REDDING — When Dan Sharp heard then-senator John F. Kennedy’s first speech about the Peace Corps, he knew he had to be a part of it.
“I sort of felt like a lightning strike hit me,” said Sharp, an 89-year-old, who lives in Meadow Ridge, a senior living community in Redding.
Sharp helped build the Peace Corp, an agency celebrating its 60th anniversary this year that sends American volunteers around the world to build relationships with other countries.
“It was just such an exciting idea to me, to remedy what I saw as the defects in our way of dealing with the lesser developed countries,” he said.
He’s now a member of six committees within Meadow Ridge but said this work doesn’t quite have the same “exhilaration of being an international pioneer of U.S. relations with other countries.”
When he heard Kennedy’s campaign speech in 1960, Sharp worked as a deputy attorney general in California during the days and led discussion groups at the World Affairs Council of Northern California about U.S. foreign policy during his off-hours.
The next day, Sharp said he walked into the attorney general’s office and asked for a leave of absence so he could help start the Peace Corps pending Kennedy’s election.
And sure enough, when Kennedy was elected, Sharp packed up his apartment and jumped on a flight to Washington in July 1961, darting right over to the existing Peace Corps office.
“I knocked on the door and said I’d like to help start the Peace Corps,” Sharp said.
Sharp remebered how he was ushered in by Director Sargent Shriver, who headed up the corps. He had to be ready to travel within five minutes’ notice because of his trilingual skills and their demand, which he said often happened.
Over time, Sharp was deemed a member of the U.S. delegation for the United Nations, playing a role in negotiating some of the corps’ first treaties including one with the World Health Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
He spent seven years working with the Peace Corps from 1961 to 1968, during which he also led American volunteers in Peru and Bolivia and helped shape the organization’s legislation and training programs.
“My motivation was what I learned about how bad our relations were with what was then called third-world countries,” he said. “The Peace Corps seemed to be a wonderful way of improving our understanding of and relationships with those countries.”
“It was an absolutely exhilarating time with some of the best people in the world,” he added. “The Peace Corps attracted the best and the brightest.”
Maryellen Enright, a Peace Corps worker in Peru who has since died, wrote letters chronicling her experiences including her interactions with Sharp while she was there. Her husband, Bob Brannon, recently discovered the letters, years after her death in 1999, and shared them with Sharp.
In one letter dated from her time in Cuzco in 1964, Enright described the politics and trouble Sharp faced with Washington for a promotion.
“He’s getting along beautifully with the volunteers, which is the most important thing, but he has made so many changes and works everyone so hard that he has a real battle on his hands,” she said, noting that the director expected Sharp to be his “errand boy,” and he refused.
She was taken aback by the “politicking” Sharp had to do to become a director in Bolivia.
“Dan is too qualified to have to do this kind of thing, and I figure if the PC [Peace Corps] doesn't want him on his own terms, it is their loss,” she wrote in a final note of it before telling her parents about her upcoming adventures and guitar lessons.
Despite the politics and adventure of it all, Sharp stopped working with the Peace Corps because of a legislation he lent a hand in penning. When Sharp was up for a “presidential appointment” in the agency, he said the leaders suddenly realized his tenure with the Peace Corps would be coming to an end soon.
A legislative clause — drafted a couple of years after the organization’s establishment to prevent the corps from becoming a “bureaucracy” — limited staff to serve no more than five years, Sharp explained. And with seven years under his belt, that meant he wouldn’t be able to further his work there.
It was a “sad” moment for Sharp, but he went on to continue developing international programs at several corporations including the International Telephone & Telegraph and Xerox. Sharp additionally became a high-ranking leader at several institutions, such as chief executive officer of the Eisenhower Foundation and The American Assembly at Colombia University.
Mark Leneker, a program coordinator at The American Assembly, said Sharp was able to bring in top-tier individuals and spearheaded international programs revolving around issues of religion and racial equity, with a prowess for creating partnerships.
“You don’t find that in everybody,” Leneker said.
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Redding resident who helped found Peace Corp 60 years ago reflects on 'exhilarating' time - Danbury News Times
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