VALDOSTA — After eight and a half decades, Jack Pruden has seen a lot. He witnessed the fear of communism change the political landscape of the nation, the meteoric rise of technology and the places that would be directly impacted by American imperialism.

He also made a real impact on the lives of others, regardless of their national origin.

A child of the Great Depression, Pruden learned at an early age to make the best of a scarce situation.

Though both of his parents managed to stay employed, money was not the biggest issue during his formative years.

Along with three other siblings, Pruden grew up surrounded by conflict stemming primarily from his mother.

“She was the apple of her daddy’s eye; she was never disciplined or taught self restraint,” he writes in his memoir, “Four Faces.” “My dad never confronted her directly and we children were pretty much in fear of her tantrums throughout our growing up years.”

They eventually would get divorced after 46 years of marriage, in 1966, when his father “finally gave up, gave everything to mother and left with nothing but the clothes on his back and his Army pension. We learned a lot about what not to do.”

Despite the stormy home life, all the Pruden children, except one, managed to maintain stable marriages later in life.

Jerry, the middle child, would never get the chance to try.

He died five weeks short of his 20th birthday as the driver of the lead Sherman tank in a column approaching the town of Ulm in southern Germany, the very day that Adolf Hitler committed suicide. He was awarded the Bronze Star and was credited for giving his life to save the rest of his unit.

Jack never joined the military. His father would not allow it.

Instead, he joined the Central Intelligence Agency.

Prior to the CIA, he attended college for two years at George Washington University to study

foreign relations.

“I wasn’t a very good student,” Pruden said. “This qualification shortfall had been a burden to me for many years until I realized that a shining résumé’s sole value was to land an initial interview but advancement was based only on performance.”

At the height of the Cold War, Pruden was assigned to establish data centers in foreign countries that would be responsible for processing sensitive information. Even today, when most of the information has become de-classified, Pruden won’t divulge its meaning.

One of his first assignments was to train police and military units in the systematic catalogue of 50,000 villages in Thailand during the late 1960s.

“Many of the villages moved and changed names on a regular basis,” he said. “It was supposed to be a one-year project and it turned out to be four years before we could turn things over.”

His next assignment would be a lesson in simple economics; turning over jobs at a Southern Vietnamese data station to locals instead of U.S. citizens only. In a year, he was able to reduce an American staff of 150 contractors to all locals.

“Upon arrival at post, I found a dispirited organization largely staffed by an all-male American contract group that did all of the professional systems work and programming,” writes Pruden. “In truth, their real focus was on monetary benefits and easy access to unlimited numbers of young Vietnamese girls who worked the ‘tea bars’ of downtown Saigon.”

“By January 1970, the Vietnam War had already cost more than 47,000 U.S. armed forces deaths,” he said. “One might have thought the U.S. mission leaders would have developed a high enough regard for the potential of Viet society to have justified the expenditure of so much American blood. In making my proposal for improving my very modest operation, I was immediately confronted with the reality that U.S. Mission management were deeply biased against any notion that local nationals could take on substantive responsibilities.”

Pruden convinced his superiors that in one year he could convert the entire staff to Vietnamese citizens or he would resign.

“This was not a hard sell since I had demonstrated that I could hire 11 Vietnamese for the cost of one American contract employee,” he said.

There were two requirements for Vietnamese citizens to fill the jobs: Their English language proficiency had to register well enough to qualify for the highest pay differential, and they had to pass the IBM programmers’ aptitude test at a “B” level or better.

“I had long before learned that computer systems and programming skills have nothing to do with prior education,” said Pruden.

He was able to hire about 250 employees for training out of a pool of more than 4,000 applicants. About 2,000 of the applicants met the job requirements.

Many applicants came from middle-class homes. Some of their families owned restaurants, laundromats or hardware stores. Pruden hired about 120 Vietnamese citizens.

“They did a great job. A lot of people didn’t think it could be done. We literally got these people from the streets, which were crawling with talented young people who usually knew four different languages,” said Pruden. “We got the cream of the crop. It was their drive and natural intelligence and education backgrounds.”

One lady, known only as Miss Khan to Pruden, aced the IBM programmer test during the application process.

“You’re not supposed to ace the test,” said Pruden. “Needless to say, we hired her. Six months later, I was cruising through the center and saw the very high-paid systems engineer asking her technical questions. I knew at that point we had done our job.”

All of the applicants held no reservations about their purpose for applying for the position with Pruden. They wanted the chance to live in America.

Every employee ended up leaving for America in 1975, except Miss Khan. As the youngest daughter, she needed to stay with her grandparents who were too old to travel. Four years later, she arrived on a fishing boat in Hong Kong and found her way to the States.

“I’ve always chuckled a bit especially when politicians talk so much about family values,” Pruden said. “In Southeast Asia, China or Japan, there are no nursing homes and they don’t have orphanages. The people take care of their own and the generations live together.”

Most of the people he hired ended up in Washington, Montreal or Los Angeles.

“Most of those employees went on to become millionaires and excelled or formed their own companies,” he said.

Today, and for the last 30 years, Pruden has taken up residence in Valdosta. Between his work across the world, he managed to raise a family.

He discussed how he came to discover Valdosta by chance.

“My wife and I didn’t want to retire in the Washington, D.C., area because it’s a horrible place to live with the traffic and weather,” he said. “We had a hypothetical town of 60,000 people, with discreet character and was not a suburb of something else.”

They took a trip across the country, avoiding the freeways and came back with a list of about 10 places that looked right.

His son, who worked for a lumber company in Michigan, ended up in Valdosta in 1979 to try and “drum up business in the South,” when he told his father about the town.

“I thoroughly love it,” Pruden said of Valdosta.

His wife, Marjorie, died in 2010 of pulmonary fibrosis, but Pruden cared for her throughout the illness. He said a patient will usually succumb to the disease in four years, but she had it for 12.

He said the secret to living long is keeping busy. He taught Sunday school classes at Park Avenue United Methodist Church, acted in a few plays with the Theater Guild Valdosta and worked a couple of years at Convergys, a tele-marketing company in town.

Now he enjoys attending writing group sessions at the Annette Turner Howell Center for the Arts. He also participated in the biomass protests last year.

“We have to do something about our dependence on fossil fuels. We’re talking about a finite resource,” he said. “It seems as though we have gotten so divided in this country we can’t discuss real problems.

Even though Pruden retired about the time personal computers became a reality for the average middle-class family, he has kept pace with the latest gadgets.

“The fact that I can communicate with the world, process thousands of pictures right here at my desk, it’s the kind of thing that I still get excited about,” said Pruden. “We were talking about doing that in the ’60s, that one day you would be able to sit in your house and communicate with the world through computers.”

Yet with this advancement of technology, he still notices many of the same problems that were present during his career with the federal government — what to do with vast amounts of information?

“People now take this as just a given, like a washing machine,” he said. “Even though I can download the complete works of William Shakespeare in 90 seconds, I don’t really seem to be spending serious time really reading them. We just seem to be inundated with stuff that is not weighted; there’s just so much of it. We’re right back where we started with the same old problem of how do you really look at information and discern what is important?”

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