Remembering Jennifer Parmalee ’80

Welcome to the PAW Memorials podcast, where we celebrate the lives of alumni. For this episode, PAW Memorials editor Nicholas DeVito sat down with Shelley Slade ’80 and Marie Yovanovitch ’80 to discuss Jennifer Beale Parmalee ’80. Jenni was a journalist in East Africa, covering politics, war, and personal stories.

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TRANSCRIPT

Nicholas DeVito: I am Nicholas DeVito, Class Notes and Memorials editor for Princeton Alumni Weekly. Today we’re talking with Shelley Slade and Marie Yovanovitch, both from the great Class of 1980, and we’re discussing their good friend and classmate, Jennifer Beale Parmelee. Jenni was a journalist whose career led her to cover politically significant, as well as personal stories throughout East Africa. She died Nove. 19, 2023.

Today we’re talking about Jenni Beale Parmelee from the great Class of 1980, and I have two classmates and friends of hers from Class of ’80, Shelley Slade and Marie Yovanovitch. Shelley and Marie, if you guys can introduce yourself. Shelley, if you want to start.

Shelley Slade: Yeah, sure. I’m Shelley Slade, as you mentioned, from the Class of 1980, and I have known Jenni since we were about 8 years old through experiences together at three different schools and afterwards. And I’m a lawyer here in Washington, D.C.

Marie Yovanovitch: My name is Marie Yovanovitch and everybody calls me Masha and, Nicholas, you should as well. So I was also a member of the Class of 1980, and I met Jenni and Shelley when they were my across the hallway roommates. I mean, I considered myself to be a roommate of their quad, too. And for most of my career I was a foreign service officer working for the State Department. And now, I’m mainly doing public speaking, affiliated with a couple of universities and a couple of think tanks here in Washington, D.C.

ND: OK, great. So my first question here, so this’ll be a little different answers from both of you, so what was your first impression of Jenni. And Shelley, since you’ve known her since 8, that’ll be a definitely different answer, which I’m looking forward to hearing.

SS: Yeah, so I was at an all-girls school with Jenni from about third grade through about sixth grade when she left to go to school in Greenwich, moving with her parents. And then, we overlapped together at Phillips Academy for three years, and then we were at Princeton together. And for the entirety of that time, as far as I can recall, Jenni wanted to be a journalist. And I don’t know what put the bug in her head, she didn’t have parents who were in journalism. But more than that, for the entirety of that time, she had the deepest sense of responsibility to give back and to do good and to support the little guy. And so, I remember that from her earliest days. When she was little, she was very, very sweet, very caring, maybe a little bit naive, but as time went on, she became much more savvy, but she never lost that sense of optimism that she could help change the world and looking for the goodness in people.

MY: Yeah, and that sense of empathy where she could really put herself in the position of other people, including the many people that she met, not only here in the United States, but overseas, who were really in very difficult circumstances, whether because of poverty, often mass famine, starvation, or war. I mean, she was a war correspondent for many of those years. But to answer your question, Nicholas, how did I meet Jenni? So I met Jenni, as I mentioned before, when Shelley and Jenni and a couple of other women were living across the hall from my quad. And Jenni was just this, at least to me, bigger than life force. I mean, she was so charismatic, she was so energetic. I, too, was interested in journalism. I eventually took a different path, but we had that in common and I was just so amazed by her focus at the age of 18. She knew what she wanted to do and she was working on that.

ND: Wow.

MY: And that freshman year, not only was she carrying a full load of classes and everything, she got a job with the Associated Press stringing for sports events in the area and in New York. And she kept that going through internships in the summer. And they hired her right out of college. I mean, she actually went from graduating to covering the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. I mean, pretty amazing-

ND: Oh, wow.

MY: ... trajectory for, I think, any journalist. But she was focused and she was dedicated, but she was still also, and Shelley you’ll back me up on this, we had a lot of fun too,

SS: Yeah, and Jenni had an amazing sense of adventure and a great sense of humor, which were right in line with her curiosity that bled over to the journalism.

