Murray and Rosa got married March 5, 1939 and left for Europe on a freighter that same day. He was 23, she was 20. Their plan was to buy a kayak, learn how to paddle it, and take it down the Danube to the Black Sea. They almost made it. This letter to Murray's childhood best friend Frank Sadler describes the end of the river trip.
Dear Frank,
The Roumanians have persuaded us to discontinue our paddle
to the Black Sea, but they had to toss Rosa and me in jail yesterday to put the
clincher on their argument.
For the last week Rosa and I had been debating whether we
should call off the paddle, fold up our boat, and start at once for home. The
last 400 kilometers of the Danube are very slow and abound with mosquitoes, but
we didn’t even figure that in our decision to quit. Slow water and biters wouldn’t
be enough to cause us to stop when we are so near to our real destination. Our
new worries rose from the war.
A few days ago I asked a Roumanian official what he thought
of our going down the river now that the war had started.
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| I don't know who the woman in the middle is. |
Not exactly encouraged, I asked one of our friends at the
American Legation what he thought.
“Listen,” he said, “The Roumanians are nice people, but the
boys they have watching over the river are young and excitable. They’re just as
likely to shoot first and ask any questions that come to their minds later.
Besides it isn’t going to be long before all hell breaks loose in this section
and you had better get out of here while there are still some frontiers open.”
That made a lot of sense to us, but we still wanted to
paddle that last 400 kilometers. When we took the train for Giurgiu yesterday,
Rosa and I still hadn’t reached a definite decision. We were going to see how
we felt when we saw the boat. Our passport was at the Ministry of Propaganda
getting stamped with the official exit visa and our arrangements for tickets
home are nearly complete, so we thought we might be able to spare five days and
dash down the river to Vilkov, the Black Sea port.
When we had landed at Giurgiu we had not counted on the cheapness of living in Roumania or the many attractions of Bucharest and its hinterland. We had told the commandant of the port that we would be back in three or four days, and he had given us permission to leave our faltboat beside his flagship—an armed tug which was used for river patrol duty. That was five weeks ago.
The train from Bucharest goes only as far as the city of Giurgiu.
The port, which is government property, lies about three miles away. Rosa and I
hired a droshky and told the driver to take us to the commandant’s office. We
got as far as the bridge which crosses a small tributary of the Danube, just
below the quays of the port, when our troubles started.
One of the soldiers on guard at the bridge wanted to see our
passports. I told him in English, French, German, and pig-Latin that our
passport was in Bucharest at the office of the Ministry of Propaganda being
stamped with an exit visa. He was both polite and firm. We must go back to
police headquarters in the city. He came with us.
At police headquarters we were allowed to cool our heels in
an anteroom for about half an hour before being ushered into a tiny office and
the presence of an official in a worn khaki uniform which would have looked
better with a little washing. So would the official. We were told he could
speak French, but someone had been fooling him—or maybe we were wrong. Anyway,
it didn’t sound like French to us.
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| Murray's father and Rosa's mother were back in Tacoma, waiting for news. |
Our inability to understand him must have looked suspicious
to the little functionary. He glared for awhile, began to shout, and finally,
when I thought that he would burst or pop an eye out of its socket, he jumped
up and left the room.
Another long wait, and then we were led into the office of
the local big shot. I don’t know his position, but he was either chief of
police or representative of the
federal government for the district. He
spoke both French and German and we had no trouble making him understand us.
I explained that we had a boat down by the river, that we
wanted to take it away, and that our passport was in Bucharest. I suggested
that he telephone either the Ministry of Propaganda in Bucharest or the
Commandant of the River Police at the port. Either could identify us, I pointed
out. He replied that he regretted that we had been subject to delay, but that
we would be allowed to go as soon as he had made the necessary
telephone calls.
It was all smiles and thanks as we bowed ourselves out. A matter of minutes, we
thought.
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| The kids are all right. |
The guard led us back to another section of the building and
put us in a little room with two narrow benches down the side and a heavy desk
nailed to the floor in one corner. The window was barred. There were several
Roumanians sitting on the benches, but none of them paid any attention to us.
