Perry lives in Honolulu, Hawai'i, where he enjoys the mild weather and the late-night bars of Waikīkī. In 1967, after attending the University of Houston, in Texas, he joined the U.S. Peace Corps and served as a Volunteer in Micronesia from August 1967 to August 1969. He later lived in Washington, D.C., and London before moving to Honolulu in 1977.

Decades ago, in March 1961, President John F. Kennedy issued an executive order establishing the U.S. Peace Corps, an organization created to send American volunteers — especially young people — to developing countries to assist with health care, education, and other needed services. 

   I served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Micronesia ("small islands"), which was a United Nations trust territory in the western Pacific Ocean administered by the U.S. from 1947 to 1986. I worked in the field of communications from August 1967 to August 1969. My assignment, in part, included working alongside young Micronesian journalists, whose journalistic assignment for several months of the year was to report news about the Congress of Micronesia, located on Saipan in the Northern Mariana Islands. 

   In My Canoe Has No News, my Amazon text-only ebook, I have a sub-text titled "The house there no more," which describes my years-later return to my Peace Corps training site in Micronesia.

   The illustration shows a scene in 1816 in Micronesia's Marshall Islands, drawn by an early 19th-century European artist. The illustration is reproduced from a scanned 4x5-inch color film transparency in my Micronesia archival image collection. The inserted photo is me (age 25) in the Marshall Islands in 1968, about 142 years after this illustration was published in Paris in the mid-1820s. Botanical note: the small tree shown in the illustration (lower right) is a young breadfruit tree.