Passport To Peril

Afterword

My father, who I called Bobby, but whose full name was Robert Bogardus Parker Jr., was first and foremost a newspaper man. He loved being where the action (what he called “the story”) was, where the news was “being made.” Most of my memories of him include an open newspaper or a typewriter. Even my baby photographs—1939 Budapest—age 14 months—show me on my father’s lap looking at the camera while his eyes are downcast, reading a folded newspaper balanced on his knees.

The typewriter image is of an old, black, boxy Remington typewriter—a shiny black machine, the keys solid, round, and high. It sat in the base of its own case, the top having been lifted off and put aside. Bobby sat at a table, using the first fingers of both squarish hands to tap out “the story.” Bobby, coffee cup on table, often cigarette in mouth, ripping a sheet of yellow paper out of the roller, wadding it up and throwing the ball of paper on the floor. (“Rurrripp, scrunch, fittttt!” Just like in the movies! Honest!) Within a few hours, the floor was littered with yellow paper balls.

The memories, however, are few. Most of these are of summer visits to Morland, my paternal grandparents’ farm in South Woodstock, Vermont. My father was mainly an absent “presence” in the lives of my brother Roby (Robert B. Parker III) and me and later, after my parents divorced in 1947, a brief presence in the life of my half-sister Lucci.

My father’s first book was Headquarters Budapest, published by Farrar & Rinehart in 1944. The jacket copy gives his biography:

Although still in his thirties, Robert Parker is one of the few veteran correspondents who have seen the war from the totalitarian side. He was with the German Army on its march into Poland in 1939; he rode with an armored division of Hungarians into Sub-Carpathic Russia and saw Hungary, Rumania and Bulgaria taken over by the Nazis. He also covered the Russian conquest of Bessarabia and, prior to the current war, the revolution in Spain. He has traveled widely in Germany and been in and out of France and other Nazi-occupied countries many times.

From 1939–41, he made his headquarters in Budapest, Hungary, one of the best listening posts in Europe. From the spring of 1942 up to a few months ago, Mr. Parker was OWI [Office of War Information] Chief in Turkey.

Robert Parker was born in Newark, N.J., and educated at the Pingry School, Elizabeth, N.J., and Union College, Schenectady, N.Y. He worked for a time on the staff of the Newark Evening Call and the Schenectady Gazette. Upon his graduation from college, he worked for the New York Journal, from which in 1933 he transferred to The Associated Press. He was sent to Paris—and there began his eventful career as a foreign correspondent.

Since it was still wartime, the jacket failed to mention that he, like many journalists, was also a member of the OSS (the predecessor to the CIA), an organization my mother referred to as “Oh, So Secret.” My brother says that Bobby was in Shanghai when the Japanese invaded China in 1937, and I remember stories of his propaganda activities, such as putting Allied messages in prayer books in churches all over Europe, including Germany, and also tales of “Wild Bill” Donovan. During the war years, my father was involved in getting European Jews, including his assistant, Paul Vajda, out of prisons (and out of the country to safety, if possible). After my mother died, I found letters from people he had helped among her papers.

In 1946, we moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where my father worked for Radio Station WLW. His daily 30-minute radio news program, “World News Analysis,” aired at 11:00 P.M. (Not surprisingly, we children only heard it a few times, once when my mother was his guest.) On Sundays he and three other commentators, Jack Beall, Arthur Reilly, and Maj. General James E. Edmonds, all friends since their European days, shared a WLW news discussion panel called “The World Front.”

In Ohio my parents divorced, and my mother, brother and I moved to Washington, D.C. Over the next nine years, my father owned an upstate New York weekly newspaper that folded and a herd of cattle that contracted hoof-and-mouth disease, and worked for the New York Daily News and the United Nations news bureau.

He wrote two more books: Ticket to Oblivion in 1950, and Passport to Peril in 1951. Published by Rinehart & Co., they were also brought out in paperback editions by Dell. Reviewed as suspense novels about European espionage, these books were praised by reviewers as “suave, exciting, unusual, and thrilling.”

I think those are the adjectives I would have used as a teenaged daughter about my imagined father. I feel it was a deep loss not to have known him better, and longer.

I, for one, would have loved to know what he would have thought or written about the fall of the Berlin Wall; or the death of Alexander Litvinenko, the ex-KGB spy, now MI6 agent, poisoned by radioactive polonium; or about Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader-turned-fugitive, wanted for international war crimes, who, until he was finally arrested, lived right in Belgrade for a decade disguised as an eccentric monk-like practitioner of alternative medicine.

My father died of a heart attack in 1955, just short of his fiftieth birthday. His was a short life of accomplishment at an early age, a hard-hitting, heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking, stress-filled existence. It was a life of constant deadlines of all sorts. In many ways he lived the life of his fictional protagonists, and like theirs, his wasn’t always a happy one.

During the war years, though, Bobby was just where he wanted to be—where the story was, in a period of great historical upheaval in the world.

Daphne Wolcott Parker Hawkes

Princeton, NJ