The Foreign Service Journal, July-August 2014

70 JULY-AUGUST 2014 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL American appreciation for sushi. In 1962, after the Berlin Wall went up, Mr. Mahoney was posted to West Berlin as deputy director of Radio in the American Sector, which beamed into communist East Germany. Topping off his Foreign Service career, he served as public affairs counselor in Kuala Lumpur, where he handled the media during a kidnapping by the Japa- nese Red Army. Mr. Mahoney retired in 1976 and settled in Cape Cod, where he plunged into scholarship on the old Cape whaling families, interviewing their descendants, publishing a booklet on the Cape Cod packets and riding his bicycle to Histori- cal Society meetings. In his final years, his daughter, Ann Pinkham, lived with him and accompa- nied him on his naturalist adventures along the Cape’s coastal marshes and the Atlantic beaches. Mr. Mahoney was predeceased by his wife, Catherine M. Mahoney. He is survived by his daughter, Ann; his son, Haynes Mahoney III, also a Foreign Service officer, and daughter-in-law Sossi; five grandchildren: Douglas and Kim Pinkham; and Karina, Dominique and Colette Mahoney; a great-grandson, Alaric; and a sister, Eleanor Mahoney of Jacksonville, Fla. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Yarmouth Port Library, 297 Route 6A, Yarmouth Port MA 02675 ( www.yarmouthportlibrary.org) . n John Alden Mason Jr. , 91, a retired FSO with the U.S. Information Agency, died on April 14 in Kittery, Maine. Mr. Mason was born in Illinois. His younger years were full of fascinat- ing work and adventure. At age 16, he hitchhiked across the country by himself with $30 in his pocket. At 17, he spent a month in Panama helping his father on an archaeological dig sponsored by the University of Pennsylvania. And at 18, he joined the U.S. Navy and taught naval aviation to pilots during World War II. He earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1948, and spent several years in the newspaper business in the Philadelphia area before joining the U.S. Information Agency in 1960. Mr. Mason’s overseas postings included tours in Brazil: as a publications officer in Rio de Janeiro, as information officer in São Paulo, and as branch public affairs officer in Salvador. He then served as cultural affairs officer in La Paz before returning to Washington. His final assign- ment was as branch public affairs officer in Guayaquil. After retirement, Mr. Mason and his wife, Wendy, settled in Kittery, where they lived happily for more than 30 years. An avid reader, thinker, writer and storyteller, he had a marvelous sense of humor and a great interest in politics, art, literature and the environment. He is survived by his wife of 66 years, Wendy; daughters Wendy, Leslie and Robin; and son John Alden Mason III. n Tibor Nagy Sr. , 93, a retired FSO with USAID, died on April 25 in Washing- ton, D.C. Born in Budapest, Hungary, on Aug. 14, 1920, Mr. Nagy served as a career engi- neering officer in the Hungarian Army and participated actively in the country’s brief quest for freedom in 1956. Because of his anti-Soviet activities, combined with an earlier term of political imprisonment, he knew he would face execution after the uprising was crushed. Instead, he escaped with his young son, Tibor Jr., into Austria, eventually arriving in the United States as political refugees in 1957. Penniless, Mr. Nagy worked menial jobs until he learned English and received his U.S. engineering license. After gaining recognition in private practice, Mr. Nagy was hired by USAID in 1969 as a civil engineer. He worked in South Vietnam on infrastructure devel- opment and repaired war damage in the Mekong Delta region. In 1976, he was assigned to Haiti to help design and repair roads and bridges in that severely underdeveloped nation that experiences frequent hurricanes. After Italy suffered devastating earth- quakes in 1980, Mr. Nagy was transferred to Naples to help implement a massive U.S. relief program to repair the damaged infrastructure. He also managed projects in other Mediterranean and Middle East- ern countries out of Naples. Mr. Nagy retired from the Foreign Service in 1987, but returned to work for USAID under contract in El Salvador after that country’s civil war. In 1993 he retired again, but was again called back in 1995—this time to help revive Bosnia’s infrastructure after the Bal- kan civil war. He stayed in Sarajevo until 2000, when he retired for the last time and returned to Washington after being diag- nosed with a rare form of blood cancer. Because of his expertise in working in war zones and areas of devastation, Mr. Nagy earned the nickname “disaster mas- ter” among USAID’s engineering corps. One of his proudest moments came in 1998, when he was invited back to Hungary by the post-communist govern- ment to a ceremony in his honor. There the Hungarian government nullified Mr. Nagy’s 1956 treason conviction and death sentence, promoted him retroactively to full colonel and awarded him one of Hungary’s highest honors—“Hero of the Revolution.”