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    "title": "Thornley, Kerry",
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    "ocrText": "on marquevers to the Philippines; as I was phasing out of the Corps\nI read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and decided the world's hungry\npeople could do best under unlimited free enterprise instead of\nsocialism.\n(My\npolitical evolution -- from I-like-Ike - conservatism to\nliberalism to Marxism to Ayn Rand to individualist anarchism\nto communist anarchism -- has been one of the major sources of\nmisunderstanding about) mus case all along. I include the information\non my political shifts (I like to think of them as advances.) be-\ncause it is essential to an understanding of my motives at various\npoints.)\nSo by the time Greg and I went to New Orleans I was, in many\nrespects, a rightwinger, Among other things, I bitterly opposed\nJohn F. Kennedy and believed that he was going to ruin the country.\nFebruary and March in New Orleans were difficult times for Greg\nand Kme.I believe it was in late March or early April that I finally\n~\nmanaged to get a part-time job as a telephone solicitor at the\nFoster Awning Company.\nThe fact that I had a full beard had prevented me, I think, from\ngetting a job sooner. I had by this time, I believe, borrowed money\nfrom Greg and drawn unemployment on my U.S.M.C. service. For while\nmy politics were capitalist, my life-style and cultural interests were\nost-beatnik bohemian. I hustled awnings and aluminum siding over the\ntelephone in the mornings and wrote and adventured around the French\nQuarter in the afternoons and evenings.\nof\nIt was probably somewhere in the early parts April that I met\nSlim (Roderick R. Brooks one day at work. Somehow, he was sitting\nat a phone desk which I was to take over for a short while before\nboth of us got off work -- I'm not sure of the exact details. But\nwhatever these were, I wound up sitting at Slim's desk and I noticed\nimmediately that he had left some doddling behind him -- Japanese\nKanji symbols (which I had studied in MACS-1 overseas).\nIt turned to Slim and said, \"Hey! I'm just back from Japan, and\nI'm writing a novel on peacetime Marines in the Far East.\"\nSlim nooded his head, almost as if in agreement with my statement,\nsmiled at me, and proposed that we spend the afternoon together.\nWe went by the day-old bakery and then to Slim's small French\nQuarter apartment. There Slim introduced me to Margaret, a waitress\nin maybe her forties who was somewhat of an alcoholic I think, She\nand Slim were old friends on a non-sexual basis and I believe that\nat this time they were temporarily living together. (If this woman\nis still alive and can be found during the course of an investigat-\nion of Slim I am sure she can provide a wealth of valuable informat-\nion: in 1963 she was working in Fong's Chinese Restaurant on Decatur\nStreet.)\nSlim was a fascinating, colorful figure. Presently he was suffer-\ning with a bad case of TB, but previously he had worked as a seaman,\na lumberman, a U.S. Marshal/ in Alaksa, etc. etc. We sat around\nhis place drinking cold coffee out of Mason jars while he talked\nabout his adventures and I talked about Ayn Rand's Objectivism."
}