Living On Peace Work : Laguna Beach Couple Join the Ranks of Corps’ Older Recruits

After 36 years in town, the Hanos are packing up their books, artwork and furniture and moving out of their hillside home in Bluebird Canyon.

Arnold, 69 and a veteran free-lance writer and teacher, and Bonnie, 64 and retired from a marriage and family counseling practice, are starting new jobs.

For the next two years they’ll be doing what is known in the parlance as “community development.” That could mean anything from helping villagers build roads or establish clinics for pregnant teen-agers. For this, they’ll each earn $200 a month plus a modest living stipend.

The Hanos have joined the Peace Corps.

In fact, the longtime social activists will be celebrating their 40th wedding anniversary in Costa Rica on June 30, just three days after arriving in the capital city of San Jose.

Arnold jokingly calls it “a mutual suicide pact,” but says Bonnie: “I’m terribly excited. I’ve been waiting 30 years to do this, ever since (President John F.) Kennedy first started it.”

Indeed, last March the Peace Corps, one of the most celebrated products of the Kennedy Camelot years, observed its 30th anniversary--still considered a thriving, effective force for American grass-roots social action despite some internal dissension.

While Corps officials lament the fact that many consider the Corps a largely obscure operation, they say the organization is again growing.

It now has 6,200 volunteers, down from the heyday high of 15,500 in 1967 but up from the 5,000 level throughout the 1980s. It is now in 80 countries, for the first time including Eastern Europe, where some 200 volunteers are in Poland and Hungary. Talks have resumed to also send volunteers to China--a move shelved after the 1989 Tian An Men massacre.

And while the large majority of volunteers are still college graduates in their 20s, the increasing numbers of older recruits have pushed the average age from 23 to 31. Volunteers 50 or older now compose 12% of the total; the figure from Southern California is even higher, 18%.

Except for the minimum age of 18, there are no age limits, said Peace Corps regional spokeswoman Joanne Townsend. “In recent years, we have had people in their 70s. One man was 86 and still in fine health,” she said, adding that the most famous example was Jimmy Carter’s late mother, Lillian, who served in India when she was almost 70.

So, as senior-age volunteers, the Hanos are clearly in good company.

Even though the organization has expanded its recruitment of specialty-skills volunteers, including engineers and small-business consultants, the Hanos fit the classic ‘60s Peace Corps mold of liberal-arts “generalists.”

And, like all the 125,000 volunteers of the Corps’ past 30 years, the Hanos are more than a little moved by a sense of social consciousness.

In recent weeks, the Hanos have been, as Bonnie says, “trying to dismantle” the house they have lived in the past 24 years.

Arnold also has been sorting through decades of old notes and papers from a free-lance writing career that spans 500 magazine articles for everything from TV Guide to Sport magazine. He also has written 26 books, including novels and sports biographies. His “A Day in the Bleachers,” an anecdotal account of the 1954 World Series in which Willie Mays made his legendary catch, is considered a classic.

The Hanos, who leave Sunday, have sold one of their cars and are storing another. And they’ll be renting out their house, a trilevel wood and glass A-frame with open beam ceilings, natural oak floors and cedar paneling. Surrounded by towering eucalyptus trees, the home gives a visitor the feeling of sitting in a birdhouse.

The Hanos, who began filling out the agency’s extensive amount of paperwork last September, requested to be sent to Latin America, Micronesia or Eastern Europe. They had no idea they would end up in Costa Rica, which they consider a “plum” assignment.

While on a three-week vacation to Costa Rica late last year they arranged an interview with the country’s Peace Corps director. Although he isn’t involved in the selection process, the director apparently liked what he saw: Shortly after returning home, the Hanos received a call informing them they would be stationed in the small, mountainous country.

“I think he was impressed with our tenacity,” said Arnold, whose son by a previous marriage, Steve, was a Peace Corps volunteer in southern India 25 years ago.

Although Arnold underwent a multiple bypass heart operation three years ago, he has had a clean bill of health ever since. “I fully informed (Corps evaluators) of my heart history. I even took a new treadmill test just last April. Everything’s OK. I’m all cleared,” he explained.

They’re not sure if they’ll be stationed in a city or “in the boonies,” but once assigned to a community, Arnold said, “our job is to organize and solve whatever their need is.”

That have learned that’s not always easy.

One young Peace Corps volunteer they met on their vacation in Costa Rica was trying to help villagers build a road, but the bureaucracy moves so slowly that he wound up spending his time teaching the villagers to read. Another volunteer also turned to tutoring when the town council failed to meet one month and canceled the next month’s meeting for lack of a quorum.

“Apparently, frustration is the biggest stumbling block to eager Peace Corps volunteers,” said Arnold. “I think that you can generalize the problem almost any Third World people feel is powerlessness. I think of one of our jobs is to let them know they are part of the system and can use it to solve their problems, and both Bonnie and I have been problem-solvers for years and years.”

The Hanos--he’s a New Yorker; she’s from Sioux City, Iowa--met in 1948.

At the time, Arnold was managing editor of Bantam Books, and Bonnie was working in the publishing house’s business office. In 1950, Arnold went to work as editor-in-chief of Lion Books, where, among other things, he edited noir thriller author Jim (“The Grifters”) Thompson. Bonnie was hired as production manager for the parent company’s comics department where the editor was Stan Lee (creator of “The Amazing Spider-Man”).

In 1955, a year after Arnold quit his job to become a full-time writer, the Hanos decided to leave New York (“It was no place to raise a kid,” said Bonnie) and move West. They discovered Laguna, a town they never knew existed, while taking a drive down the Coast Highway that same year.

Once settled, the Hanos quickly became involved in civic affairs.

In the early ‘60s they helped integrate Laguna’s barbershops, and Arnold served as chairman of the the Laguna Beach Interracial Citizens Committee. He also chaired Village Laguna, which was begun to fight high-rise beachfront development and continues to be Laguna’s leading environmental organization. Bonnie worked on a committee that started the first child guidance clinic in Orange County, and they both were early members of a citizen’s committee to preserve Laguna Canyon and the Laguna greenbelt.

Given their longtime activism, joining the Peace Corps is certainly not out of character.

“I can’t see having a sedentary retirement,” Bonnie said. “I think it would be terribly boring.”

“I’ve always looked forward to change,” said Arnold, adding: “I have a feeling that people are meant to give back. Without sounding too goody-goody, I think that’s part of it.”

During their two years in the Peace Corps, the Hanos will accumulate 24 days of vacation and, they said, they may return to California to visit or do some traveling in South America.

But they’re not at all sure what they’ll do when their Peace Corps assignment ends in 1993.

Some volunteers, Bonnie said, decide to extend their tours.

Who knows, she said, “we might be in the middle of a project that’s so exciting we won’t want to leave.”

“I do wonder what we will do next,” mused Arnold.

To which Bonnie joked: “We may want to come back and have a hot shower again.”

Arnold, ever the writer, gazed at their interrogator and laughed: “Now you’ve got your final sentence.”