d been before.” Okinawa was much more bustling and crowded than she remembered.

After returning from that initial Okinawa trip, her hankering for travel was still strong. She read about the newly formed Peace Corps.

“When I joined, it was still in its first two years of existence. Since it hadn’t officially started yet, I went to Alaska for a year and taught at the military base there. The classes looked like a United Nations.”

She also continued to pursue her desire to join the Peace Corps.

She received an invitation to go to Phillips University, but replied, “I don’t want to go. I want to go to Thailand.” She was the only one who wrote expressing that desire, she said, and the result was she spent two years in Thailand.

Upon her return, she decided she wanted to teach world history.

“I wanted to excite ninth-graders who are not so easy to excite,” she laughed. “Then I got a call from a fellow in Washington, D.C., who was training people being sent to teach in Korea.”

She taught in rural Korea, training women as public health workers. Then Alice came home and went to teach in Hawaii for two years. She heard that the Peace Corps was starting up in the Fiji Islands.

“I directed the Peace Corps training program in Molokai as a U.S. representative working with their volunteers,” she said.

She visited friends in Eugene, Oregon, who talked her into applying for graduate school in gerontology, the study of aging. She earned her doctorate and was hired by the University of Washington in Seattle.

She worked there more than eight years, setting up a training program for teenagers “to help them understand old people.” She also took part in a think tank project in Minnesota, “but that was boring.”

Contacted by the head of Benjamin Rose Institute in Cleveland, the oldest institution for the elderly in the nation, she joined the executive staff and helped plan a rehabilitation hospital — aptly named the Kethley House — for those facing hard times in old age. Alice Kethley helped direct the institute’s services for 18 years before retiring to Hawaii in 2002.  That safari will fulfill her urge to travel for now.

 

Janet Cline is a former reporter for the Port Arthur News.