“She said, ‘Julie I don’t know if this was you or not. I was just watching this old Saturday Night Live Weekend Update segment with Norm Macdonald, and he talked about this Julie Waszczak going on a trip to Paris from Enon, Ohio. Was that you?’
“So, I had to explain the whole thing to her.
“After I got the call, I dug out the scrapbook my mom and I put together after everything was said and done 30 years ago. I went through it with the kids (Charlotte and her twin brother, Zachary) and I shared it with their teachers, too.
“It was all so long ago, but it’s so very fresh too because it’s been rediscovered.
“And now there’s even more of a connection with the NATO gathering going on in Dayton and the way the city is back on the world stage like it was with (our trip.)”
In November of 1995, Dayton played host to the warring Balkan factions and by the time all the parties left the negotiations at Wright Patterson Air Force Base, a peace proposal – brokered by Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. assistant secretary of state – had been worked out.
The next month in Paris, U.S. President Bill Clinton, along with Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, Croatian president Franjo Tudjman and Bosnia-Herzegovina president Alija Izetbegovic, had agreed to sign the deal that would end Europe’s deadliest confrontation in 50 years.
The Dayton Daily News found a unique way to bring the historic moment home to its readers. The newspaper sponsored an essay contest titled “Is the Pen Mightier than the Sword?” for area high school seniors.
The winners, along with a chaperone – Oakwood High French teacher Maija Racevskis, who had been a war refugee herself as a child – would be sent on an expenses-paid trip to France to meet the international leaders, witness the signing, and represent the Miami Valley.
From the 176 contest entries, a panel of five esteemed judges chose the 18-year-old Waszczak from Greenon High and 17-year-old John Kim from Centerville High.
Waszczak tied her essay to Anne Frank, while Kim tapped into thoughts by President Franklin Roosevelt.
In an editorial, the Daily News commended the pair’s penned efforts:
“The essays that won the two young people their trip to the historic ratification of the Dayton Accord demonstrated a combination of unsurprising youthful optimism and surprising mature realism.”
I went along with the three to chronicle their adventures and I can say now, in more than 50 years as a journalist, it remains one of my all-time favorite assignments.
The paper could not have picked a better trio than Waszczak, Kim and Racevskis to carry the Dayton banner.
As that post-trip editorial concluded:
“We have followed the experiences of our representatives in Paris and we have, as a community, developed more interest in the future of Eastern Europe than we ever developed through the years of bloodshed, or even through the weeks of negotiations in our midst.
“Our young Daytonians gave us a human connection.”
That was not an exaggeration.
The day the accord was signed, here’s how my account began after our trio had arrived at the U.S, ambassador’s residence where Clinton was having a last-minute confab with the principles:
PARIS - He had just come from a mince-no-words, here’s-what-we-expect-from-you private talk with Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, who a day earlier was said to be dragging his feet on recognizing the borders and legitimacy of other Balkan nations.
Now, he was headed to the Elysee Palace to sign his name to the peace agreement which – though a high-risk political gamble for him – could end a Bosnian war that’s been Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II.
But first, President Clinton needed to read some fine print. He pulled his glasses from a jacket pocket, shook them open and began to survey the list:
Sonic Youth
Kicking Giant
Assponies
Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments
The Dance Hall Crashers
“This looks like a good tape,’’ Clinton said to John Kim, the Centerville High senior who had just given the president a homemade cassette of independent bands he taped as a present for Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea, 15.
On a day when the president was giving generously – 20,000 U.S. troops and eventually $718 million in aid – to help ensure Bosnian peace, he ended up getting a little something in return.
Once again, Dayton was a surprise provider.
Thursday in Paris, besides the prospect of peace, Clinton got the tape, a Snoopy Christmas card complete with the Kim family newsletter and a special DAYTON pin and address book from Greenon High senior Julie Waszczak.
From Oakwood High French teacher Maija Racevskis, the president got some personal insight that he didn’t just take to heart, but right along into the French presidential palace, where he used it as the theme for his stirring peace process speech.
On the day when the Dayton Accord was being bannered worldwide, our city wasn’t simply represented in name, it came to Paris with a face, a voice and a personality.
‘Do not let your children down’
That day as Waszczak waited for Clinton and the other leaders to finish their last-minute meeting, I remember she ended up standing next to Holbrooke and U.S. Secretary of State Warren Christopher with whom she shared some heartfelt thoughts about Dayton.
As I wrote, that day:
As she finished the conversation, up walked Clinton. She dug frantically in her purse – “I’ve got a pin here for you . . . if I just find it,’’ – before pulling out the tiny memento she had gotten from City Hall.
Clinton grinned. “Do you know I collect pins? I’ve got one of the biggest collections around.”
“So now you’ve got one from Dayton to add to it,” Waszczak said.
“The president nodded, “This is a good one.”
Finally, Clinton greeted Racevskis with, “It’s a good day.”
She nodded: “Yes, it is . . . especially for the refugees of this war. For them, it’s a great day. Having been a refugee, I know that now they will have hope for the future.’’
I watched Clinton lean in and ask about her experience. She told him the first five years of her life, she lived in a World War II displaced persons camp.