We sat down to wait. An hour later we were still waiting.
I began to feel restless and irritated. I opened the door
and walked down the hall toward the big shot’s office to see if I could stir
him into action. I was intercepted by my friend in the khaki uniform and
steered back to my little room, where Rosa and I waited for another half hour.
Then she went foraying through the building, but the guard led her right back.
We were both beginning to get sore. Another hour and no news. It was late and
our plans for the day were completely disrupted. Mad clear through I started
down the hall again.
My khaki uniformed pal met me about ten steps from the door
of our room, grabbed my arm and started to pull me back. I didn’t feel like
being led, and he annoyed me anyway. I yanked my arm free. He grabbed at it
again.
“Just a minute,” I growled at him. “You’re pushing around an
American citizen, and you’re going to get your nose smeared all over your dirty
face in about another ten seconds.”
He didn’t understand the words, of course, but the tone must
have given him a pretty good idea of what I was driving at. He flared right
back at me, shouted Roumanian some more, pointed back to the cell.
All at once it clicked. I hadn’t realized before that we
were really prisoners.
“OK,” I said, deciding that I had better take it easy. “I’ll
go back, but you telephone Bucharest.” I repeated Bucharest about five times
and made the motions of telephoning. He looked as stupid as ever. Then I turned
around and started back to the cell. Evidently feeling that he had me on the
run, the dirty-faced dope made a lunge for my arm.
That was one too many. I let him have it with my elbow in
his stomach and he grunted. By the time he straightened up I was in the doorway
and facing him. He took a couple of steps toward me, so I cocked my right and
started jiggling my left around a la Freddie Steele. He moved one step closer
and I was all set to let him have a right when I saw a soldier coming down the
passage. Roumanian bayonets are 18 inches long, so I decided to sit down. My
pal slammed the door.
About an hour later he came back and looked in. I was foxy
this time. Instead of making any passes at him, I whipped out my pen and
notebook, walked over to him, and bending quite close looked at the numbers on
his uniform collar. Then I wrote the figure down in the notebook.
It worked. He decided maybe I was someone important. With a
dazed look in his eyes he clicked the door shut and we could hear him hurrying
down the hall. In a minute or two he returned to show us back into the big
shot’s room. I decided to follow through on the act. I raved and ranted in
English for about ten minutes, and finally subsided into German and French to
tell the braided boy behind the desk just what I thought of officials in general,
him in particular, and nincompoops as a class. I larded my talk with enough
references to America and President Roosevelt to make him think that he must
have at least the vice-president in his office.
It was only half effective. I think I convinced him that he
had made a mistake, but I didn’t make him believe that he should make an
exception. He had to check up some more. The commandant of the port, he said,
had been transferred. The Harbormaster had no record of us. He hadn’t phoned
Bucharest. We would have to spend the night in the jail and then we would be
released after he had phoned Bucharest in the morning.
At that, I went into my song and dance again. We were not
spending a night in jail. I called upon the Greek Gods, the Supreme Court, the Constitution
and the Marines. I screamed and yelled and beat my chest like Tarzan calling
his apes. Finally he gave up.
“You may stay at the hotel,” he said. “You may phone
Bucharest yourselves tonight and see if you can get one of your friends to
identify you.”
With that I subsided. It was too late to fold up the kayak,
so we might as well stay. We were given a guard to go to the hotel with us. On
the way we passed a telephone station and put through a call to our best friend
in the propaganda department. This official at once asked to speak to our
guard. We took great delight in watching him reel under a tremendous verbal
attack at long range. By the time that conversation was over, we were persons
of importance in Giurgiu. We weren’t even guarded at the hotel room, and this
morning we were escorted to the river where we found the Romur intact.
Our troubles had decided us that we’d never get to the Black
Sea in the five days we have to spare, so we folded up the kayak and came back
to Bucharest. We expect to start home on the fifteenth.
As ever,
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