Papua New Guinea Years: 1968-1975.

From my memoir: The Edges of my Life.
By Andrew Leslie Philips © 1985


Chapter 1

Leaving Home.

Adverting was not my first career choice. I’d wanted to be a traveler and a journalist. But I couldn’t get a job in journalism because I didn’t have the credential, the university degree, so advertising was my next, it was creative and better paid than journalism but I never got to the “better paid part”.
I spent five years in the ad business learning about copywriting and media and printing and design and finally I was an account executive selling the American dream that had become Australia’s.

An Interview with Cmdr. Paul Tibbets - the man who dropped the first atomic bomb.

Hiroshima Countdown.
 An Oral History Interview with Cmdr. Paul Tibbets. 1985.

Paul Tibbets dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. I met him thirty-nine years later in Columbus Ohio where he ran the first corporate air charter company in the United States. After the “Good War”, Tibbets’ fame comprised cache and notoriety and business was prosperous

I’d conduced a telephone interview with Tibbets the previous year - in 1983 - for a 12-hour marathon radio production exploring Hiroshima on New York City Pacifica Foundation radio station, WBAI. I said at the beginning of this memoir that I was born in the shadow of the Holocaust and Hiroshima. This radio program was my chance to get to the heart of the matter.

At the time I was a volunteer producer. I brought audio and stories from my international travels with Australian Broadcasting to WBAI where I produced my own 90 minute weekly late-night radio program: Investigations: In Search of the Art in Radio. If one could get through the front door and volunteer, WBAI offered access to the weird and wonderful New York audience . After some years of weekend news and documentary specials I had the chance to produce an all-day broadcast about the atomic bomb and Hiroshima.