Jan's Story

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Jan's Story Page 5

by Barry Petersen


  The head of our British security team was nicknamed Smudge. He had a chat with me the first day I arrived and explained that he would be in the front seat of the heavily armored Mercedes whenever we went out on a story. He also taught me how we would handle trouble when we were outside the car. “If one or two people are coming at us, I'll shoot them,” he said in a tone I considered a bit matter-of-fact considering this was my life under discussion. “If it's a big crowd, I'm not going to open fire because they'll overwhelm us anyway, and it'll just make them angrier. We surrender and see what can be done next.” Those were his rules of engagement, and they became mine as well.

  For seven weeks I worked the Iraq story, living on cigarettes (I started smoking the second I hit that place) and cookies. No alcohol. I wanted to be alert since we might need to flee the hotel at any hour. Heavily armed men storming hotels at 3 a.m. where journalists or officials stayed was a new tactic then.

  And once outside, the fear and no small amount of paranoia crept in. I would see a couple of guys talking at the corner and look up and stare at me. I'd see a car slow down for no reason and feel my body tighten. Are they after me? I would be a big catch for kidnappers—the foreigner, the American, the journalist—so I learned to keep my eyes and ears open.

  It was a false sense of security. Other journalists, including Americans, were kidnapped and held for ransom. Other journalists, including two from CBS News, were killed while on assignment long after I left.

  Not all my travel was this dangerous. There were the stories in Paris on the latest fashions, or in Wales covering the last remaining community choirs. The one constant was coming and going, sometimes with no more warning than a quick call home while I was hurrying to an airport.

  I once joked with Jan that if either of us ever got the seven year itch, it would take fourteen years to develop, because I was gone half of the time.

  I went when asked by the Bureau Chief, or the Foreign Editor, or the Executive Producer of this show or another. Jan always said she understood. She accepted what my job demanded, and this was one of the many reasons I could make her my life. I felt blessed, almost saved, when we fell in love, because my life before Jan was often a self-made horror.

  I grew up a military brat, in a family always moving to the next assignment until I was in junior high school. My dad retired from the Army—he had been a pilot beginning in the days of World War Two—and we moved to the small town of Sidney in eastern Montana that boasted a population of 5,000 on a busy day. This was the town where my Danish immigrant grandfather had settled and farmed and where my father had grown up. My grandfather moved the family there in the 1920s because it already had a substantial Danish immigrant community and a Lutheran Church with services in Danish. Probably the only town in America where the Petersens, Hansens and Larsens far outnumbered the Smiths in the phone book.

  When I was fifteen, I decided to become a journalist. It took two more years before someone paid me. The summer before entering college I got a job at the local weekly newspaper, the Sidney Herald. I quickly learned that the job wasn't about journalism, it was about grunt work. I swept up and helped with small printing jobs by stapling pages together. And to my great honor, once a week I washed the ink off the lead slugs in the flat page molds after the ancient press ran off a few thousand issues, wheezing and clanking all the way. If there is printer's ink in my blood, it seeped in the hard way. It took two or three days of steady washing to get that ink off my hands.

  The good part happened when there was a breaking story and I got to cover it. One day it was a prairie fire west of town, and the editor let me race out with a notebook and a camera. I gave him a look so youthfully intense that I'm sure he smiled once I was out the door.

  After graduation from the journalism school at Northwestern University, I went from being a newspaper reporter in Miami, Chicago, Omaha, and Milwaukee, to TV reporter in Milwaukee and then Minneapolis. My break was being hired by the Los Angeles Bureau of CBS News in 1978. I was the rookie correspondent, and that meant if a story developed in Portland at four on a Friday afternoon, I was the guy ready and eager to fly up and cover it. I would leave town at a moment's notice, which meant leaving my then-wife behind with shattered weekend plans … again. It didn't take long before she grew convinced that she was always going to be second best to a good feature story that might get on the Evening News.

  It takes a combination of blindness and arrogance to destroy a marriage. I had both with my first. We made it through thirteen years, had two wonderful girls along the way, and made several lawyers richer in our angry parting.

  This was the state of disrepair I called my life when I met Jan, and I didn't think I had a lot to offer. I was broke and sharing in the raising of two young children with an ex-wife. Not prime material for one's dating profile. But Jan didn't see it that way, and I decided that my best plan would be to prove her right.

  In reality, we didn't have that much in common. Jan spoke French (fluently) and Italian (quite well), and I didn't. She studied European art history in college, and I studied journalism, American history and politics. She got good grades, I didn't. She was bubbly and charming and had a raft of friends. I was quiet and distrusted life too much to have many real friends. I think it was these differences that so attracted me to her. I relished taking care of her, and she felt safe in our love, that I would happily devote myself to making her happy.

  And when she cared for me, the world melted into the background and I found my solace in her. I got the far better end of this bargain because I was the beneficiary of her enthusiasm for life and her spirit of adventure.

  She had other chances. There had been a first marriage, but it ended in disaster. She mentioned once that a rich Seattle lawyer wanted to marry her, but she turned him down. She wanted more, and I was it. I teased her about how she could have had an easier, somewhat more predictable and certainly more comfortable, life if she had married the lawyer. To which, of course, she laughed.