ND: Wow, that’s great. Yeah, because it says here that she covered Princeton sports for the Associated Press. And so, then that had her going to Moscow, which I don’t think I realized that. That’s amazing.

MY: And as a very young cub reporter, she got the biggest scoop out of those ... I mean, I might be exaggerating here, but she got a scoop out of those games because, I mean, obviously, she wasn’t the star AP reporter out there. They had a full team out there. And so, she was probably on the sidelines covering something. So this was during the summer of 1980 when the Soviet Union had just invaded Afghanistan, and there were these Afghan athletes who came to her and wanted to defect, and that was a whole huge deal. And the embassy got involved and everything else. As a cub reporter, if she didn’t find the news, the news found her-

ND:The news found-

SS: Right, yeah. I don’t think we know the whole story, but we know that she was approached in a dark movie theater by these athletes and some of the journalists who she had been covering the Olympics with just didn’t hear from her. Nobody knew where she was for a couple days, that’s what we heard. And then, she showed up on the plane to go back to the United States, and nobody has really ever learned what happened during those three days.

ND:Oh, wow. That’s really interesting. So was she with the AP at that point?

SS: Mm-hmm.

ND:And then, she was working out of Denver, out of Rome, and then out of Ethiopia, and that’s when she was the Washington Post correspondent in Ethiopia?

MY: Yeah, I think she started stringing for the Washington Post, didn’t she, in Rome, Shelley? Still in Rome?

SS: Possibly, yeah, possibly. I know that she was definitely working for AP in Rome.

MY: And then I think she left AP and was a stringer for the Washington Post. And then when her husband was transferred to Addis, she continued there. And of course, there’s no shortage of stories in Africa ever, and certainly not at that time. So that would’ve been around ’89, maybe, ’89 that they went there.

ND: Can you speak a little about her time while in Africa? Because she was covering the Ethiopian famine, the genocide in Rwanda.

SS: Could I add one story about her time in Rome?

ND: Yeah, please.

SS: In Rome, she was covering everybody from the Pope, she would be on his plane sometimes, or the other journalists-

ND: Oh, wow.

SS: ... to Muammar Gaddafi. Jenni always seemed, as Masha indicated, to find herself in the middle of some adventure, but she actually went to Libya where she interviewed him on several occasions. And on one occasion, Arafat was coming to meet with Gaddafi, and Jenni had been interviewing Gaddafi, and he was so fond of Jenni that he brought her out to meet Arafat’s plane, which, as I recall, crashed. I mean, everybody was okay, but had a very bad landing. And he then ran up to Arafat and said, “I want you to meet my friend Jenni.” So there she was with Arafat and Gaddafi.

ND: Right after the plane crash?

SS: Yeah.

ND: Wow.

MY: It was more like a hard landing.

ND:Yeah, right. But it just seems like she was covering the right place at the right time in all these events. That’s amazing.

MY: Shelley, I don’t know if there’s anything you wanted to say more about Rome, but I would say about Rome, when she was in Rome, I was posted to my first foreign service posting in Mogadishu, Somalia, and that was ’86, ’87, and she was my only visitor. She came out from Rome. And Somalia was, as you probably know, a former Italian province. And so, her Italian came in very handy. And of course she went back a couple years later when the civil war started there and covered it. But she had already been there before as a tourist.

But when she went to Addis, I think the first thing, the really big story that she was covering was the civil war in Ethiopia. And the eventual result of that, of course, was the establishment of Eritrea as an independent country. She really knew the fighters on both sides and had some really amazing stories to tell. I mean, when I would come back to Washington, often there’d be Somali or Ethiopian cab drivers, and I’d say, “Oh, do you know my friend Jenni Parmelee?” And they all knew her, right? Because she was [inaudible 00:10:20].

ND: Wow.

MY: They didn’t all love her, but they all respected her.

SS: Yeah, yeah. I had the same experience.

