The Foreign Service Journal, June 2011

70 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 1 School. She met her husband when they were both students at Kansas State University. They were married in 1944. She then transferred to Northwestern University, where she majored in speech. Mrs. Parker loved the adventure of traveling with her husband throughout his career as an Arabist in the U.S. State Department. She accompanied him to posts in Australia and the Mid- dle East, providing a warm home for her family and their many friends. Before Julia Child made French cuisine popular, Mrs. Parker com- pleted a course in French cuisine with Madame Petro-Colonna in Virginia and began her lifelong love affair with cooking and good food. Later, in 1986, she received a diploma “D’Etudes Pro- fessionnelles” from L’Academie de Cuisine in Maryland. She was known for her unending search for the perfect recipe. Mrs. Parker organized theater groups in Cairo and Rabat, directing and starring in several plays. Jeanne Parker was predeceased by her husband. She is survived by two daughters, Alison P. Kenway of Port- land, Maine, and Jill Parker of Arling- ton, Va.; two sons, Jeff D. Parker of Boston, Mass., and Richard J. Parker of Danvers, Mass.; nine grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the American Near East Refugee Aid, at www.anera.org. Nuel L. Pazdral , 75, a retired For- eign Service officer and the husband of retired FSO Ronna Sharp Pazdral, died on Nov. 8, 2010, at Fairfax Inova Hospital in Fairfax, Va., of complica- tions resulting from a stroke. The son of an Army (and later Air Force) surgeon, Nuel Logan Pazdral was born on Nov. 17, 1934, at Jeffer- son Barracks, an Air Corps station near St. Louis, Mo. Mr. Pazdral’s first mem- ories were of Mindanao and Corregi- dor, the Philippine islands where he lived until 1939. He grew up on Army posts in Utah, Texas, Alabama, Califor- nia and Alaska, sheltering during the war years with family in the Washing- ton, D.C., area. In high school, a prize for photogra- phy led to his special interest in jour- nalism and his part-time work as a sports reporter and photographer for what was then Alaska’s second-largest newspaper. At Stanford University, where he graduated in 1956 with a B.A. in political science, he was a stringer for several local papers and Stanford’s school daily. He then worked briefly for a San Francisco daily newspaper before the Army picked up his college deferment and sent him to Ft. Ben- ning, Ga., and later to Korea for a 13- month tour as a rifle platoon leader and regimental liaison officer. Mr. Pazdral worked for a San Francisco television station before joining the Foreign Service in 1961. His first tours were in Washington, D.C., as a post management officer in the Bureau of African Affairs, staff as- sistant to the Africa Bureau’s assistant secretary and a systems analyst in the Office of Management Policy. In 1966, he was assigned to Copenhagen as a consular officer; this was followed by a posting to Bonn as deputy sci- ence attaché. In 1970, Mr. Pazdral transferred to Warsaw as the science officer responsible for a PL-480 sci- ence exchange program that grew from $1 million in 1970 to more than $20 million by 1973. After completing FSI’s advanced economics training, Mr. Pazdral work- ed in the Bureau of Aviation Negotia- tions and then as special assistant to the assistant secretary for economic affairs. Following brief tours on the Board of Examiners and as the Cyprus desk of- ficer, in 1977 he was assigned as prin- cipal officer to Consulate General Kra- kow. There he reported on the begin- nings, in southern Poland, of the dem- ocratic opposition publication KSS- KOR and the development of the Sol- idarity movement, as well as the elec- tion of Cardinal Carol Wojtyla, from Krakow, as Pope John Paul II. In 1979, he was assigned to Para- maribo as deputy chief of mission, fol- lowed by a posting to Lagos in 1981 as deputy chief of the political section. While in Nigeria, Mr. Pazdral met his future wife, FSORonna Sharp, also as- signed there. They married in 1983. Mr. Pazdral returned to Eastern Europe in 1983 as chief of the political section in Bucharest, where he focused on human rights violations under the Ceausescu regime. His final assign- ment was as director of the Office of Multilateral Affairs in the Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Af- fairs. Following retirement from the For- eign Service in 1988, Mr. Pazdral be- came a consultant to the State Depart- ment, completing numerous tempo- rary-duty assignments as he accompa- nied his wife to her overseas postings. An active outdoorsman, Mr. Pazdral joined a Danish sailing club in 1966 and simultaneously enrolled in Danish lan- guage classes achieving both language and sailing proficiency qualifications to navigate Danish waters. Years later he purchased his own 34-foot sloop and sailed it from the Baltic to the Adriatic Sea and back to the U.K., with many port calls en route. I N M E M O R Y