  I worked to prove her right, and a way of doing that was creating special surprises for her. One year CBS brought us back from Moscow to New York so I could be the vacation fill-in anchor on the morning show news block. The stint crossed over September 1st, her birthday.

  This was my chance to pay her back for all the things she did for me, like just loving me, which always seemed pretty amazing. I relished planning a special night for her because it meant thinking about the things she liked doing with me. This evening was going to be about sharing those things between us, so I arranged for dinner at the Rainbow Room on top of Rockefeller Center. We ate dinner and drank champagne while the city below glistened only for us. The orchestra played while I danced with her (badly) over and over.

  When we got back to the hotel, I gave her the room key so she would be the one to open the door and see her next surprise. There in the center of the room was a round, metal statue from India, a Buddha of Many Hands. She had admired it when we were out shopping one day, so I snuck back and bought it for her. It was spiritual and mysterious, just like Jan. She loved it. I have it still, as a remembrance of making a wonderful evening that was a delight for both of us.

  Celebrating life. She did it with such ease, and she let me build around her a place where her life could be celebrated across continents with experiences and adventures and where there was always one place of safety … and that place was in my love for her.

  TIMELINE

  January, 2006

  Barry's update to family and friends

  I know that Jan's e-mails are not terribly informative. You must simply accept this. She is rather vague about details these days, and she is hesitant about discussing her condition. I think that is understandable. All I can say is to keep sending her notes and I will keep encouraging her to answer them. If you have specific concerns that you want to discuss with me alone, send a note and I'll answer back.

  At the moment, Jan is doing well. I can't guarantee how long that will go on, but I pro
mise I'll do whatever I can to make it last. Best from Tokyo.

  ~Barry

  5

  “Never shall I forget the days I spent with you. Continue to be my friend, as you will always find me yours.”

  ~Ludwig van Beethoven

  The Jan We Knew

  I would like to believe that I made Jan feel loved every day. It wasn't something I would say just with words. There was always a quick hug or a kiss or a glance over the breakfast table so she could see in my eyes how much I loved her. And when she saw that, she smiled back. Better than words.

  I always thought of her as “My Jan,” but that wasn't altogether true. She shared that smile and that optimism with everyone who came into her world. As time passed, the loss of “Our Jan” became ever more apparent. Family, hers and mine, and friends, all began missing her spunk, tenderness, and quick sense of humor.

  In an attempt to hold her close and provide comfort, people sent me notes and remembrances of their favorite stories. Little vignettes. Some were stories from the days before I knew her, which I love because they let me see her before there was “us.”

  Long before I met her, Jan worked at KIRO-TV in Seattle where she started in 1974. She was one of the first women reporters in the Seattle market. It wasn't too long before Annie Busch Marshall joined her in the newsroom. Annie wrote:

  “I met Jan in September, 1979, when I came to work at KIRO-TV as a reporter/anchor. We were fast friends, the only two female faces on the air for an entire year. I had the day shift and Jan worked the night shift. Since it was still the early days of women in the newsroom or the work force for that matter, we were living in a man's world. We both worked to assert our sharp wits, determination and intelligence to make up for our gender and our height. We were both 5'2” tall, or more accurately, short.

  “One day, the news consultant came to visit. He watched me anchor the Noon News and asked me why I didn't move around more on the set. He said I looked stiff. The answer was simple; my feet didn't touch the ground. I had to jack the chair up quite a bit to avoid looking too diminutive next to the much taller anchorman. So the station handyman built a box to put under my feet while anchoring. It was plywood, covered with carpet.

  “Jan and I took this marvel of a box around the newsroom to get a new view on life and look a few people in the eye at a higher altitude. Jan especially enjoyed standing on the box and speaking with much taller males who preferred to brush off the ‘little girls.’ In fact, this added height brought her a new-found energy, and she had some rather pointed conversations. One guy became so uncomfortable with a taller, mightier Jan he told her step down from the box. Jan and I were quite amused by the entire scene.

  “A few days later when Jan was trying to make her point about a story with a producer, she went to the set, picked up the box and proceeded to discuss her view while standing tall atop the box. She won.”

  I know the feeling of the guy who lost the argument. Jan was the Cute Blonde, but she held her ground well until she won. She was comfortable with who she was, what she believed, and how she wanted to live in this world. If she had a good idea, I quickly learned to adopt it because she was so often right.

  Her confidence came from being the oldest, the one who had to watch out over the others when they were kids, and the one they looked up to … except when they thought she was pushy and called her “Bossy” without realizing that she considered that a compliment.

  After Jan moved to San Francisco to be with me, we were often visited by her family. There were four younger brothers and sisters, and she was a superhero to the youngest, her brother, Dave.

  “Jan was my ‘big sister’ with a nine year separation between us,” Dave told me. He didn't have much time growing up with her; when Jan went off to college, he was still in elementary school.

