<p>Growing up in an oil “camp” in Saudi Arabia provided lots of exotic experiences, round-the-world travel, and, yet, somehow, a recognizable American childhood.On a steamy August day in 1953, Rick Snedeker, then just three years old, stepped off an Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco) company airliner with his family into a life as different from what they left behind as sandpaper is to silk.It was to prove fabulously exotic and at the same time just like “home” in many ways.In his charming memoir — 3,001 Arabian Days: Growing up in an American Oil Camp in Saudi Arabia (1953-1962) — author Snedeker describes via a series of vignettes his fond and strange remembrances of living for nearly a decade in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. Aramco, then the fledgling national oil company, was in those years run by several American oil giants including Standard Oil, and was hastily hiring American experts to develop the far-flung Saudi oil fields. To ease life for the new residents, Aramco built comfortable communities, some aspects of which were reminiscent of how families lived in the States.While a child, Snedeker considered the camels, endless sand dunes and kindly Saudis that filled his childhood in the desert as nothing unusual. Kids enjoyed the live Nativity pageants at King’s Road baseball field; Santa’s arrival on a camel or by helicopter at Christmas; the crowded, boisterous annual tri-camp desert fairs; Pep Flakes cereal, powdered whole milk, and chocolate milkshakes churned in his dad’s new-fangled Waring blender; the Dining Hall’s culinary delights. Then, too, Aramcons occasionally had to confront dangerous diseases, some unknown in America (polio, for example, ravaged Dhahran children in the fifties). But everywhere, watchful eyes looked out for the kids, creating an enveloping sense of safety and security and, Snedeker recalls, a great deal of happiness.Aramco provided generous biannual “long vacations,” allowing round-the-world travel to visit the planet’s most glittering metropolises, unusual getaways and remote hideaways. London. Hong Kong. Zurich. Honolulu. Asmara. Bangkok. Venice. Hofuf. Bahrain. New York City.Being raised in the unique, exotic environment of oil-camp Dhahran made the kids who grew up there different from other American children. When the expatriate Aramco dependents returned to the U.S., they were often seen as “other” by their untraveled peers. But it all turned out fine, as the entertaining read of 3,001 Arabian Days makes clear.</p>

3,001 Arabian Days: Growing Up in an American Oil Camp in Saudi Arabia (1953-1962) A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Snedeker, Rick

Community & Culture

Station Square Media

<p>A brief historial account of how Christianity became so embedded in American culture from the colonial era to day that most Americans are hardly aware of its ubiquity and socio-political influence. The nonfiction book examines how because the first decades of settlementin the New World brought mostly European Protestant Christians, their faith and cultural ways spread rapidly in the new country, and remained dominant into the 21st century. This historical reality has resulted in a society of unconscious Christian privilege and persistent efforts to embed the faith ever deeper into the nation's public square and governmental politics. The Constitution, however, as the Founding Fathers intended, prohibits faith's coercive influence on government. There is a rational way to right this ship of state, but it won't be politically easy.</p>

Holy Smoke: How Christianity Smothered the American Dream

Religion & Spirituality

Atheism

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Books by Snedeker, Rick