John E. Osguthorpe, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Becky B. Lloyd, June 24, 2004: Saving the Legacy tape no. 667

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JOHN E. 0 GUTHORPE J 24,2004 Outstanding Seedsman of the World. Years later, Utah State declared me a having d n more to feed the world than any man in the state of Utah. I worked in Alaska for eight years before being transferred to Washington DC. Then I began my travels of the world. I was in 119 countries. Then because I was responsible for spending so much money, some of the people in Washington, DC, got quite upset. They said, "No man should have the responsibility and have the authority this man has who is less than a cabinet officer." My budgets were larger than most of the cabinet offices. So I was sent back to the field into Senegal. From Senegal, I started the West African Rice Development Association, which took in fourteen countries in Central and West Africa. After two years there, I moved my headquarters to Monrovia, Liberia. Then after that, I said, "I've been abroad thirty years. I've lived in the whole world, I'm tired, I'm going to quit." So at age fifty-nine, I said, "I'm retiring." They said, "You can't." I said, "I just did." That in a thumbnail is my thirty years abroad. I have got twenty-two major awards, which are downstairs and I will show you, from the State Department, from the Agriculture Department, and Montana State University where I was honored. It was the A ward of Sigma Psi for outstanding original research in the Arctic. The other awards are for things I've done and I will. . .in the new book that's coming out, I'll take up all the twenty-two awards I have gotten since I went to the Foreign Service. BEC: That's great. JOHN: That's just a thumbnail sketch. As I told you, my life's been entirely different and hardly anyone knows anything about me because I did so well and went so far. But I never put my head above water. I would give others credit for anything that was done. I 4