Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring by Pete Earley Read Free Book Online Page A

it was much smaller than the public schools that Arthur and John liked. But Johnny Walker didn’t care what his sons wanted. He had graduated from St. Patrick’s and felt the rigid discipline would be good for his boys. Peggy also liked the idea because she was turning more and more to the Church for solace, returning to the teachings that had sustained her parents.
    The school was run with absolute authority. Answers were black and white; actions were good or evil. There was no room for gray, whether it was a question of school rules or Catholic dogma. Physical punishment, a crack on the knuckles with a ruler or a swat with a wooden paddle, came quickly and often. Students were required to say the rosary every day. A photograph of Pope Pius XII was displayed next to a picture of President Harry Truman in the principal’s office. The three-story brick school building looked more like a fortress than a school.
    To John it became a prison.
    He developed an intense distaste for organized religion, but while he shared his feelings with his brother, John was cagey enough to conceal them at school. Open confrontation with the priests and nuns would have been catastrophic. Instead, he resisted tacitly, doing as little homework as possible and showing no interest in any school function. He even refused to have his picture taken for the yearbook. He wanted no part of St. Patrick’s.
    Meanwhile, Arthur thrived at the school. Academically, he had his ups and downs, but he excelled in sports, particularly football, scoring three touchdowns and averaging four yards per carry as a running back for the Paddies during his senior year. Arthur also was into basketball, baseball, and track, played the trumpet in the band, and was the hero in a senior class play. Just before graduation in 1952, his classmates named him the most popular student in the school.
    John and Arthur had always depended upon one another – each filling in for the other’s weaknesses – but after the move to West Scranton they began to grow apart. The separation was partially because of girls. John wasn’t interested in them; Arthur was obsessed. Years later, Arthur would claim that he was a virgin when he married and was rarely unfaithful to his wife. Others, including John, would recall how Arthur had had a string of girlfriends and how he had, in fact, lost his virginity as a teenager when the family lived in Richmond. At St. Patrick’s in 1952, he met Rita Clare Fritsch, a prim and proper blonde pixie with large black-rimmed glasses and a pug nose. Rita fell in love with Arthur, but not with his family. She had heard from her mother that Johnny was a drunk. Rita also had trouble getting along with Peggy, who seemed jealous of her son’s new interest. The more serious Rita and Arthur became, the more time Arthur spent at the Fritsch home.
    Arthur was not the only member of the Walker family spending less and less time at home. Johnny had quit his job at the Roosevelt and gone to work as a disc jockey at radio station WARM. The most popular radio deejays in Scranton were on the air in the afternoon and early evening. Being a newcomer, Johnny was stuck with the graveyard shift. But he didn’t mind the schedule because it gave him the opportunity to experiment with different formats. Within a few months, he had developed a show called The Night Walker . Johnny played soft music and read love poems over the Scranton airwaves. Sometimes he would whisper into the microphone as if he were confiding in an unseen lover. The show was an overnight sensation and Johnny was, once again, a celebrity, especially among women. The circuits overloaded whenever Johnny asked listeners to phone in and request “that special song for someone you love.” Soon he was earning $4 an hour, at a time when some workers in the Lackawanna Valley were earning that amount for a full day’s work.
    For a while, Johnny’s success made family life much easier. The tranquility did not last,