The Foreign Service Journal, November 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | NOVEMBER 2020 91 directorship. He persuaded Mr. Murrow to order all Voice of America transmit- ters to condemn the Soviet Union after the Soviets violated the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963. From 1965 to 1967, he was deputy chief of mission and chargé d’affaires in Sofia. He then served as a public affairs officer for three years in Berlin. In 1975 Mr. Tuch was the Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. From 1976 to 1981, he was the deputy and acting director of the Voice of America. When American diplomats were taken hostage in Tehran in 1979, he ordered the creation of a VOA Farsi language service, which went on the air within 10 days. His last post, from 1981 to 1985, was as minister counselor for public affairs in Bonn. There, he helped create the U.S. Congress–German Bundestag Youth Exchange Program, which is still active today. Mr. Tuch retired from the Foreign Service as a Career Minister in 1985. “When ‘Tom’ Tuch retired recently, a whole generation retired with him,” Christian Science Monitor journalist Elizabeth Pond wrote at the time. “He is one of the last of those Europeans who fled to America as refugees from Hitler— then paid back their debt with a lifetime of service to their adopted country.” In retirement, Mr. Tuch taught public diplomacy and intercultural com- munication as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and at the Uni- versity of Missouri in Kansas City. His groundbreaking book, Com- municating with the World: U.S. Public Diplomacy Overseas (Palgrave Macmil- lan, 1990), explains the development of U.S. public diplomacy since World War II. Mr. Tuch received the Presidential Distinguished Service Award, USIA’s Distinguished Honor Award and the Edward R. Murrow Award for Excellence in Public Diplomacy. He was president of the USIA Alumni Association, and a founding and emeritus member of the board of the Public Diplomacy Council. He served as a member of the Board of Trustees of Youth for Under- standing from 1985 to 1991, and was on the FSJ Editorial Board from 1991 to 1994. He contributed more than 15 articles and letters to the Journal . His articles also appeared in The New York Times , Chicago Tribune and Philadel- phia Inquirer. Mr. Tuch was predeceased by his wife, Ruth “Mimi” Lord Tuch. He is survived by his son, David, and daughter-in law, Helena, of Sao Paulo, Brazil; his daughter, Andrea, and son-in-law, Patrick Lannan, of Santa Fe, N.M.; and his companion Sylvia Weiss of Bethesda, Md. In lieu of flowers, contributions may be made to the Wolf Trap Opera, 1645 Trap Road, Vienna VA 22182. n Cheryl Lynn Young , 69, spouse of retired Senior Foreign Service officer Thomas Young, died unexpectedly on May 7 of a heart attack. The couple had been married for nearly 48 years. Ms. Young was born on May 21, 1950, in Wauwatosa, Wis., and adopted by Rozella and Larry Bylander when she was a toddler. She grew up in Fairmont, Minn. She attended college in Yankton, S.D., for a year before moving to the Binghamton, N.Y., area where she met her future husband, Tom, in 1970. They were married on Oct. 1, 1972, in Hunts- ville, Ala., and were living there when Mr. Young received an offer to join the Foreign Service. Their first overseas assignment was to Tunis, where their son, Travis, was born. That assignment was followed by nine others, taking them to South America, North Africa, the Caribbean, Australia, the Middle East and Europe. Ms. Young took to the Foreign Service lifestyle enthusiastically, and the couple spent 35 wonderful years traveling the world together. During their Foreign Service years, Ms. Young worked in a variety of family mem- ber positions, primarily in the manage- ment sections of the embassies to which they were assigned. In the late 1990s, however, she applied and was accepted for a con- sular associate position at U.S. Embassy Nicosia. In preparation for that assign- ment, she took the FSI consular course and served as a de facto consular officer during her three years at that post and as a consular associate in their onward assignment to Amman. During Washington, D.C., assign- ments, Ms. Young worked in the private sector, including two years in the early 1980s when she was the breadwinner for the family while Mr. Young was on an educational leave of absence from the Foreign Service. In 2007 the couple retired to San Diego, where their son and other family members were living. Ms. Young quickly developed many friendships in the area. She was an expert in several crafts including knitting, sewing, crocheting and needlepoint, and she enjoyed teaching others those skills as much as she enjoyed completing her own projects. She knitted caps for newborns and taught herself how to make quilts, which she took great plea- sure in gifting to family and friends. An excellent bridge player, Ms. Young participated in three to four games a week with her friends in the area. When she was not physically sitting at a bridge table, she