When John Frum Came: A Novel of South Pacific Cargo Cults / Bill Schroeder (ePub)

forcing his ultimate return to the company where he started out.

¿ Had a change of life goals and sought new areas of expression. He was offered the position of Producer-Director of The Maryland Renaissance Festival¿s Shakespeare Program. However, he also needed to have a second talent: he chose Tarot Card Reading. First he was billed The Mad Monk, later he became Prince Ali-Ba-Boon (Knows nothing tells much!)

¿ Pursued ¿life upon the wicked stage¿ as a hobby for the next few years in local theater groups. He played a variety of roles: Lt. Brannigan (Guys and Dolls), Mayor Shinn (The Music Man); Merlin (Camelot); The Prime Minister (The King and I); the Arab Sheik (Don¿t Drink the Water); and The Chinese Detective (The Butler Did It!).

¿ Took early retirement from the Defense contractor to go into the retail business. Harking back to his childhood love, in Washington DC¿s Restored Union Station he recreated a small museum named Schrader Scientific¿ where he sold the things The Smithsonian displayed (Dinosaur bones, Fossils, Gems, Taxidermy, Anthropological Artifacts). At the same time he opened playing card stores both in DC and Baltimore.

¿ Found that as much fun as it was, retail stores were not profitable. So, he moved on to running a ¿Welfare to Work¿ program in Maryland for three years. He was asked to leave after his unsuccessful unionizing attempt.

¿ Took this opportunity to pursue his most deep-seated desire to write books. The first was ¿John Frum, he come¿ which was about an American missionary and a young Solomons Islands shaman during World War II. It centered on Cargo Cult beliefs and the huge Navy ships full of unimaginable wealth.

¿ Wrote his second book about a secret propaganda program put together by President Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. Just when the plan was ready to go into action, FDR died of a stroke, Mussolini was strung up on a lamppost, and Hitler offed himself in a Berlin bunker. The war was over in Europe and there was no reason to complete the plan to flood Central and South America with decks of propaganda playing cards. He wrote ¿In Der Fuehrer¿s Face¿ to accompany a limited private printing of the lost deck with the cooperation of the Library of Congress. He made a public presentation of the book at one of the LOC¿s Meet-the-Author book signings.

¿ Had been collecting everything he could find abut the assassination of President Garfield in 1881, when Kennedy took the spotlight in Dallas. He continued gathering details for decades on Charles Guiteau, the man who shot Garfield, and recently published ¿The Innocent Assassin,¿ explaining why he was not guilty of murder.

¿ Followed up with ¿Seven Decks You Will Never Play Poker With.¿ As a Cartomancy (Playing Card) Historian he wrote a number of magazine articles about decks of cards that qualified as rare historic anomalies. He re-edited them into a book of interest to card players (and non-card players) alike for the Random House Book Fair in 2009.

¿ Most recently turned his attention toward developing the Genuine American Flag Movement after discovering that China has sold us $69 Million dollars worth of inaccurate copies of Old Glory. Their influence is so pernicious as to make it more likely than not you will see flags on TV and in public that no longer follow the design of the Eisenhower Flag that became legal on August 21, 1959. He has established a detailed, informative website www.genuineamericanflag.com explaining how to get a flag made in the USA by American workers.