THETFORD — From time to time, Upper Valley friends of Chris Wren would receive an email or call from the retired foreign correspondent for The New York Times, inviting them to meet him for lunch.
“Johnny Cash is buying,” Wren would tell them.
Wren, who died Feb. 15, a week shy of his 90th birthday, at his home in Thetford following a brief illness, was best known for his overseas reporting that often put him in harm’s way. In a journalism career spanning five decades, Wren covered six wars on the ground, starting with Vietnam.
While Wren made a name for himself with his reporting and writing on international events along with authoring more than a half dozen critically acclaimed books, he also possessed a talent for songwriting.
The subject came up while Wren was interviewing Cash at the country singer’s home for a 1971 biography (“Winners Got Scars Too”). As Wren later told it, Cash announced he was taking a break from their interview for a nap. In the meantime, if Wren put together samples of his songwriting, Cash said he’d be happy to take look when he returned from his afternoon slumber.
Cash ended up performing two of Wren’s songs — “Jesus Was a Carpenter” and “Gospel Road” — in the 1973 film “The Gospel Road.”
Years later, when Wren walked out to his mailbox, he’d occasionally find small royalty checks for his songs, or as he put it, lunch money.
Wren was born in Hollywood, Calif. Both of his parents were actors, which led them to bounce between the West and East coasts for roles.
“Sometimes, we had money. Sometimes, we didn’t,” Wren said in a 2018 Valley News interview when he was teaching in Dartmouth’s Master of Arts in Liberal Students program, better known as MALS.
As a high school senior, Wren had been accepted at Dartmouth and Princeton, so how did he decide where to spend the next four years?
While Princeton offered a half scholarship, Dartmouth promised a full ride. During his four years in Hanover, Wren developed an interest in the Upper Valley’s outdoor offerings, such as hiking and camping, that stayed with him.
Her father “wasn’t into the fraternity scene,” said his daughter, Celia Wren, a freelance arts journalist in Washington, D.C. He much preferred to spend time rock climbing with friends, she said.
After graduating from Dartmouth in 1957, he joined the Army, training as paratrooper with the Green Berets before serving in post-war South Korea. These pre-journalism experiences helped prepare him for working in hostile environments.
Wren met his best friend — and regular lunch companion — Jack Shepherd, a journalist turned environmental studies professor at Dartmouth, at Columbia School of Journalism, where they both earned master’s degrees.
After graduating, they worked together at the news magazine Look until it folded in 1971. At Look, Wren covered the Civil Rights Movement in the South and the war in Vietnam.
Throughout his journalism career, Wren was “going into war zones and asking questions of people who were either facing trouble or causing trouble,” Shepherd, who died in 2022 at age 85, told the Valley News in a 2018 interview. “At some risk to himself, he went into these places to show not only readers, but himself that what he was writing about was real. He wasn’t satisfied to write from the lobby of his hotel.”
In a Feb. 20 obituary, The Times wrote about Wren tracking down Muslim guerrillas in a remote region of the Philippines in 1986. Wren had been warned by local police that his “life was at risk,” if he didn’t leave.
“He waited until the noon call to prayers, when the guerrillas were distracted, and then hid in the back seat of a taxi as he was whisked out of town,” The Times wrote.
Starting in 1973 in Moscow, where he moved with his wife, Jaqueline, and their two children, Celia and Christopher, Wren spent much of his 28 years with the newspaper as a bureau chief in such hot spots as China, Egypt and South Africa. He covered the 1979 U.S. hostage crisis in Iran and Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in South Africa in 1990.
“Chris was a remarkable adventurer,” said Jack Shepherd’s widow, Kathleen, of Norwich. “We were always in awe of his bravery.”
One of Wren’s biggest news scoops came while covering a 1974 mountaineering expedition in the Soviet Pamirs. Wren was climbing with a group of American mountaineers when they discovered the bodies of seven Soviet climbers, all women, who had died in a sudden blizzard not far from the summit of Lenin Peak, one of the tallest mountains in Central Asia at 23,400 feet.
Soviet authorities had successfully blocked the story of the missing climbers from getting out to the world until Wren’s exclusive appeared on the front page of The Times.
Jed Williamson, of Hanover, was among the American climbers who made the discovery. Williamson had met Wren years earlier in Alaska when both were in the Army. “He wasn’t a super technical climber, but he had a love and passion for the mountains,” Williamson said.
They met again in China years later. Williamson was part of a mountaineering team preparing a climb in the Communist country before running into trouble getting final approval for the expedition. Fluent in Chinese, Wren navigated the red tape with Chinese authorities. “His help was invaluable,” Williamson said.
Chris and Jaqueline, who were married in 1964, began bringing their children to the Upper Valley for family vacations. The couple eventually purchased a second home in Fairlee.
Wren spent part of his Times’ career as an editor in New York. After he finished work on Friday nights, the family made the five-hour drive to Fairlee. “My dad loved getting out of New York on the weekends,” said Celia Wren. “He wanted to be in the outdoors.”
After retiring from The Times in 2001, Wren spent the next five weeks of the summer making the nearly 400-mile trek from the paper’s newsroom in Times Square to Fairlee on foot. He turned the adventure into a book — “Walking to Vermont” (Simon & Schuster, 2004) — that took him through five states and lengthy sections of the Appalachian Trail and Long Trail.
Upon reaching Fairlee on the last leg of his journey, Wren wrote, he “climbed a steep trail up Bragg Hill, to the stone walls of a peaceful cemetery whose weathered gravestones recalled hardscrabble Yankee families named Webster, Carpenter, and Morrison… They seemed good neighbors to join someday. But not yet.”
In 2004, Wren learned his dream home — a 1700s cape — on a Thetford hilltop above Lake Fairlee — that he had been riding his mountain bike past for years was for sale.
Clark Graff, an architect, and his wife, Jill, were the Wrens’ new neighbors in the Five Corners part of Thetford. “Chris brought a lot to our neighborhood,” Clark Graff said.
An avid cross-country skier, Wren had a network of trails built on the 60-acre property.
“Some of the things that he and Jaqueline did for their neighbors was to give us all free access to the ski trails that worked their way through their woods and fields,” Graff said. “They fed us all spaghetti suppers in their house to watch the election results of presidential elections. They let neighbors stable and graze their work horses in their barn and field.”
When the Wrens heard the Graffs’ daughter, Caroline, was getting married at home, they offered up their next-door field for the wedding tent and parking.
Clark Graff, who recently moved to Hawaii with his wife, said in an email, “Over the course of the many walks and talks that we took and had around Five Corners, I was let in on some wonderful stories from his days as a journalist, but in the end, I think I enjoyed his friendship more.”
With Jaqueline experiencing health issues in recent years, Wren didn’t leave Five Corners as often for restaurant lunch outings with friends. Instead, they came to him for gourmet sandwiches from a local bakery and lemonade.
But one thing didn’t change. Johnny Cash would still be picking up the tab.
A Celebration of the Life of Christopher S. Wren will be held Friday, April 17, at St. Martin’s Church, 5327 Lake Morey Road East, in Fairlee, starting at 4 p.m.
