The Foreign Service Journal, December 2008

the Foreign Service. In February 1944 he arrived in England and was part of the landing force on Utah Beach. He fought during the battle for Normandy and was offered a bat- tlefield commission to second lieu- tenant. After hostilities ended, he was transferred to the military govern- ment and sent to Schwabach, where his knowledge of German was fully employed. In 1946, Mr. Erickson returned to Kansas to teach languages at a small college. Later that year, recalling a USO-sponsored trip to Rome, where the imposing U.S. embassy had made a great impression on him, he applied to the State Department for work and was readily accepted. Following training in Washington as a code clerk, he was sent to the con- sulate general in Mukden, Man- churia, in February 1948. There the Chinese Nationalists were attempting to hold the line against the Chinese Communist military forces. On Nov. 1, however, the Communists marched into Mukden unopposed. Within a month, the American transmitters were confiscated, guards were in place around the consulate general and the living compound two blocks away, and the 13 Americans were taken hostage. Ultimately, Con- sul General Angus Ward and four staffers were removed and put in soli- tary confinement. Within the com- pound, conditions during those win- ter months were horrendous. The electricity had been cut off, and it was so bitterly cold that the pump froze, and they could not bathe. Their baked bread had to be sliced to re- move the cockroaches. After a month, Ward and the oth- ers were returned. In June 1949, after a sham trial, Erickson was sen- tenced to three years in prison for “espionage.” The sentence was later commuted to immediate deportation and banishment. However, this saga did not end until December, when the Americans were suddenly in- formed they were to depart in 24 hours. After 40 hours aboard an ice- cold train with windows stuck wide open to the frigid air, they reached Tientsin, and were turned over to American diplomatic personnel. From 1950 to 1954, Mr. Erickson served in Algiers in the economic sec- tion; from there, he was assigned to Paris. He was commissioned as an FSO in 1955, and in 1956 returned to Asia for a tour in Vientiane. There he met Foreign Service staff assistant Patricia Gordon, a Berkeley graduate and fluent French-speaker, whom he married upon completion of their tours in Laos. The East Asia Bureau in Wash- ington was next. A highlight of that tour was serving as escort officer for Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia on the latter’s visits to the U.S. In 1962, the Erickson family, now including a son, Mark, arrived in Kobe, where Mr. Erickson served as economic officer and deputy principal officer. In 1964, he attended the Air War College in Alabama, before being posted to Beirut as economic counselor in 1965. With its scores of banks and head offices of many foreign businesses, Beirut was considered an island of calm in a troubled region. That changed suddenly with the outbreak of the Six Days War in 1967, and the Erickson family joined hundreds of other evacuees leaving by air or by ship for Rome or other safe havens. Mr. Erickson served as chief of personnel for the Far East Bureau in Washington from 1967 to 1970, not a happy sinecure during the time of forced assignments to Vietnam. He then became consul general in Rotter- dam, an assignment that ended in 1974. A posting to Tokyo as econom- ic/commercial counselor followed. Pollution-related health problems of his family forced a curtailment of that assignment, and Mr. Erickson next went to Ottawa as economic/com- mercial counselor from 1975 to 1978. His final assignment was to the con- sulate general in Frankfurt, ironically the place where he had first sat for the Foreign Service examination three decades earlier. Following retirement in 1980, Mr. Erickson worked on Freedom of Infor- mation Act issues and as a fact-check- er for U.S. News & World Report . He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Patricia Erickson, of Solomons, Md., and their son, Mark, of Tampa, Fla. Sharyn Roberta Moss , 62, a for- mer cultural affairs officer and wife of the late FSO Stanley Moss, died on Aug. 29 at her home in Novato, Calif. Born in New York City on Oct. 15, 1945, Sharyn Moss graduated from Sheepshead Bay High School in Brooklyn and received her bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees from Brooklyn College. She then taught physical education at Sayville High School, Long Island, N.Y., for five years. During a vacation, she planned to meet her girlfriends in Greece after first visiting Israel. In Greece, howev- er, she decided to cut her visit short to go back and spend more time in Israel. Falling in love with the coun- try, she returned to New York, learned Hebrew, left her promising teaching position and lived in Israel for the next 10 years. In Israel, Ms. Moss served as a cul- tural attaché at the embassy in Tel Aviv, where she met her husband, FSO Stanley David Moss. The cou- ple returned to the U.S., married and settled in Marin County. Living in Tiburon, Calif., for a year, they then 74 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / D E C E M B E R 2 0 0 8 I N M E M O R Y