School Story:
Of the lanky kid with spiky blond crew cut and the coins jingling in his pocket or zipping around Scudder’s pond reaching for a puck, our yearbook concluded that he would become “either an engineer or a hobo.” About hobo he says, “I failed to make the grade.” But looking back on his professional life he also concludes that he became both, if the number of places he has lived and the number of jobs he has done can qualify as a kind of professional hoboism.
He wandered even in school, one year playing hooky almost a third of the time he estimates. His attitude toward school may have been influenced by something he learned later in life—that he was mildly dyslexic—able to read but “I just couldn’t sit down and write things.” He gives English teacher Bernie Shulman credit for recognizing that what he could not put in writing, he could speak. After an oral presentation Shulman said, “Merkel, I don’t understand why you’re not getting As in this class. Nobody ever said anything like that to me before. Usually people said the opposite, ‘Why can’t you spell cat?’”
If he couldn’t spell, he could shoot. “My big brother Ed gave me a new Red Ryder when I was about ten. I loved that BB gun and had years of fun with it ( most of it safe fun ). The scouts and NRA literature showed me the correct way to handle rifles, and when I started hunting with firearms I had good safe skills. I taught all four of my sons shooting and handling guns. Two are very good small game hunters and one is an awesome marksman. I just got my nine year old grandson a small BB rifle for his birthday. Before he could go out with his dad he had to read and explain all the safety rules and how handle a rifle correctly. I was told today that he passed the test and did very well with his first target practice.”
When he graduated Pete didn’t have the money for college so he tried unsuccessfully to get into the Electricians’ Union but he didn’t have the necessary contacts. He went to work in Jakobson’s Ship Yard repairing and building tugboats. His on-the-job training included machining as well as risky work on high structures, both of which would become surprisingly useful later. By 1961 when other classmates were graduating from college, Pete enrolled in the University of Kansas because it had a good engineering school, and, “I happened to be enamored with these cowboy novels I was reading by Will James.”
He graduated in ’65 with already recruited by the CIA recruited because of his communications skills and knowledge of antenna design, and also because his work experience in machining, driving and running a boat. After intense training in which he was one of the top students in lock picking, the Agency assigned him to Greece. “It turns out I had a knack for breaking and entering.” There he used his skills in electronics and machining building antennas and becoming an operative in the targeting program that helped the US listen in on embassies, ambassadors, and code rooms as he traveled to other countries in Europe and Africa. Most of that work stopped after a few years when his station chief called him in and told him the Soviets had put him on their watch list. “If we don’t keep you in low profile for a while they’ll probably kill you.”
He returned to the States in 1969 still working with the CIA but also wondering how he might bring over a woman he had met in Greece. Her father was on the Agency’s surveillance list. Unfortunately for the father but fortunate for Peter the man died soon of throat cancer and Pete became engaged. He found new work with Hewlett Packard, brought his fiancé home and married her. Work with HP again took him to other countries where he always tried to learn at least the rudiments of the local language and realized that Dorothea Comfort his Sea Cliff Spanish teacher had been right and he had been wrong when he thought learning a foreign language was useless. Pete also found himself in Iran as Khomeini was taking power in 1979 and often flying through Beirut airport during that country’s civil war when mortar shells were flying.
The first of Pete’s four sons was born in 1970. In 1989 when his wife left him and the boys to return to Greece and open a restaurant, Pete had to adjust to being a single parent. “That’s when I retired early.” This was the first of several retirements. After the CIA Pete had returned to Kansas to get his MBA and he now combined his business training with his electronics expertise working in sales and marketing with large and small computer firms. Among the jobs he would pursue, he formed The Merkel Guys, a home improvement company run with three of the boys. He also began working with the Fairfax County, VA police department on surveillance and occasionally participating in search and seizure operations.
After retiring from sales and marketing with Digital Equipment, and then retiring from police work, and also from running a school computer system, Pete says, “I finally succumbed--Hell, I’m not going to retire anymore.” He went into real estate work which he continues to pursue. He invites “anyone interested in good real estate deals in Athens Greece or Washington, DC” to contact him.
from John Storojev
I knew Peter longer than anyone else in school. I knew him from the time I was first plucked down into the good US of A from a childhood in Japan and China. My parents rented rooms at his family’s home in Glen Head. It was my first exposure to America and Pete was a part of it. We eventually moved out to a Levittown-style development in Southridge, which straddled Glen Head and Glen Cove counties. The walls were so thin that you could hear everything in the house and it was very easy to put a body part through the sheetrock walls. Pete was a quiet, reclusive guy. But he transformed himself apparently because when I went to the 25tth Reunion (Yes, I was there!) he was this tall rather gregarious, glad-handing person. I guess he had moved into sales, of some sort, and the shy, quiet guy was no more. I wish him well.