She didn’t go into detail about how she and her mother had fled Riga, Latvia, on their own – hiding in fields and trenches as Nazi soldiers passed by – until they finally ended up in a refugee camp.
Her father, separated from the family at the onset, spent a year tracking them down.
“You are giving hope to little children, kids like I once was,’’ Racevskis told the visibly-moved Clinton.
Later, as the trio watched the signing on television with state department and presidential staff at the ambassador’s residence – before joining the champagne toasts – they heard Clinton underscore the message of his speech with Racevskis-like words, “do not let your children down.”
Racevskis was especially moved that day:
“I felt like I was part of a historical moment today. I was able to articulate feelings to the president and, in so doing, I felt linked to the moment. It did feel surreal and magical. How much more exciting can it get than that?’’
A bold move by Kim especially linked him to the moment.
As the unsmiling Milosevic left his meeting with Clinton and headed toward his waiting security men for the ride to the peace signing, he suddenly found himself face to face with the Centerville teen, who thrust out a hand.
“He looked at me like `Should I know you? . . . Well, you must be somebody because you’re here,’ ‘’ Kim said with a laugh after the handshake.
“I just did it ‘cause I could. That was pretty cool.”
Before Clinton left, he gave Kim a presidential pin and Waszczyak a crystal box bearing the presidential seal. When he got to the door, Clinton turned around and bid them goodbye.
“I thought he’d be more fake – like, ‘Oh yeah, I said I’d talk to you, so let’s get this over with,’” Kim said. “But he was genuine.”
Hours later, when we finally left all the proceedings, Racevskis said she believed the day would not be forgotten by the teen-agers:
“I was so proud of our kids. They rose to the occasion and did a fine job representing Dayton to the world. They had a presence of mind here today. They showed poise, maturity, respect, an openness, a sense of humor.
“This was a lifetime kind of experience for both these kids. This will somehow fall into the big jigsaw puzzle of their lives.
“I’m absolutely positive it will have an effect on them – whether it’s a scholarship opportunity, a career move someday, or a mindset.”
NATO assembly bringing back memories
When the group returned to Dayton International Airport, they were met by a small crowd and the Greenon High marching band.
While the 77-year-old Racevskis passed away in 2020, her Paris prophecy remains very much alive today.
Many of the traits Waszczak and Kim showed 30 years ago continue to be a connective piece in that jigsaw puzzle of their lives.
After graduating from Westminster College in Pennsylvania, Waszczak lived in Streetsboro, the Atlanta area and Beaver, Pennsylvania, before returning to Enon about 10 years ago. She’s married to retired USAF Major Richard Perron and works for a Minneapolis-based marketing consulting firm.
The twins graduated Friday night in a ceremony held at Wittenberg University and while Charlotte now plans to study music education and minor in history at Westminster College, Zachary is headed to Ohio University to study finance and business analytics.
John Kim and his wife Sarah have twins as well. Levi and Jonah are nine.
The family lives in suburban Washington, D.C. and Kim teaches writing at the University of Maryland.
He graduated from Columbia University and then got his law degree at University of California Berkley. He practiced corporate law for six years in Los Angeles, but his longtime passion to write remained strong and finally, in another bold move, he decided to fully embrace it.
He had begun writing zines in high school and had continued in college and some of his work was published.
He got a masters of fine arts for fiction writing at UC Irvine in California and since then has written literary fiction, short stories and essays.
His work can be found on his website: johnjaewonkim.com
His zine – Stubs: 2001-2010 – is a memoir of his life told through the ticket stubs he collected from the concerts he attended over that decade.
This past week – with the excitement in Dayton over the NATO gathering – he was reminded again of the trip he, Julie and Maija Racevskis took 30 years ago:
“It meant so much to the city.”
Then, like now, he said the people of Dayton are proud to have Wright Patterson Air Force Base and that “status and scope” it has, not just in the U.S. Armed Forces, but globally:
“It made us proud to be included in that and to be able to represent everyone back home.”
Waszczak agreed and said she was intrigued by what was happening here again.
“This has brought back a lot of memories,” she said.
She had her scrapbook out again the other day as we spoke and soon was running through some of the ephemera she had displayed there.
“I literally kept such random stuff from that trip,” she laughed.
“I’ve got a postcard and a book of matches and next to them I wrote ‘stuff from the very expensive restaurant we ate at.’
“I’ve got the signature of the White House liaison who helped us and napkins with the Presidential seal.
“Here’s a gum wrapper and next to it I wrote: ‘The wrapper for the piece of gum I was chewing when I met President Clinton.’
“There’s a map of Paris. The boarding pass for my flight (from Chicago to Paris.) And in here somewhere is that little snippet from USA Today that told about John and me going to Paris.
Macdonald had used that snippet as a prop.
“I mean over the years it’s been a good party trick,” Waszczak said.
“I’ve been able to say, ‘Yeah, Norm Macdonald talked about me once on ‘Saturday Night Live!’”
“The joke was kind of crappy but I think the recognition was still pretty cool.”
So do a lot of other folks.
That’s why she got that call one night not so long ago.
About the Author