2025 Peace Corps Week: Athlete and coach John Kleinschmidt served in Indonesia and Malawi as a sports advisor
John Kleinschmidt’s Peace Corps group was instrumental in running Malawi’s 1st and 2nd national meets. Only a few years after they left, the country sent track and field athletes to the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Each day this week — 2025 Peace Corps Week, Feb. 24-28 — UH Hilo Stories is featuring a former Peace Corps volunteer with ties to Hawaiʻi Island. This story on John Kleinschmidt, who did his Peace Corps training on Hawaiʻi Island, is written by UH Hilo political science major Makayla Carmer primarily based on interviews by Peace Corps chronicler Bill Sakovich.
By Makayla Cramer/PoliSci Dept/UH Hilo.
John Kleinschmidt (b. 1941-d. 2023) was a Peace Corps volunteer in Indonesia and Malawi from 1964 to 1966, where he served as an athletic coach and advisor. While he was conflicted on whether or not to go while studying at the University of Wisconsin, he met and spoke to a Peace Corps volunteer who had returned; Kleinschmidt was fascinated hearing about the volunteer’s experiences. Several weeks later, after graduating with a bachelor’s degree in physical education with a focus on coaching, he applied to be a Peace Corps volunteer and was accepted to train in Hilo, Hawaiʻi. Training consisted of Bahasa Indonesian language training as well as courses in history, cultures, religion, terrain, social habits, and athletic workshops.
Kleinschmidt and his group were sent out to 15 locations throughout the islands of Indonesia, where he was sent to the northern island of Sulawesi and the city of Makassar. There, he met a professor who offered to host him, which gave him the opportunity to learn more about the culture and speak better Indonesian.
After only a few months in Makassar, Kleinschmidt was told that the Party Kommunist Indonesia was causing uncertainty and havoc throughout Indonesia. Thus, the American International Development and the Peace Corps decided that Indonesia was no longer safe. Only five months after Kleinschmidt was pulled out of Makassar did President Sukarno get replaced by Military General Suharto. Nearly a million people were killed by April 1966; suspected communists and Chinese Indonesians were the targeted groups, as the newly established Indonesian government knew China helped supply the communists with weapons.
Kleinschmidt’s Peace Corps volunteer group was then sent to Morocco, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Malawi. There were over 250 Peace Corps volunteers teaching in the Malawi schools. Kleinschmidt and two of his Peace Corps volunteer friends were assigned to each of the three regions of Malawi, and each worked with a Malawian counterpart as assistant regional sports advisor; one went to the Southern Region, another to the Northern Region, and Kleinschmidt went to the Central Region. Their main objective was to organize and run local and regional track meets. This involved teaching how to officiate track and field events. Kleinschmidt’s group was instrumental in running and organizing Malawi’s first and second national meets, and only a few years after they left Malawi, the country sent track and field athletes to the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Kleinschmidt commenced his return home after his time in Malawi as a Peace Corps volunteer, but did not reach his intended destination because he contacted the Peace Corps recruiting office in Chicago, where he found an old high school friend from Horicon, Wisconsin, Steve Wrucke, who had served in the Peace Corps in South America. That encounter led to Kleinschmidt to working at the Big Ten campuses and Notre Dame over the next six months as a Peace Corps recruiter, where he told his story to students and encouraged them to sign up for the Peace Corps. Following this, he decided to go into the Army, considering he had a college degree and was ranked 1A by the draft system.
According to Kleinschmidt’s obituary, he served in the United States Army from 1967 to 1970, including a tour in Vietnam. He completed his distinguished military career as a 2nd Lieutenant and earned Bronze and Silver Star citations. In 1968, prior to his deployment to Vietnam, he married Ellen Swaine. They raised two sons in Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, where Kleinschmidt had been raised and then returned to become a beloved football, track, and tennis coach and an adaptive physical education teacher at his alma mater University of Wisconsin, Madison, until his retirement in 1999. During his career at UWM, he completed his master’s in exceptional education in 1977. In 2019, he was inducted into the Oconomowoc Athletic Hall of Fame as an athlete and coach.
He later married Lisa Lucke in 2002 and they lived in Oconomowoc until he passed on June 13, 2023, at the age of 82.
Story by Makayla Cramer, a political science major at UH Hilo. Susan Enright, editor of UH Hilo Stories, contributed.
Peace Corps Volunteers Project
This week’s stories on former Peace Corps volunteers is part of a larger project headed by Su-Mi Lee, a professor of political science, who along with her poli-sci students and members of the local community are collecting biographical stories of former Peace Corps volunteers who have ties to Hawaiʻi Island. Learn more about Prof. Lee’s Returned Peace Corps Volunteer Project (2023), and see more stories about it.