  When Dave was in college, he visited the Bay Area for a lacrosse tournament at Stanford University. Jan was working at the NBC station in San Francisco, and Dave was excited about coming up to visit—even if his appearance managed to scare nearly everyone who looked at him by the time he finally reached us. “I took a lacrosse stick to the mouth and received a lovely swollen and bloody lip that looked like an apricot hanging off my lip” he remembers, a tad painfully. “The night before going to see you and Jan in San Francisco I'd slept on the lawn of teammate's parents, so my hair was standing up on end. I hadn't showered after our games, and my lip was looking ohso good.

  “When I got to the TV station downtown, I'm sure the security guards thought I looked like someone down on his luck and who'd had spent the night living rough on the street. Luckily Jan came bouncing down the stairs, gave me a big hug and then laughed at my appearance.

  “She gave me the keys to her car and directions to their house. After a long shower and a nap, we went to dinner, laughed way too much, and I was on a jet home the next day feeling very grown up having experienced San Francisco thanks to my big sister.”

  I wish Jan could remember this moment, when she made her little brother feel so grown up. She never stopped to consider that what she gave so naturally could mean so much to others. To her, this was just being a good sister and nothing unusual about that.

  I envied that in her because that is something hard for me. She could give without the expectation of getting anything back in return, and I treasured her ease at being a great big sister, or a good friend, or a wife who loved me despite my many faults. She was a natural.

  There were many times when she gave me that unquestioned love. She took it with us when we started our move from San Francisco to our first tour in Tokyo, and then on to Moscow. She joked that we had gone from Japan, a country in the 25th century, to Moscow still mired in about the 18th.

  Part of that feeling was brought on by the gloom of Moscow. Lights were expensive and hard to come by, so only one out of every two or three streetlights worked. On a dark winter's night, the gloom spread wide. It was the same in people's homes. They would sit by the dimness of a single lamp because light bulbs were scarce.

  So gloom was not something she would accept from me, especially on January 14, the day I turned forty. It was winter, cold and dark outside, which matched my mood. Turning a decade older, which was how I saw it, made me feel that I should have accomplished more in life. Or worse, that the best years were those already lived. I was busy moaning and looking in life's rear view mirror. All I wanted was to hide under the bedcovers and feel sorry for myself.

  This was not for Jan. She decided the event wouldn't pass unnoticed or uncelebrated. Over our Christmas vacation in the US she secretly bought forty birthday greeting cards. All day long, despite my best efforts to ignore such a dreaded milestone, the cards popped up. On the breakfast table. In my coat pocket. In the bathroom, living room, bedroom. On my desk in the office. It finally had the desired effect. I forgot my gloom about aging and ended my endless conversations with anyone who would listen about being over the hill, and just laughed.

  Jan had always been the one ready for a new adventure, the one ready to suggest a trip for us or with the girls and ready to laugh at me when I worried about the cost. But when we moved back for our second stint in Tokyo I noticed that Jan was changing. We didn't really realize why until she was finally diagnosed. Emily sent me this note remembering those days:

  “We were going out to dinner one year at Christmas and I think we might have been trying a new restaurant. By then, it was unusual for us to go somewhere that Jan didn't already know well. Julie and I were getting ready, dressing up and wearing makeup we bought at the 100 Yen store (like the dollar stores in America), and Jan was supplementing any items we might have needed from her supply of makeup.

  “As Julie and I stood facing the mirror, Jan coached us from behind while we applied our makeup. I remember her explaining all about how to do our eyes to make them look bigger, the way to put blush on your cheeks, and even some lipstick tutorials! It was one of those mother/daughter type moments, and it felt really good.


  “At that point I think I already knew we weren't going to have Jan forever and so I treasured the happy moment.”

  “I'm sorry,” Emily told me later when we talked about those times, “but remembering this makes me sad.”

  When we first left America for our overseas odyssey, we got homesick. So after a few years we scraped together some money and went to a place we loved, a development called the Sea Ranch. It's about three hours north of San Francisco by car with houses built along a ten-mile stretch of the Sonoma County coastline.

  Whenever we could arrange a vacation there from the various places we lived, we would call up old friends from San Francisco to come up the coast and be with us, to walk the beach during the day, or sit in the hot tub and enjoy the starry nights.

  John Carman and I worked together when I got a newspaper job fresh out of college, then we went our separate career ways. He later ended up in San Francisco as the TV critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, and we reconnected when CBS News moved me there. He was among the first to meet Jan when she moved to San Francisco to be with me, and he was among those we often invited to our Sea Ranch home. I had forgotten this little episode until John reminded me.

  “I had a dog, a white standard poodle named Peabody, who occasionally had his own way to express his exhilaration about life: he bounced. It was close to a straight-legged vertical bounce – boing! boing! boing!

  “One weekend I drove Peabody up to your ocean side home in northern California. Peabody was a city dog. Sea Ranch promised new discoveries and sensory overload. I suppose I'd cleared Peabody first with you two, but I still worried you might privately harbor strong objections to a sizable and excitable dog in your home.

  “From the moment we pulled into your driveway, Peabody was in doggy demon mode, boinging up and down around a brush area that surely reeked of deer scents and other exotic doggy delights.

 

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