Three days after arriving in Malaysia, Art Massolo heard a rumbling outside his hut — then a crash. A tree 50 yards away had been halved by a mortar, and local warriors streamed past him. While U.S. troops fought a savage war in the jungles of Vietnam, Massolo was thrust into an unacknowledged war zone too, something he hardly expected as a newly trained Peace Corps volunteer. And the irony doesn't escape him for a second. "I probably saw more military action in the Peace Corps than I would have seen in Vietnam," he says.
Joining the Peace Corps wasn't his original plan. After graduating from Hamilton, Massolo earned a law degree from the University of Chicago and wanted to pursue his doctorate. The draft board, however, had other ideas. Tired of granting him deferments, the board rejected Massolo's application and three subsequent appeals. His noncombat options were limited.
He considered joining the Judge Advocate General's Corps (JAG), the legal branch of the Navy, but the lengthy commitment gave him pause. "I would have loved to go into the Navy and do my service that way," he reflects, "but I wasn't prepared to give them seven years of my life." The Peace Corps required only two, so in 1967 off he went.
Massolo taught English, history, geography, social studies and physical education at the Dragon School, a boarding school in Sarawak attended by an ethnically and religiously diverse mix of students. The Iban and the Land Dayaks, long ago headhunters in Borneo, shared classrooms with Malays and Hocka Chinese, members of an indigenous population interned by British soldiers. (The Hocka children were permitted to board at Massolo's school.) Some of his students were 10 years old, others were 20; Christians, animists and Muslims co-existed.
Breaks in the oppressive jungle heat came in the form of drenching monsoons. "It didn't stop raining for six months of the year," Massolo says. One day, on a bus ride back from the capital, the sky opened, flooding the road and preventing the driver from reaching Sarawak. "Some villagers threw a rope across the water," he remembers. "We got off the bus, pulled ourselves across this raging river and boarded another bus on the other side." That's just the way things worked.
Even with the harsh conditions and political drama, Massolo reveled in his chance to live the life of an internationalist. "The young people I worked with were wonderful," he says. "And talk about diversity.… Between the Iban, the Land Dayaks, the Chinese and the Malays, it was one learning experience after another."
Massolo's service ended two months early when he assumed a principled stance and helped expose an explosive scandal. He'd learned that USAID food aid — milk and meat — was being supplied to his school but knew that it never reached the students, who ate only greens and soup. He approached Peace Corps officials for help, but per agency policy they prohibited him from getting entangled in local politics. Soon he discovered that his school's headmaster was in cahoots with an Australian expatriate; the two men had been selling the food on the black market. Massolo wrote a letter to the Malaysian prime minister, telling him of the scam. He then resigned his Peace Corps post, unable to stomach what had happened. "Until that point, I certainly had not been exposed to corruption in the way I was there."
Since his service four decades ago, Massolo has been a prominent member of the Hamilton alumni community. In addition to serving as a charter trustee, he and his wife Karen have sponsored about 15 students through their long association with LINK, a Chicago-based mentoring program that provides at-risk inner-city students with private school educations. "We look for students with the internal fortitude to break out of their environments," he says. The Massolos also established a scholarship at Hamilton for LINK participants.
Perhaps the seeds of Art Massolo's philanthropy took root in the Malaysian jungle. "I learned there that if you could help one person you were a success," he says. "There was no way we were going to save the world."
Art Massolo '64 joins one of his classes for a group photo during his Peace Corps service in Malaysia." The young people I worked with were wonderful," he says. "And talk about diversity.... Between the Iban, the Land Dayaks, the Chinese and the Malays, it was one learning experience after another."
