Peggy Polk Sullivan

Peggy Polk Sullivan a long time foreign correspondent for United Press International and, while still in college, a trailblazer in the field of women’s parachuting, died January 13 at her home in New Orleans. Peggy worked for UPI for 32 years serving in Albany, NY, Boston, New York City and Washington, DC and then in Moscow, Madrid and Rome. But perhaps her most newsworthy accomplishment occurred in 1956 when, as a junior at Radcliffe College, she became the first woman to complete 10 parachute jumps and thereby become the first person of her sex to earn a license from the American Parachute Association. Ultimately she completed 16 jumps. Born Rose L. W. Polk in Towanda, Pa on October 11, 1935 she was brought up mainly in Brooklyn Heights, NY. She attended local public schools and then the Elizabeth Irwin High School (the famous Little Red School House). She went on to Radcliffe College, since absorbed by Harvard University, and graduated cum laude in English literature in 1957. A year later she entered Columbia Journalism School, graduating in 1959. Shortly thereafter she went to United Press (later UPI). Her first assignment was covering then Governor Nelson Rockefeller in Albany. Five years later, while she was working in the Boston bureau, President Lyndon B. Johnson sought to recruit her for a press job in the White House; she turned the offer down because she wanted to continue her reporting career. For about ten years she worked at UPI headquarters in New York as a talented and versatile rewrite person and editor, doing stories on crime, politics and the arts. In the early 1970s she went abroad spending two years in Madrid covering the post Franco period of transition to democracy. She spent two years in Rome and two in Moscow followed by a brief assignment in Washington. Then she returned to Rome as bureau manager where she would remain for 18 years. Rome became her spiritual home. She lived in the glorious Palazzo Doria-Panphilj surround by a large circle of friends. During this period, Peggy was baptized into the Episcopal Church and became a devout member of the Church of St Paul Within the Walls, serving twice as senior warden. Professionally, she covered Italian politics including the wave of terrorism in the 1980s, wrote elegant articles on Italian fashion, she covered closely the papacies of Paul VI and John Paul II, traveling extensively with both pontiffs. UPI went out of business in the mid 1990s. Peggy worked for a year on publications for the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. She then joined Religion News Service, a branch of the Newhouse newspapers and worked exclusively on the Vatican until 2005. In August of that year, she travelled to New Orleans with an old friend Scott Sullivan, a Newsweek correspondent in Paris. The couple was married a year later and Peggy settled into a New Orleans life for the next nine years. She was a devoted member of Trinity Episcopal Church, belonged to a variety of civic organizations, adored Creole food, jazz music and Mardi Gras. As she had done everywhere she went, she accumulated a vast number of friends and she became a solid member of her husband’s family. Her dying words were “the best thing that ever happened to me was joining this family.” A Eucharist celebrating Peggy’s life will be held at Trinity Church, Jackson Avenue and Coliseum Street, at 1pm this Saturday, January 24, 2015. To view and sign the guest book, visit www.lakelawnmetairie.com.