Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring Read Online Free PDF

and Angelina spent most of their lives just a few blocks from the church where they were married. He is remembered in West Scranton as a hardworking, pious man who was a good provider for his wife and eight children, four girls and four boys. Many nights, after a dinner of pasta, meat, salad, and bread – always torn from the loaf, never sliced – Arthur gathered his children around and told them funny stories, fairy tales that he made up as he went along. Afterwards he went down to the fruit cellar and brought them oranges and bananas.
    Angelina was equally devoted to her family. She was always doing something for someone else: baking bread for a sick neighbor, mending clothes for her children, helping collect a basket for the needy at Christmas.
    The Scaramuzzos were devout Roman Catholics, so much so that when Arthur added on to his simple, two-story frame house on Geraldine Court, he erected two shrines to the Virgin Mary in the entryway. It was not unusual, the children recall, to see Arthur and Angelina pray before the shrines at night before retiring, thanking the Virgin for what they considered to be an abundant life.
    But one of their children, Margaret Loretta Scaramuzzo, looked at her parents’ life a bit more skeptically than they did. Born in 1913, Peggy was a beauty. She had auburn hair, ebony eyes, and an unbridled sense of adventure. “Peggy wanted more from life than most of us,” a cousin remembers. From the time she was a little girl, Peggy attacked life with a vengeance.
    As a teenager, Peggy developed a beautiful singing voice and was soon a frequent vocalist at St. Lucy’s. But while singing at church functions pleased her parents, Peggy sought a bigger stage.
    Her mother and sisters sometimes had trouble accepting Peggy’s passion for life. Once, when her mother asked Peggy to run an errand to the corner market, Peggy snapped, “No. There are some things a young lady just doesn’t do.” Angelina was forced to make the trip herself.
    Peggy saw how hard her mother’s life was, raising eight children and running the home. She saw the toll that her father paid for working as a stone mason. As a child, she had assumed these hardships were the routine ingredients of life. But as she matured, she started to look at her own neighborhood more critically. She saw girls only a few years older than she marry and turn, seemingly overnight, from gushing teenagers into dour wives left at home to change soiled diapers while their pot-bellied husbands tossed darts and drank beer at the neighborhood bar. She began to realize that although West Scranton was her parents’ world, it didn’t have to be hers. She had beauty and talent, and she didn’t intend to settle for a young man who was content to come home each night with coal dust under his fingernails.
    On a brisk December evening in 1932, Peggy met a man who also had big dreams. She had gone with her brother Frank to a nightclub called The American Beauty to hear a local band. During a brief intermission, a young man approached her.
    “Hello, Miss Scaramuzzo,” he said. “My name is Johnny Walker.”
    John Anthony Walker was unlike anyone Peggy had ever met. Lean and clean-cut, he was handsome by any young girl’s standard. But there was something more to Johnny Walker than good looks. He had a certain elegance that other Scranton boys lacked, a certain charm and gentleness. He also had the most appealing voice Peggy had ever heard, a distinct baritone with a certain authority to its natural cadence, a smoothness that seemed to say, Trust me, I know what I am talking about .
    Johnny had grown up in West Scranton, the son of James Vincent Walker, an engineer for a mining company, and Mary Ferguson Walker. He had two brothers and a sister, all of them smart and talented, like him. When Johnny was a student at St. Patrick’s High School in West Scranton, underclassmen from the University of Scranton used to hire him to write school papers for them.