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

Johnny was not just intelligent he was musically gifted. A love of music was just one of the things that brought Johnny and Peggy together. Fifty years later Peggy still recalled the night she met her future husband. “It was love at first sight,” she told me tearfully, as we spoke in the parlor of her childhood home, which Arthur Scaramuzzo had bequeathed to his children. “Johnny was so handsome and I was so in love with him. We were so full of life. Nothing was going to stop us, man! Nothing!”
    I asked Peggy, who was seventy-four years old at the time, about her wedding. But Peggy, who was still working an eight-hour job during the week and was mentally sharp, suddenly became evasive. “I can’t remember when it was,” she said, “but you know it was here in Scranton and it wasn’t anything special.”
    I later discovered that Peggy and Johnny were not married in Scranton, but in Rockville, Maryland, on August 15, 1934. One month after the ceremony, Peggy gave birth to Arthur James Walker. The fact that Peggy was pregnant when she married was never mentioned within the family. Even Arthur claimed not to have known.
    It was the first of many family secrets to be revealed.

Chapter 4
    Washington, D.C., is much more glamorous than Scranton, and Johnny and Peggy soon were happily settled into a modest apartment at 43 R Street Northeast, a tidy section of row houses. Johnny worked at the Department of Commerce as a clerk in the National Recovery Administration, one of the overnight bureaucracies President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had created to help pun America out of the depression. Peggy took care of Arthur and soon found herself pregnant again. On July 28th, 1937, Peggy gave birth to John Anthony Walker, Jr.
    From the beginning, relatives recalled later, Peggy favored her second-born. Perhaps it was because her pregnancy with Arthur embarrassed her. For whatever reason, Peggy developed a special bond with John, whom everyone called Jack as a child, that grew stronger through the years.
    It didn’t take long before John Walker Sr., grew tired of being a government clerk. Meetings and shuffling papers were not for him, he told Peggy. So when a better paying and more demanding job opened at the Bituminous Coal Commission, he accepted it and moved his family to Altoona, Pennsylvania. But before Peggy had a chance to unpack, Johnny quit this job to take an even better one in New York City. “Could there be a better place for an ambitious young man and his family than New York City?” he asked Peggy.
    Johnny had been offered a job by his father’s cousin, Frank Comerford Walker, a prominent attorney, former Montana state legislator, Democratic Party official, and pal of FDR. On December 10, 1938, a group of Democratic stalwarts had formed a private corporation to raise money for construction of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, the first presidential library. Frank Walker had been elected president of the group, and he wanted Johnny to be its liaison with the Philadelphia construction company hired to build the library and with Dr. Fred H. Shipman, the library’s first director. It was challenging and heady work.
    An album of family photographs shows a beaming couple poised in the living room of an attractive fifth-floor apartment on Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. Johnny is pictured with his jacket tossed casually over his right shoulder, his left arm draped around Peggy. He is dressed in a crisp white shirt, tie, suspenders, carefully pressed trousers) and spit-polished shoes. Peggy is wearing a store-bought dress with matching hat and gloves. Peggy and Johnny spent hours keeping their family album current, she meticulously arranging each snapshot and Johnny drawing white ink doodles on the album’s black pages. It was more than a scrapbook of family snapshots. It was a primer of a couple on the move.
    Nearly all of the relatives visited the young couple in New York, and Arthur Scaramuzzo, in particular,