The most popular foreign resident in the tiny
Turkish port of Kusadasi is a lean, blond, blue-eyed American known
locally as Kemal Baldwin. Kids follow him
through the streets, and adults come to him for solution of all kinds
of problems. In a country where the word Cyprus has sent U.S. prestige
to its lowest point in 20 years, the 5,000 citizens of Kusadasi think
that if Americans are like “— Baldwin they cannot be all bad. Yet Baldwin is a jailbird, and under threat of a dishonorable discharge
from the U.S. Army. Born Kenneth Baldwin in Utica, N.Y., 30 years ago,
he enlisted in the army in 1957, won an award as the “outstanding
soldier of the regiment.” In 1958 he was shipped to Turkey and
assigned to a U.S. communications center in Ankara. When he bought a
tape recorder at the PX and resold it to a Turkish citizen, Baldwin
broke Turkish law; when he sold a second tape recorder for a pal, the
pal backed out of the deal, and Baldwin qualified for a court-martial
for “larceny.” At his army trial, he was sentenced to a
year's imprisonment , a bad-conduct discharge,
forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and reduction from specialist
fourth class to private. The Turkish trial took longer, but Baldwin was again found guilty, and
sentenced to ten months in jail, to be followed by 2 years of
banishment.
In jail, Baldwin learned to speak fluent and colloquial Turkish, and was
so useful an inmate that he was often given the jail keys when the
jailer had chores to be done in the town. At the end of his term he was
given a going-away party by both prisoners and jailers. Softballing Turks. Reaching Kusadasi —his town of
banishment—last” year, Baldwin had to report daily to the police.
Because of his prison record he had been afraid that the townspeople
might shun him. “They didn't,” he says, “and that I
appreciate. Soon I began to see ways I could be useful to individuals
and the town as a whole.” He started an English class, and his students included a bank president,
a doctor, a teacher, an architect and the local police commissioner. He
taught the villagers to play softball, and there is now a three-team
league. He was convinced that Kusadasi's location on the beautifully
indented Ionian coast made it a natural tourist center, and he soon
bubbled over with ideas. When cruise ships arrived in port, Baldwin got
the citizens to wear colorful folk costumes and put on exhibitions of
the regional sword dances. He persuaded the subgovernor, Ozer Turk, to
start rebuilding the massive stone caravansary in the center of town.
Instead of housing camel caravans, it will be a hotel and shopping
center. Last year Baldwin made a new friend when a well-connected British
socialite named Rosemary Rodd, 47, came to live in Kusadasi. She rented
a dilapidated villa which her money and Baldwin's muscle soon made
habitable, and he moved in. Together Baldwin and Rodd are teaching
beekeepers in the area the intricacies of extracting royal jelly from
their hives for use in medicines. Baldwin operates Rodd's motorboat for
charter, two months ago used it on a mercy mission to rescue a Turkish
soldier with a mangled hand at a coastal post inaccessible by land.
