Research Trip to LA and the OC...

Short week...I head out Thursday to LA, to do work on my book on Albert Schweitzer's legacy for education. I will interview his only child, Rhena Schweitzer Miller, 86, who, when I spoke to her last week, was bailing water out of her Pacific Palisades home. I may need to bring a bucket along with my notes. I am just finishing the recently published letters of Albert and Helene, before they were married, that shed marvelous light upon his evolving motivation to go to Africa, and her essential role in all that. Rhena may have more to say about this...I hope!

I am staying in Santa Monica, much loved, and reminds me of when I stayed there in the early fall while working as a Dartmouth admissions officer those many years ago. Like then, I will be truckin' south, to beat traffic, on Friday morning to visit the Schweitzer Institute at Chapman University, smack in the middle of the OC. I have lots of questions for the director, Marv Meyer.

I head back on Sunday night, on the red eye, perhaps after seeing one of my show biz (second) cousins. Then spring break here at Purdue...

Note to self: Get used to this trek, as daughter vows to hit Hollywood after her stint in Evanston ends in a few years. Hey, I can take it...like Randy Newman, "I love LA," but maybe only to visit. I really am not an eight lanes of slowly moving traffic kind of guy!