After our family pulled up stakes in Rome, mom & dad served as camp directors at this AFSC summer camp for people in the Middle East interested in ending conflict. We built a swimming pool together, or started off in that direction. The terrain was solid rock and we only got a pool in outline. It might have made a nice basement for some future building or condo. I haven't been back to Ramallah to see if I could find any trace of it.
Anyway, that was the year Boris Spassky and Bobby Fischer faced off for the world championship. I came to this channel in the midst or revisiting those games, which I was also tracking at the time. We would work until it got hot (early to mid morning) and then knock off for ice cream at Rukab's.
I was going from middle to high school that year, and once we got back to North America, for job hunting purposes, I started life as a freshman at Southeast High, Bradenton, not far from the Tropicana place. Dad found work in the Philippines and I finished my freshman year in Manila.
I was used to being uprooted by that point and so was the school (ISM, formerly ASM). Families were always coming and going in that capital. My friend Glenn Baker would show up in our senior year, fresh from Islamabad and before that Turkey (with an interlude in Virginia or one of those).
