Word: olmstead
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gail Olmstead, pregnant with her second child (the first: Karen, 2), spent the empty, endless weeks of waiting at her parents' home in Plainfield, N.J. It was hard to maintain her husband's faith that everything would work out, that they would be back together soon. The details of Bruce Olmstead's confinement were not encouraging: "I am kept alone in a cell but am not being abused." Prison, he wrote, "has pretty well shown me that I couldn't quite make it as a cloistered monk. I am given cigarettes, hon, and filters at that...
Like McKone, Bruce Olmstead seemed to worry more about what his ordeal would mean to his family than what it would do to him. His own spirit, which he showed from the moment he joined the Air Force after graduating from Kenyon College in 1957, was more than enough to sustain him. Brought up in a devout Episcopal family, Olmstead made the most of a Catholic Bible surprisingly provided by his jailers. He read Scriptures and spent hours making up sermons. "Often in his letters home," said his brother, Dermatologist Brent Olmstead, "he'd include a little prayer...
Enough Blame. For Gail Olmstead and Connie McKone, the toughest job of all was to follow Air Force advice to remain calm and quiet, not to make personal appeals to Khrushchev, not to complain to the press. It seemed to the two women that very little was being done for their husbands. Regularly, every two weeks, the U.S. State Department sent notes to the Soviet Foreign Office and asked that the two officers be released. Regularly, the notes drew evasive replies...
Just as their plane taxied toward takeoff, there was a sudden jolt. Two tires blew out. While spares were flown from Warsaw, the Electra's passengers were taken back to the airport terminal. McKone and Olmstead made the long hour's drive back to the U.S. embassy. No one could say when their plane would be ready to leave, and every passing minute increased the possibility of a news leak. The two men were spirited into the ninth-floor apartment of the embassy's air attaché, Colonel Melvin J. Nielsen. Embassy electricians were ordered...
Wonderful Thing. By that time, Colonel Godfrey McHugh, White House Air Force aide, had telephoned to Connie McKone and Gail Olmstead to report that their husbands were free. Memories of the news-breaking conversations are blurred with emotion. "There was silence and heavy breathing over the phone," said McHugh. "It got me, too. In their voices you could tell how they felt." Later, after his press conference, President Kennedy, too, decided to call the wives. But their phones were already jammed. The operator announced that President John Kennedy was among those waiting to get through. Which call did Mrs. McKone...