By Patricia Sullivan
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Bea Russell lived, by her own account, a glamorous and exciting life.
Vivacious and outgoing, as a young woman she posed for noted photographer Philippe Halsman, as had her mother, and her portrait was used in magazine advertisements for Ponds Cold Cream.
She enrolled in the University of Michigan in 1945, when men outnumbered women five to one, and arrived on campus with "an unscholarly determination to enjoy my five-man allotment," she wrote in a memoir. "I failed to get beyond number three . . . and silently consigned the rest of my quota to my competitors."
The English major married a handsome Army veteran bound for a career in the State Department's Foreign Service, starting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. After an initial bout of seasickness and altitude sickness (not at the same time), the South Orange, N.J., native reveled in the exotic overseas surroundings, hunting elephants in Sudan, fishing in the Indian Ocean, fleeing a rickety Beirut cinema during an earthquake and attending a presentation at the court of Haile Selassie.
"My mother constantly looked for a new theme or adventure in life," her son, Brian Scott Russell, said after her death Jan. 14 from a cerebral hemorrhage at 80. "It couldn't be just a normal Foreign Service dinner party or cocktail party, it had to involve something like a treasure hunt."
The job of a Foreign Service spouse in the 1950s was a full-time position, requiring a wide-ranging education, social graces, a good memory for names and faces, fiscal discipline and creativity. No flibbertigibbet, Russell raised her daughter and son, oversaw the operation of the household, staged amateur plays for the diplomatic community and published articles in the Foreign Service Journal and the Saturday Evening Post about her adventures. She also penned a delightful book, "Living in State" (1959), an account of her family's first decade abroad.
To combat the perception that the diplomatic corps is exclusively a striped-pants-wearing, caviar-nibbling, champagne-sipping set, she exposed her family's finances in a style later familiar to Money magazine readers: so much for fuel, so much for housing, so much for clothing and so little for the entertainment required by the job.
Her husband, H. Earle Russell, steadily climbed the career ladder, serving in Tunisia, studying Arabic in Lebanon, then working in Saudi Arabia and Morocco. His promotion to deputy chief of mission in Dakar, Senegal, prompted another adventure; the Russells and their 16-year-old son decided to turn the transfer into a 2,500-mile road trip. With their older daughter attending a U.S. nursing school, they loaded their year-old Peugeot station wagon with provisions, added an acquaintance as a passenger, and set off from Rabat, Morocco, in June 1971 along a fairly well-traveled track through the western Sahara Desert.
A period of unusually hot weather struck, driving temperatures to well over 100 degrees, accompanied by hot winds. All traffic and human activity stopped, so when the Peugeot broke down, there were no passing travelers.
"It was a freak circumstance," her son said. "What happened was that the differential casing cracked and slowly leaked all the oil."
According to State Department cables after the fact, the Russells had checked in with authorities at Ain Ben Tili, Mauritania, but the message to expect the party never got to officials at Bir Moghrein. Thus, after the breakdown, no one noticed that the group had been missing for eight days. Her husband died in the heat, and by the time rescuers spotted them in the desert, the three survivors were severely dehydrated and exhausted.
"My mother was very stoic," her son said. "She really came to the aid of myself and Tom," their acquaintance. When help arrived, "we were down to a half-bottle of Evian water, which is what saved my mother and I."
Russell returned to the United States and settled in an apartment in Northern Virginia. During a previous period when the family lived in the United States, she had written for a defense contractor's newsletter. A voracious reader, the new widow had excellent preparation for the job that the State Department offered, preparing the daily media briefings for American embassies in Africa. She held that job until her retirement in 1990.
She met Mike Meyer, a magazine executive, in 1975 at a tennis tournament. At a dance later that night, Meyer cut in on her partner and began a relationship that lasted 30 years.
Russell played tennis with women 20 to 30 years younger than she was, skied until 1998 and read The Washington Post and the New York Times every day, her daughter, Christina Vetsech, said, and Newsweek, Time and the New Yorker every week.
"She always made the best of anything," Vetsech said as she described her mother's kindness and graciousness toward strangers. "She was always engaged in whatever community she lived in."