It was another time of transition. A one-term president, accepting his electoral defeat, was on his way out.  The president-elect in the then normal course of events became the new president.  Ronald Reagan promised, whether or not he delivered, a sunny morning in America.  Donald Trump, soon to be inaugurated for his second non-consecutive term, has promised retribution. Which makes one almost nostalgic for what happened four-plus decades ago .

Recalling an Historic Moment 

November 4, 1979, like Dec. 7, 1941, was another date which will live in infamy. That was when Iranian students stormed and seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran and took 53 Americans hostage for 444 days.

Jan. 21, 1981, was another date that was all but forgotten until the death of James Earl Carter, our 39^th president, at the age of 100, shortly before this new year 2025. That date, 44 years ago, was when the hostages were at long last released, timed to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan.

It is four decades and a world away from the jubilation that accompanied the release of the hostages, and even longer since their detention began and the nation rallied round them with yellow ribbons and nightly news updates that often only added up their days in captivity.

When the Embassy was occupied and the ordeal began, I was a general assignment reporter at the Washington Post. The newspaper, with its then seemingly cast of thousands, acted quickly to assign a reporter to every hostage. The idea was to contact the family, so that when at last the release was at hand the nation’s capital newspaper of record would be there.

My assigned hostage was Michael Metrinko, a political officer from the small town of Olyphant, six miles north of Scranton in the depressed former coal country of northeastern Pennsylvania. When the release seemed imminent, as 1980 drew to a close with hapless lame duck Jimmy Carter unable to seal the deal, I was one of the few if not the only Post reporter to have kept up with his hostage family. So my editor David Maraniss dispatched me to Michael’s hometown.

I had had a phone conversation or two with the family – Harry Metrinko owned a bar and he and his wife lived above it – so I was cautiously hopeful as I drove my 1972 red-and-white Celica, purchased used with 74,000 miles and the only sort of sports car I’ve ever owned, northward.

I went first to the family home. When I arrived, I found that a reporter from The Philadelphia Inquirer, Don Kimelman, had preceded me.  Don had done much more advance reporting with the Metrinkos in the agonizing days and months before, and they had seemed to adopt him almost as a surrogate son in Michael’s enforced absence.  I was chopped liver.

How, then, could I report this story from inside the closely knit family circle?

Sometimes, in the news business, when you can’t go directly to the primary source, you find other routes to penetrate the inner circle, and that’s what I did to get the inside track to the Metrinkos. A Welcome Home Michael Metrinko Committtee was hastily formed. Its chairman was a congenial Irishman named Bill McAndrew, whose day job was running a federally-subsidized housing rehabilitation program for those in need, of which there were many in this depressed region physically scarred by hills of coal ash and remnants of the once flourishing mines.

Naturally, I befriended him, and he was a willing accomplice. But the timeline was murky. It would be a slog to the finish line. The release we all thought was imminent was not. As the Iranians toyed with Carter in the final days of his administration, the drama dragged on for weeks, thus requiring me to charge the Post for fresh socks and underwear I needed. The weather was chilly, mostly in the 30s, with clouds and occasional flurries. Not too bad.

Scranton’s “biggest celebration” or not?

It was to be Scranton’s biggest celebration, except perhaps for the end of World War Two, since my great-uncle Charles Previn, as musical director of Universal Studios, brought his ingénue starlet Gloria Jean Schoonover back to her hometown for the world premiere of her debut film “The Under-Pup,” on Aug. 24, 1939. Then, The Scranton Tribune reported, thousands greeted “the new film star” in the parade from the train station to the theater.   She was all of eleven on what the newspaper called “one of the most exciting days in Scranton’s history.”

Reported The New York Times. “A staff of skilled propagandists was dispatched in advance to engineer the connivance of the city fathers, take to ecstasy the slumbering Chamber of Commerce and lash the local peons to a frenzy of adulation.” As the people of Lackawanna County prepared for Michael Metrinko’s arrival, the excitement was no less intense, and the preparations were no less elaborate. Michael would be coming home, The Tribune reported, to “one of the greatest celebrations in Scranton, Olyphant and Lackawanna County history.” There would be school bands, veterans groups, Boys and Girls scouts, and two buses for the media.

Michael Metrinko, 34, had phoned his father from Wiesbaden, Germany, to wish him a happy 70^th birthday. But the flight to the States and then to the Scranton-Wilkes Barre Airport, seven miles from Scranton, would come later, on Jan. 28. On that cold winter day, the former hostage descended from the six-passenger twin-engine plane. There he was greeted by a host of dignitaries and after a brief ceremony stepped onto a 150-foot red carpet that led directly to a Rolls Royce. Inside it, seated in back for the parade that was about to snake through Scranton and on to Olyphant, were Harry and Alice Metrinko, Michael, and me.

As the Rolls Royce began to drive off, I was on the inside and Don Kimelman was on the outside. All he could do was wave.  As I recall, I waved back.  It was truly one of the great moments in newspaper history, for me at least. The story I wrote later that day that appeared on page six in the next day’s Washington Post (no online edition!) did not reveal my scoop, which I am reporting here for the first time, 44 years later. Who said old news is no news?

But it was indeed, as I wrote, “a tumultuous and joyful outpouring of patriotism and thanks that he seemed to have trouble comprehending.”  He’d be held in solitary confinement for nine months, but inside the car heading towards Olyphant, he found the reception baffling.  “I don’t understand, because we aren’t heroes,” he said. “We were just doing our jobs.”

With Jimmy Carter’s demise, some of the former hostages have stepped forward to thank him for his efforts, which did not include bombing Iran, as many had urged, and thereby, they believe, saving their lives, and perhaps costing him his re-election.  Michael Metrinko, in a New York Times story by my former Washington Post colleague and longtime friend Peter Baker, said, “He did his best. He was dealing with a time of insanity — complete insanity, political insanity — on the part of the Iranians, on the part of a lot of Americans.”

I had also heard from Michael the day before. He was reacting to the blog I’d posted on the occasion of Jimmy Carter’s death.  At 78 and long retired from the Foreign Service, he was now an independent internal affairs consultant in Carlisle, Pa.  I was actually reposting what I’d written for Carter’s 100^th birthday back in October, with an R.I.P. tacked on at the end.  Michael had seen it and written email to me on Dec. 30. “A very nice piece to read on this cold December day, Gene,” it began.  “Who back then – You, Jimmy Carter or me – could have thought we would all make it this far into December of 2024?” Who, indeed. But here we were, minus Jimmy.

I looked up Michael’s LinkedIn profile, which he closes with this:

As Alfred Lord Tennyson said: “I am a part of all that I have met. Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’ gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades for ever and for ever when I move.”  To which Michael added: “My journey continues to that untraveled world.”

So do we all.

In other news

I’m happy to report that I have signed on for another year – my 16^th – as the editor of B’nai B’rith Magazine. It’s an eclectic publication and the public face of the country’s oldest Jewish service organization, founded in 1843. We’ve won many awards, including the best Jewish magazine published di 2023.  Over the years, our cover stories have been about Jews in the Civil Rights Struggle, Iran in Latin America, Israeli films, Jews of Color, Interfaith Marriage, Gays & Judaism, Jews and Muslims in America, Jewish Arabs, Stolen Silver: Nazi plunder and the unfinished quest for restitution, Rising Antisemitism: How Hate Hurts Kids, Brighton Beach—then and now (our most recent), Jewish Orphanages, Music of the Holocaust, Anti-Social Media, and much more. To view past issues, click here. For the most recent issue, click here.