ND: Wow. Well, the fact that they respected her, it showed she was doing her job, so that’s unbelievable. What would you say was your favorite quality about Jenni?

MY: Shelley?

SS: I think the word that Masha used a few minutes ago, empathy. I mean, she had empathy not only for her friends and her family, I mean tremendous caring and empathy, but also for people that she didn’t know at all. She was able to put herself in their circumstances and really feel for entire groups of people. And that is what she brought to her journalism and her life as a whole.

MY: Yeah, no, I would agree with that. She was, as so many of us are, a very complex person. And so, there was that empathetic part of her, which I think really helped her, not only in her personal life, but also in her professional life, because she could really see things from the other point of view. And I think that’s a really good quality to have and important for all of us to get in reporting.

But, I mean, she loved life. She had this sparkle about her, and people were drawn to her. I certainly was. And I feel that as a result of that quality of just being, I don’t know, I’m not very articulate at the moment, loving life and wanting to live it to the fullest and having adventures. The three of us have a shared love and passion for traveling. And so, we’ve all had our travel adventures with Jenni, and she was just a good time, too, in the most positive sense of that word. And I think that really drew people to her.

And the other thing about that is I think the quality of loving life and loving people and wanting to make things better, empathizing with people, she made other people, her friends, I mean me, I’m talking about now better people. She would encourage me to do things. I’m the timid one in our friendship. She would encourage me to be brave and that I could do things. Not only did I love her and love our friendship, but I was the better person for having known her.

ND: Right, right.

SS: Yeah. I’ve got a story from the time that she and I went to Iran together, which was the summer of 1977, about a year and a half or so before the Shah was overthrown. One of our roommates, well, two of our roommates actually freshman year in that quad right across the hallway from Masha, were two Persian women. Mahno Zahedi, the granddaughter of the Shah and the daughter of Ambassador Zahedi, and Sharmine Batmanghelidj. Mossavar-Rahmani is her married name. But Sharmine invited us to visit her in Iran during the summer of 1977. And if Sharmine’s listening, I think I’ve told her this story, I’m not sure, but a friend of their family escorted us down to southern Iran to see Persepolis. And we went one day, and it was incredibly fascinating. But back then there was no bottled water and we couldn’t drink the tap water there. So for Jenni and I, it was really dusty and hot, and we were parched.

And the chaperone was going to return a second day with another family friend who was visiting, and Jenni and I asked if we could stay at the hotel. And he said fine, but we had our plans, of course. And he said, “Now, don’t leave. Do not leave the hotel under any circumstances.” And I’m hoping we didn’t nod our head either way. But within 15-20 minutes, we were out the door exploring the city of Isfahan, and we were dressed in Western clothes, and this was southern Iran. So in retrospect, it was a little naive of us, but it worked out fine.

We met two university students who proceeded to tell us how much they were interested in America, wanted to learn about our culture, practice their English, and then they went on to tell us about everything that was happening politically in the universities in terms of the plans to overthrow the Shah. And that was Jenni and I. And Jenni, I will say, we were both so enthusiastic, actually, about this little sort of adventurous foray, kind of our own detective work. And I guess because Jenni was there and asking lots of questions, we learned a lot about the country supplementing the great tourist sites we were seeing, we kind of learned what was happening with the people. So that’s one of my favorite Jenni travel stories. I know Masha has a good one, too.

ND: Can you share one, Masha?

MY: Well, I’m going to go back to that point that I made before about Jenni’s sort of sense of adventure and sense of wonder. So we were in Zanzibar, and this was before Zanzibar had too many nice places to stay. We were not staying in a very nice place. But one day there was a fisherman who said that, for compensation, he would take us out on his, I’m forgetting the name of the vessel, but it looked kind of like a Hawaiian outrigger. It was pretty small.

