Harriet Sackett Micocci

Harriet Sackett Palmer Micocci, 101, author, and translator in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II, died peacefully at home in Gulfport, Florida on February 12, 2014 from presumed alzheimer's disease. At one time resident in New York City and for a long time in the District of Columbia, she was born January 16, 1913 in Syracuse, NY, the daughter of Rhoda S. and Dr. Joseph C. Palmer. Her first marriage, in 1939 to the Englishman Astley Hawkins, reporter for Reuters, was undone by misunderstanding and heartbreak as the US failed to come to the defense of Great Britain in the first years of World War II, and ended in divorce. There were no children. Her second marriage, in 1948 to Antonio A. Micocci who worked for Voice of America during World War II and the US Information Agency as well as the Cuban refugee program of the US Dept of Health, Education and Welfare, ended with his death in 1966. Mrs. Micocci had three children from that marriage. Hal, as she was known, grew up in Syracuse listening to family stories about her anti-slavery great-grandfather, U.S. Representative William A. Sackett of Saratoga NY, and her great-uncle Col. William A. Sackett who led the 9th New York cavalry regiment at Gettysburg. Imbued with a sense of being part of history, she was deeply influenced also by the intellectual determination of her grandmother Zilla Sackett Stone, who made her sons teach her on weekends everything they were privileged to learn at Hamilton College which she as a woman could not attend. Hal was also shaped by the progressive values of her parents: her mother who attended Smith College class of 1906 and then worked in the Henry Street Settlement House in New York City before her marriage, and her public health doctor father who brought clean water to Syracuse, and instituted a fresh milk program for public school children. Late in life Hal still told the story of her father bringing her, along with a number of poor city children crippled by polio, in a car to see Franklin D. Roosevelt, himself a polio survivor, campaign for governor of New York. Dr. Palmer wanted them to be inspired. Hal graduated from Smith College in 1934, majoring in history. Prevented from studying abroad in Spain by the Spanish Civil War, she went to Italy instead and was proud to later earn her M.A. at Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard University, after studying with the famous Italian anti-Fascist professor Gaetano Salvemini. Hal's facility with language - at one time she coached the students of opera singer Madame Louise Homer in their German pronunciation - led eventually to her work in Washington D.C. During World War II she translated Italian documents at the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, and traveled for the OSS to North Africa and Italy. When the OSS was disbanded in 1945 she was transferred to the U.S. State Department where she worked on the Italian desk until she left to raise her children. To her knowledge she was the first civilian American woman to enter Rome with the Allies during the war, after their march up the Italian peninsula. Later, Hal's work as writer and editor for the U.S. Dept of Labor's Division of Foreign Labor Conditions sent her to Israel and Hong Kong. With her best friend, the late Priscilla Mason, also a longtime D.C. resident, she traveled in retirement to Russia, China, Turkey, and Indonesia among other countries. Hal was a prolific writer of letters, poetry and diaries, and an accomplished completer of NY Times crossword puzzles. She had two books published: Protocol and the Peabodies about balancing work in the State Department with raising chickens on a farm in what was then very rural Virginia; and Captain Orkle's Treasure, a book for young people she was inspired to write after observing her children's fascination with the Narnia books of C.S. Lewis. The original working title, Captain Orkle and the Outward Bounder, paid homage to the magical boat which carried the adventurers, but was vetoed by the publisher. Throughout her life Hal welcomed young people into her home, including the two dozen who stayed with her in Washington for the 1969 March on Washington to stop the Viet Nam war, as well as many friends of her children and children of her friends. After her retirement she lived much of the year on the coast of Maine where she continued to welcome guests. A series of beloved dogs were her constant companions. A great lover of adventure, in her seventies she helped crew a sailboat from Maine to Florida during a particularly stormy Atlantic Ocean passage, and at another time from Maine to St. Barth's. In her eighties she became an even more serious student of the Civil War. Moved particularly by the symbolic action he took at Appomattox to start reconciliation between the North and South, Hal became a docent at the Brunswick, Maine home of the Civil War hero, the Union general, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain. Hal leaves her daughter Rhoda Micocci together with her husband David Jackson, son Tony Micocci together with his wife Martha Savitzky, son Jonathan Micocci together with his wife Christine Crosby, granddaughter Sonja Micocci Hoskins together with her husband Christopher Hoskins and their daughter Juniper Hoskins, granddaughter Maddalena Jackson together with her friend Zachary Mills, and granddaughter Alair Micocci.