But the people of Ea Ea never left his mind. He corresponded with a missionary to learn how they had fared. He studied and restudied international air schedules.

"The more I thought about my experience with the people in New Guinea, the more I realized what a debt I had to try to repay," he says.

In 1960, with the family vacation money and the family's blessing, Hargesheimer made a solitary, 11,000-mile journey back to New Britain, biggest outer island of Papua New Guinea, then Australian-run, now independent.

The villagers, hearing Mastah Preddi was coming, lined the beach and sang "God Save the Queen" as he stepped from a boat in the moonlight.

"It was wonderful, overwhelming," he says. He was met by Luluai Lauo, Joseph Gabu and others, and later found Ida and her 16-year-old son, to thank her, too.

But "a simple thank you didn't seem enough," he recalls. Back home, he consulted with a missionary, who told him what the people needed: a school.

The Minnesota salesman went to work, canvassing relatives, meeting with church groups, speaking to service organizations. He raised $15,000 over three years, "most of it $5 and $10 gifts."

With the money and 17-year-old son Dick in tow, he returned to New Britain in 1963. He was given church land in Ewasse, a central settlement near Ea Ea, now renamed Nantabu. There a contractor raised the area's first permanent elementary school — cement floor, metal roof, sturdy walls.

He brought in New Guinean teachers, American volunteers and an Australian headmaster, and the Airmen's Memorial School opened in 1964 with 40 pupils and four classrooms. But Fred Hargesheimer wasn't finished.

Back in the U.S., a brief spurt of publicity drew more contributions, he got more ideas, and this story of a debt repaid grew, decade by decade. But it was a story little known or celebrated beyond New Britain's welcoming villages.

In 1969, his fund built a library at the school and a clinic for Ewasse. By then, too, the school's successful plot of oil palm helped pave the way for a large plantation of the lucrative crop, with scores of jobs, easing the deep poverty here in Bialla district. Rows of the stout palms today blanket the hills, property of Belgian-owned Hargy Oil Palm Ltd., west of a large lake named Hargy. Once his own children were grown, Hargesheimer saw an opportunity to "say thank you in a meaningful way." In 1970, he and Dorothy packed up and moved to New Britain, to teach the children themselves and to build a second school — this time closer to Nantabu, next door in the village of Noau, at the foot of the smoking Mount Ulawan volcano.

Garua Peni, then 10, was one of their first students.

"I thought, 'Wow! They left their place to come here for us, just to share themselves with us,"' she recalls.