Free Family of Spies: Inside the John Walker Spy Ring by Pete Earley Page B

to my surprise this afternoon, I received a phone call from Bobbie. I feared the worst, but she was just lonesome and wanted to call. In a way I wish she hadn’t called; it only made me very homesick. Like all women, she started to cry and I swore I would have also if there weren’t so many sailors around. So, if you get a chance, I’d rather have you write Bobbie than me. I think it’s harder on the girls than the men.”
    After the U.S.S. Razorback returned, it was sent to San Francisco and John moved his family into subsidized Navy housing on the base. For the first time in their marriage, John and Barbara had a normal nine-to-five life together for a long period. They also allowed themselves some spending money to eat at restaurants and see movies. John bought a bicycle and rode it to the ship each day to save money.
    The togetherness, however, wore thin. John discovered that Barbara spent most of her time talking about their three daughters and he was quickly bored by domestic discussions. She in turn grew weary of john’s endless sea stories. One evening John came home early from a short test cruise on the submarine and found the house in disarray. Dirty clothes had been dropped on the floor, and the kitchen was jammed with several days’ worth of dirty dishes and silverware. Barbara, who was pregnant again, and the three girls were nowhere to be seen. When they arrived home a few hours later, John was waiting on the front step.
    “What the hell is going on?” he demanded.
    “I was too tired to clean up tonight so I took the girls to a drive-in movie,” Barbara said.
    John told me later during an interview that this incident was a turning point.
    “I have always been a neat person,” he explained. “I can’t stand an untidy house and that incident stands out in my mind. To put it in perspective, I was literally busting my ass, trying to get ahead at work, but my wife, who I thought was in the same mold, was becoming a typical lazy Navy wife who didn’t want to do anything but sit at home and raise kids. I began to sense that she was not the woman who I thought I had married. We had gotten married at an early age and both of us had a lot of growing up to do and I was growing up in a much different direction than she was. Things in the marriage were still okay, but I was beginning to see long-range things in Barbara that I was not happy with. Laziness was the main thing, which resulted in her being what I would call a slob.
    “She had started watching television, and it seemed that she was watching it twenty-three hours a day and doing absolutely nothing to progress or improve herself. Technically, we were both high school dropouts, but I had done something about that. I had gotten my GED. When we first met, I viewed Barbara as someone who was poor as hell, but who had lots of ambition. She had pulled herself out of the sewer, and I figured she would claw her way to the top. We were very similar in that way. We were aggressive and had high aspirations. We were going to make something of ourselves. But after a few years of marriage, it became clear to me that she was falling to the side. She wasn’t doing anything. She talked about getting her GED. She talked about it endlessly, but she never went after it. I’ll give her this much: raising kids is tough. But I was out at sea a lot and I still managed to study hard enough to make all of my ranks.”
    In the spring of 1962, John moved his family again – the fifteenth move in five years – to Vallejo, California, where he reported for duty on the U.S.S. Andrew Jackson , one of the Navy’s new nuclear-powered submarines. It was a trying time. Barbara was having a difficult pregnancy and had started complaining about John’s refusal to help around the house or care for the children – Margaret, age four; Cynthia, age two; Laura, age one. Despite her badgering, John refused to lift a finger. “The Navy is my job. The house and children are