And he took us sailing, and it was just very magical and very, I mean, the water, everything was so pure and beautiful, and there was nobody else around anywhere, not even other fishing vessels. And there were porpoises that were leaping in the water that he pointed out to us. And Jenni had this thing for dolphins and porpoises, and she kind of stood up and dove in the water and started swimming towards them. And again, like I told you, I’m sort of this timid one in the friendship, and I was like, “I’m not going to do that.” She was like this receding dot on the horizon.

SS: And it’s such a brave thing to do because, of course, sharks follow dolphins in the water and everybody wants to jump in, but 99.99% of the people don’t. But Jenni got that magical experience, because she took that risk.

MY: It got to the point, it was like 15 minutes or something, I mean, who knows how long it was. It felt like forever. And I’m thinking, “How am I going to explain that she’s dead to her family?” I did nothing. Anyway, eventually I was trying to tell this guy who, we didn’t have a common language, “Let’s keep on going. Let’s go pick her up.” He didn’t really get that. He was just going with the flow. Jenni eventually came back. It was the time of her life. It made her whole vacation. I have a different memory of that moment.

SS: Yeah, so she really lived life to the fullest.

MY: Of course Jenni saw the magic of it.

SS: Yeah, it’s a great metaphor because, I mean, she jumped into life with two feet.

ND: I was going to say she leapt into everything. Yeah. That’s amazing.

MY: Actually, I do have another story from her time in Addis. I was visiting her and we actually had this whole series of adventures, but it was shortly after the war ended. So Eritrea had just been established as a country, and we were there. And then, we actually drove from the capital of Eritrea, Asmara to Addis, which is a long, and at least at that time, very adventurous trip.

And Jenni decided she was going to have a party at her house. She lived on a farmhouse slightly outside of Addis. And so, everything was ready, and the guests were about to arrive. And Jenni had this long, elegant dress on. And so, before the guests arrive, she’s like, “Oh, yeah.” And she goes to a closet, unlocks it, pulls out an AK-47 and brings it out to the guard. So this was a huge memory. Jenni in evening clothes, and I’m still kicking myself that I didn’t take a photo. She comes back and I’m trying to pretend that, “Oh yeah, I do this all the time, too.”

ND: Right. Normal behavior. Yeah.

SS: And we should add that Jenni was a very beautiful woman, too. I mean, that’s part of the picture. I mean, not only inside, but outside, as well.

MY: And very sophisticated. And the dress was beautiful and very formal. And years later, I sort of mentioned it to her. She had no memory of that because her life, on the one hand, was a very social, often expatriate lifestyle, but it was also full of the other side, human misery, the danger and the difficulties of living in a place like Addis. And she navigated that in such a graceful and gracious way. She really did.

ND:So she was married and she had two children. Is there anything you can speak to about her family there?

MY: Shelley.

SS: Yeah. Well, she married an Ethiopian guy, great guy named Tsegaye. She met him in Ethiopia. He, at the time, was owning and running the most successful nightclub in the city. And they fell in love and had two beautiful daughters. One, Sarafina, is now living in Berlin, she’s in her late 20s. And then her daughter, Sophie, is in her early to mid-20s living on the West Coast. And I think they both see their mother as a great role model for them, very inspired by her.

MY: It was such a great family. And Jenni, I mean, she loved the work that she did in journalism, but when she started a family, I think she really made that... and this is such a hard decision for I think all journalists or people in possibly dangerous circumstances, she made the very difficult decision to sort of rejigger her career so that she wouldn’t be going to war zones because she just loved those little girls, and, of course, Tsegaye, to bits, and she wanted to be there for them and for every minute of raising them. So that’s when she got a fellowship and she started the journalism program. And I think Shelley can speak to that and did a number of other things that were kind of journalism adjacent.

ND: Right. She was with the UN with World Food Programme.

MY: Exactly.

SS: Before that, she was with Voice of America-

ND: Voice of America. Right.

SS: ... for while here in D.C. running their Horn of Africa desk.

MY: Yeah, yeah. So she had, well, and still has a wonderful family that is keeping up the legacy.

