Mission Behind Bars

Until he landed in prison on a two-to three-year rap for passing a bad check, John Corpier, 32, thought of himself as "a pretty worthless fellow." The son of a Texas dirt farmer, he left school after the eighth grade, worked at a prewar Civilian Conservation Corps camp until he joined the Air Force at 17. Though he made a respectable war record as a B-17 waist gunner in Europe, he never seemed able to settle down once he had left the service. He worked at radio and TV repair jobs in Alaska, Seattle and Palo Alto, Calif., finally ended up as a booking agent for a small jazz band in Las Cruces, N. Mex. There he wrote a phony $600 check and landed in jail.

Prison had an extraordinary effect on Corpier. Time after time, members of the local Seventh-Day Adventist church came visiting, brought him a Bible and books to study. "It was the first time in my life," says Corpier, "that anyone had done anything for me that I didn't have to pay for. It made quite an impression." What could Corpier do, he asked himself, to help somebody else? Last summer he persuaded Associate Warden T. M. Woodruff of the New Mexico state prison to let him start a course in electronics for convicts.

Eventually he had 30 men poring over books on mathematics, electronics and TV. He made the most of his meager equipment--a radio signal tracer, an R.F. generator, an oscilloscope, a vacuum-tube voltmeter, a pile of TV parts. Self-educated in math, he taught his students algebra and trigonometry, did not hesitate to pile on the work ("Brother, I really load them"). Though some of his students had been chronic troublemakers in the prison, they soon reformed. All have been perfectly willing to spend hours each night wrestling with such assignments as: "Draw up six different parallel circuits, showing voltage at each point, voltage dropped at each point, the current flowing at each point, and the total current flowing in each circuit plus the total resistance."

Last week, up for parole, Model Prisoner Corpier gave his parole board a jolt. Though he had a job waiting for him, he said, he did not want to be sprung until he had trained at least one student to take over his course. As a matter of fact, he was not only willing to pass up future paroles; he would, if necessary, stay until his term ended in 1959 and "the warden kicks me out." Corpier had a compelling reason for such a decision: if he could prepare his students to qualify for FCC licenses, they would surely find jobs once they got out. "It's pretty hopeless for them if nobody is willing to help," said he. "How can a man go straight if he can't find work?"

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