Last week I gave a talk at California State University Monterey Bay’s chapter of the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. The talk is titled “Surviving the Zamzam.” It’s a story about my Aunt Jamie and Uncle Fred Henderson and their getting captured by the German Navy while on their way to Africa to be medical missionaries. They were taken prisoner on April 17, 1941 and their ship, the Zam Zam, was sunk.

I pieced it together based on 6 books on various aspects of the Zam Zam, some reminiscences written by my aunt and uncle, some newsletters published by their church while they were prisoners, some Life magazine stories, and a few links on the web.

I’ve posted on this in 2018 here, here, and here. More recently I’ve posted on items I’ve discovered in my research here, here, and here.

It’s not my usual kind of talk. I usually make an argument for or against a particular policy or an argument about various factual or theoretical economic issues.

Here I don’t do that. I just tell a story.

But if you want a little content on the perils of central planning, go to 24:25 and 29:30.

One thing I’m wondering and I don’t have the answer to happens at the 17:30 point. It strikes me that what Captain Rogge was doing–flying neutral colors–was, as I say in the talk, “illegal as hell.” But I don’t know.