SS: Yeah. And we just heard a story the other day from this woman who she worked with at VOA, Voice of America, who said, because of Jenni’s compassion for the people of Eritrea, for example, there were some protests outside VOA, specifically against Jenni. And Joan talked about how Jenni just handled all of it with a sense of humor, no fear, just the cost of being a journalist, I guess, and expressing what you felt was the truth.

MY: Yeah. And also, again, she was able to navigate between many different cultures and political views. So she not only did that when she was a practicing journalist herself in Africa, Rome, and in the United States, but when she was heading up the VOA. The Horn of Africa had, I mean, I’ve forgotten now how many countries she was responsible for and how many languages and each language and country has, just like the United States, subplans and subviews and sublanguages, and everything else. I’m using the wrong terms. I hope you’ll forgive me.

And she was able to navigate all of those differences in the most diplomatic way. And they loved her. I was telling Shelley at her funeral, I mean, it was amazing people who had kept up with her for all these years and people who hadn’t seen her in 20 years who were there to pay their respects. And when I mentioned that to our friend Joan, that Shelley just mentioned, Joan said, “Oh yeah, she had a following.”

SS: Yeah, yeah. And for the last, I guess, maybe 18 months of her life, she was in a nursing home because her disease progressed pretty rapidly. And the nurses there told us they had never seen anybody who got so many visitors. I mean, she had visitors every day from all her different jobs and friend groups and family members.

ND: She sounds like an amazing person. Is there anything else that we should cover before we wrap this up?

MY:There are so many things. I did just want to share one thing. I was looking at some of her past writings, and maybe Shelley might want to add something here. So Jenni was a reporter, so often that’s the facts, but she was also an analyst, and she wrote a column in 1996 when she was pregnant with her first daughter, Sarafina, in New York City. So this is the quote, “From deep in my soul had bubbled up a yearning for tolerance and acceptance that seemed ever more precious and rare. After 10 years of expatriate life, five of them in Africa, my homeland looked angry, fearful, and polarized, fertile ground for racism and extremism of all hues, from Farrakhan to Buchanan, right wing militia, to a woman dashing rapper. Fringe thinking seemed to have turned mainstream.” And she wrote that in 1996. And I just think it’s so prescient about where our country has gone and is going.

SS: Yeah. And if I could read one passage-

ND: Please.

SS: ... from two years earlier. She was always concerned that here in the United States, we don’t really think that much about or do that much about all of the tragedies taking place in Africa and other parts of the world, and that really bothered her. And she saw her role as a journalist to try to raise our consciousness of what was happening and what we could do to help.

And there’s a passage from one of her articles in 1994, which I’ll read. “In Somalia, it took tens of thousands of deaths to finally crack open Western consciousness in 1992. It played big on the screens so long as the American and other Western troops were there. Last month, when the last of the U.S. troops left reporters joked that they were writing the obit on the Somalia story. They were right. Contributing to the apparent eagerness to turn away from Rwanda is the fact that this exceedingly bloody conflagration, for most of us, defies comprehension, explanation, and thus, to a large degree, compassion.” So she really thought a lot about those issues and cared deeply about them

MY: Yeah. Of course, in different places around the world.

SS: Right, exactly. At the end of her career, Sudan was a real focus for her, and how much of the world was completely unaware of what was happening there, the civil war there, the suffering.

ND: Yeah. She wanted to shed light on important issues that we’re not so focused on here in the States, and it’s important work. She did important work. Shelley and Masha, I really do appreciate you spending the time to talk about your friend Jenni Parmelee, and thank you so much.

SS: Thank you, Nicholas.

MY: Thank you, Nicholas for continuing the work. Right?

ND: Thank you, thank you.

SS: Thank you.

ND: The PAW Memorials podcast is produced by Nicholas DeVito and Princeton Alumni Weekly. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and SoundCloud. You can read transcripts of every episode at paw.princeton.edu. Music for this podcast is licensed from Universal Production Music.