The legacy lives on: Roger Hall remembered

Brandywine Hundred resident Roger Hall had one simple last request.

“He wanted his epitaph to read: ‘He made us laugh,’” said his wife, Linda. “And he did. He made people laugh. He had a wonderful quick mind and a great sense of humor.”

Roger’s legacy of laughter will live on, she said, though the perennial storyteller died on July 20 of congestive heart failure at age 89.

He will be remembered as a devoted husband, a stirring storyteller, a wry author and a spy with a sense of humor, she said.

Roger was best known for his cult classic spy novel, “You’re Stepping on My Cloak and Dagger,” a comedy of errors which chronicles his misadventures in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the World War II-era predecessor to the CIA.

During his tenure as a war-time spy, Roger taught hundreds of soldiers how to jump out of airplanes and he used humor to help the troops remember his instructions, said Linda, 65.

His jokes might have saved their lives, she said.

Roger was adamant that humor had a place in even the most serious cloak-and-dagger operations, she said, and this came from a man who knew how to kill someone with a folded-up newspaper.

“He always said, ‘OSS does not stand for oh so serious,’” she said.

During their 35-year marriage, Linda said Roger often told funny stories about his time in the OSS, many of which can be found on the pages of his spy novel, like his adventure capturing 10,000 Nazi soldiers in Norway.

But one of Linda’s favorite stories did not make it into Roger’s first book when it was published in 1957 because the publishers considered it too risqué.

The story begins while Roger was training Polish parachutists at a flight school in England. He met a beautiful, blond Polish woman named Olga who worked packing the soldiers’ parachutes.

Wanting to impress Olga, Roger gazed into her beautiful blue eyes and repeated a Polish phrase he heard a British officer yell as the Polish parachutists jumped.

“Then Roger said Olga’s blue eyes turned into two blue bullets,” Linda said. “And she shoved the parachute into his stomach, knocked the wind out of him, and he didn’t know what he had said.”

Later that day, Roger asked the British officer and learned the Polish phrase meant “keep your legs together,” Linda said, laughing as she recounted the story.

Laughter and literature were big parts of Roger’s life, she said, and it is no coincidence that both played a role in how she and Roger met.

Linda first laid eyes on Roger during the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1968.

Roger was already a successful author who had had two books published and Linda was a student attending the conference to have her poetry critiqued.

But their meeting was not love at first sight, Linda said. In fact, it occurred because of her poor eyesight.

She mistook Roger for a professor named Mr. Sloan who had spoken the previous evening and she approached him at breakfast to compliment him on his lecture.

“And then he said, ‘Oh thank you dear, won’t you sit down?” Linda said.

She quickly discovered Roger was not Mr. Sloan and accused him of misleading her, but she could not resist his charms and ate breakfast with him anyway.

That case of mistaken identity began their 40-year relationship.

Roger and Linda were married in 1973 and lived in a tiny apartment in New York City where he worked as a writer, penning articles for magazines and the New York Times and weaving stories about his time in the OSS.

“He was a wonderful story teller, verbally and in a written way,” Linda said. “People enjoyed his company because he could really spin a great yarn and he never told it the same way twice.”

His attitude of marching to his own drummer made their marriage fun, she said, and he never failed to make her laugh.

The couple moved to Greenville in 1986, taking up residence in an old farmhouse, Linda said, then recently relocated to Brandywine Hundred.

Roger spent a lot of time lecturing about his adventures as a spy and felt right at home in front of an audience, she said, but he never stopped writing.

Being married to a writer fed Linda’s own creative side, since Roger would bounce his story ideas off her and ask her opinion of things he had written.

“When he was working on the manuscript for [his novel] ‘19’ he would call me in Philadelphia and read me a whole chapter over the phone,” she said, chuckling. “So I guess I was in a way his muse.”

Their marriage was like a patchwork quilt of emotions stitched together with laughter, but their love for each other continued to grow until the moment of Roger’s death, she said.

After he underwent knee surgery last year, doctors discovered Roger had extensive heart damage and he spent several months in the hospital battling an infection.

Linda brought Roger home, where he held on for five more days. During his final hours, Linda comforted her husband by hearkening back to his days in the OSS.

She said to him, “All you need to do is find your parachute and jump out of the plane. It’s perfectly safe.”

Roger died a short time after that, she said, but in a fitting end to his laughter-filled life, the last sound Roger heard was a close friend laughing at one of his old jokes.