Greece: The Sea Bass and the CIA’s Sports Car

After two years of Pentagon staff work he was glad to escape, Bob took a posting as deputy chief of the Air Force section of the Military Assistance Advisory Group in Greece. Athens gave the family some of its happiest and strangest years — a tour Bob remembered not in policy but in a robbery, a fish, a scooter, and a sports car that arrived by air.

To Athens

The family shipped a car out of Brooklyn, rode a MATS C-54 to Germany by way of Iceland, and then a second C-54 down to Athens. They lived in the Aperigy Hotel for about six weeks until they could find a house, and hired a Greek maid named Poppi. There was no air-conditioning, so on hot nights they slept outside on the veranda under a mosquito net.

“Klepsi-Klepsi”

One of those mornings, the household woke to the maid’s alarm.

“We were awakened one morning with Poppi crying ‘Klepsi-klepsi’ meaning a thief. We went inside and found that we had indeed been robbed. Passports and money was all that was missing but various papers were strewn all over the back yard.”

They lost the passports and the cash; the thief had scattered the rest of their papers across the yard. It is the kind of detail — the foreign word for the universal fear — that fixed the whole posting in his memory.

The Sea Bass

Their main outing was the beach, pebbly but with delightful water. Bob had equipped himself with a snorkel and a spear-gun — a serious one, fired by a .45-caliber blank cartridge, the spear trailing twenty feet of nylon cord. One afternoon, hunting for a target, he found a very large one.

“I spied this huge mass which took me awhile to recognise that it was a huge sea bass. Just lying next to a large boulder. I raised my gu[n] to shoot and then the thought hit me that this creature could tow me and my gun out to sea if he was only wounded. And the more I looked, the less I wanted this trophy so I swam back to shore and sat quietly the rest of the afternoon.”

It is a small, perfect Bob story: the careful calculation of risk against reward, made underwater, with a loaded spear-gun — and the quiet good sense to let the fish be and go sit on the beach.

A Vespa, a Bicycle, and a Lost Patch of Skin

On a trip to Rome he bought a Vespa motor scooter; that first Christmas in Greece he gave Andy his first bicycle. One afternoon the small parade set out together — Sue standing in front of Bob on the Vespa, Andy pedaling alongside.

“As we passed a taverna near our house, Andy waved to the drinkers on the veranda and looking at them wave back, he dropped his bike and lost some skin. So Sue pushed his bike home and I took Andy home on the Vespa. I suspect he still remembers this.”

(Andy, who would grow up to gather these very stories from his father, almost certainly does.)

The CIA’s Sports Car

And then there was the car — the detail that turns a family memoir into something out of a Cold War novel. Bob had bought a Triumph TR2 sports car in England. Getting it to Greece was no trouble at all, because of the company he kept.

“There was the sports car, a TR2 which I bought in England and my friends in the local CIA group flew it to Greece in their C-54. A great little car.”

An American officer’s sports car, ferried into Athens in the belly of the local CIA station’s transport — recounted by Bob as the most natural thing in the world.

Home the Long Way

When the tour ended, the family chose to come home by sea — flying to Naples and boarding a ship for New York. Bob woke the children in the early dawn to come up on deck and watch the Statue of Liberty pass slowly by. The TR2 came home too, offloaded at Brooklyn; he drove it the whole way to Mississippi while Ruth followed in a Ford wagon and the kids rotated between cars. From Ecru, after a stop with his mother, they pushed on to his next assignment in the Pacific Northwest, at McChord.