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Over the Back Fence By HANK HENRY Tray serves as memento of a cousin's eventful life On our living room wall hangs a copper serving tray from pre-Gulf War Baghdad. It is about 2 feet across, and every inch of the tray was decorated by hand. It must have been a painstaking, time-consuming job involving hammers and chisels and a lot of sweat. It was a gift from Nora's cousin, Paul Williams, who grew up in Klamath Falls and later lived the life of a world traveler. When he gave her the tray, he said, "If you die first, I'll want the tray back. If I die first, you can keep it." After spending four years in the Marines, with his last post at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, Paul went to Oregon State University to study food science. He was later hired by the Beatrice Foods Co., an international conglomerate that sent him back to Guantanamo to operate a milk processing plant that produced a natural-tasting product that required no refrigeration and had a shelf life of at least six months. The process is used in many countries around the world, except for rich countries where nearly everybody has a refrigerator. After almost two years in Cuba, Beatrice Foods transferred him to Rhoda, Spain, to manage a similar plant. He was the only non-native at the plant, but that didn't faze him. He had a knack for getting along with local people wherever he worked. After two years, Beatrice executives realized that Paul's ability to get record production under such circumstances was quite valuable, and it made him a troubleshooter for its plants in Europe and Asia. From Spain, he went to Morocco, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Italy, among other places. Paul later said that, after working in some of the flashpoints of the globe, he had left packed suitcases behind him in a number of places from which he had been forced to flee. One was Tehran after the fall of the Iranian shah in 1979. He always lived with the locals wherever he went, and that paid off when some of the young Iranian men in the plant helped him walk north to the Turkish border, many miles away. From there, his work took him to Asia, with stints in Korea, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Indonesia and southern China. Beatrice Foods had imploded by that time, and Paul had to find his own jobs. One of these was in Bangladesh, one of the poorest countries on earth. Political upheaval struck soon after his arrival, and a government official was sent around to tell him that his U.S. currency would have to stay in the country or else he would be fined and imprisoned. He was put under close scrutiny night and day. Paul developed a plan. Every afternoon, he went to the local airport and spent an hour sitting in the terminal, ignoring the two or three secret police who always sat nearby. He would watch the departure of the international flight and then go back to the plant. Finally, after a few weeks, there came an afternoon when, for some reason, none of the police showed up. At the very last second, Paul ran down the corridor and boarded the plane. All he had was the clothing on his back, plus his lucky shoes. Glued inside them was $10,000. Paul later managed a dairy plant in Canton, China, until the firm went broke, a not-uncommon event as the Chinese government experimented with a quasi-business economy. He moved on to Singapore and Malaysia, where he spent several months on his own sabbatical, living with a native family in its compound. Paul has worked in about 15 countries and visited 39 others. His favorite country was Thailand, where he resided for several years. Much of his time was spent coaching soccer and teaching English to Thai children in remote villages. He and Nora were not only cousins but also close friends from grade school days. I also considered him a friend. On Jan. 22, 1998, Paul Williams, 59, died in Ching Mai, Thailand, of a brain aneurism. The copper tray still hangs in our living room, and we still miss him. (Hank Henry is a retired Jackson County commissioner and a former radio and television announcer. Call him at 772-9055.) Prime Times front page Mail Tribune front page Copyright � The Mail Tribune 2000, Medford, Oregon USA