James Pomeroy Howe

A worldly country gentleman, Jim Howe was a journalist, orchardist, winemaker, gourmet, connoisseur, collector, and admitted spy for the young CIA. While growing up in Kansas, Howe yearned to see the world. He became an Associated Press foreign correspondent stationed in the world's Great Cities---London, Paris, Warsaw, Berlin, Brussels, Moscow, Tokyo, Peking, Shanghai, Bombay, Washington, Honolulu, and San Francisco. For three decades he trotted the globe covering World War I, the Russo-Polish war, the Sino-Japanese war, the Chinese Revolution. He saw so many conflicts that his San Francisco Chronicle obituary began: "They used to say you couldn't have a genuine war until Jimmy Howe of the Associated Press got there."

During his long life, Jim developed a most impressive resume. He wrote for The Washington Post, The Washington Herald, The New York Telegraph, The New York Evening Journal, The Philadelphia Bulletin, The San Francisco Chronicle, The New Orleans Times Democrat and his father's famous Atchison (Kansas) Globe. And he roamed history's backstages. He interviewed Gandhi, Lindbergh, George Bernard Shaw, King George, Lloyd George. His were the days of steamer trunks and three-week ocean crossings; communications by telegraph, sealed envelope, carrier pigeon. There were no transworld flights, no computers, no telefax, no World Wide Web.

Mia, his wife, was the daughter of an Austrian aristocrat, a university administrator from Vienna. In 1947, The San Francisco Examiner's women's editor related how Mia became a Howe:

"Jim Howe met the charming Mia herself in Luxembourg when he was passing through there as a World War I correspondent. And the way of their meeting was this: Needing some information, and handicapped by not knowing the language, Jim merely stood in the middle of the palace square and yelled--loud and clear, 'Does anybody here speak English?'

"'I do,' said a shy young voice. It was Mia---who not so long thereafter said her 'I do's' in quite another fashion."

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