Posted on 07/26/2015 4:11:59 PM PDT by marktwain
dear archy,
Thanx. :)
Would you believe that the summer of ‘68, I spent my time reading the Berlitz book, before i started Russian 101 in my junior year of high school??
My counselor asked me, when i was choosing classes for the next school year, ‘Why did i want to learn the Russian language?’ I told him, since i was in the ‘business curriculum’, and wanting to go to the New Hampshire College of Accounting and Finance, (now snhu on tv), because one day in the future, we will be doing business with them. That was 1968.
I believe it, and would observe that as pretty good reasoning for a high schooler back then.
Around 2000, the University of Memphis decided to shut down its Russian language program, leaving the non-tenured grad students and teaching assistants to fend for themselves. This, though there are more Russian language speakers in the world than French and German- speakers combined.
Not to worry: several of the Russian and Ukrainian girls from the former department chipped in and bought a house, and set up cubicles on the downstairs with apartments upstairs, and began offering tutoring, some for beginners but other classes tailored for specialty business idiom. And the Fed-Ex corporate headquarters and shipping hub is in Memphis; shortly after FedEx CEO Fred Smith took a couple of their offerings, so too did many of the down-the-food-chain senior execs who took their cues from The Boss.
And too, the Navy Office of Personnell is at the Memphis Air Station at nearby Millington; once a couple of the senior officers there found out that one course directed toward military language use was being taught by the daughter of a former Soviet three-star general of the Stavka it got more crowded. And then aviators from Little Rock and Biloxi air force bases and elsewhere.
The girls at the Russia House are doing okay, I hear....
Back around the time you were making those language and education decisions, I was on the 5-kilometer border zone more generally known as the Iron Curtain. Ya know how you could tell an East German who was a pessimist? He learned Russian. An optimist? He was the guy taking English lessons....
dear archy,
FWIW, Class of South Vietnam, campus of U-Tapao Royal Thai Naval Air Station, Rayong Province, Thailand ... home of the ONLY stationed B-52’s on the Asian mainland, 1971-1974.
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