6/17/1930 – 6/20/2024

She arrived in Japan rumpled and exhausted, barely 22, with a six-month-old on her hip. She introduced the baby to his father, David, and David introduced her to her new alias: Mrs Sally Moore. Welcome to the life of an early 1950s CIA wife. 

Americans weren’t supposed to fraternize with Japanese in those early post-war years but that didn’t stop Sally McGrath, who made lifelong friends everywhere she lived: Tokyo, Okinawa, Virginia, Hong Kong, São Paulo, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Maryland, Bucharest, and New Mexico. The alias proved tricky though. Sally loved to tell the story of two new Japanese friends getting together to invite to tea two young American couples each had met—only to discover that the Moores and the McGraths were one and the same.

She moved every two or three years, as CIA wives did, packing up the household – she eventually had six children, much to her surprise – and living by the advice she gave the younger foreign service wives she mentored: “Live everywhere as if you were going to live there for the rest of your life.” Sally made life fun. Cooped up by a Hong Kong monsoon, Sally cut down the dining room curtains and made buckskins for the neighborhood kids. She piled her children into David’s small boat and sailed down the Brazilian coast. She took them by bus to Uruguay. And, always, there were horses. Glossy horses stabled at the posh German-Brazilian riding club in São Paulo. Bony horses tethered in a sandlot in Recife – when they weren’t being galloped gloriously down the beach.

It wasn’t all a lark. David arrived home in Tokyo one afternoon, told her to pack a suitcase and the baby, and an hour later they were on a military flight to Okinawa, where they stayed for a year. She never did find out why. On the cocktail circuit in Rio, she cultivated the sinister chief of Brazil’s secret police. “You’ll thank me when you lot get busted for smoking pot on the beach,” she told her teenagers dryly. Right she was.

She learned Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin, and Portuguese, but food was the language Sally loved best. She made the Chinese hot pot called huo guo. Paella. Feijoada. Moqueca. Homemade bread. Unfazed by unexpected dinner guests, she’d peruse the fridge and announce in ringing tones, “It’s going to be the loaves and the fishes tonight, I’m afraid!” 

Between stretches abroad, the family lived in a decrepit, historic mill house in Northern Virginia that demanded endless labor they could ill afford. Soon the cream of the CIA, the State Department, and various foreign embassies were motoring out for sweaty work weekends, rewarding themselves at day’s end with one of Sally’s famous dinners.

Her marriage to David dissolved after 35 years. Though never fully reconciled to the divorce, Sally mustered her courage and moved on. At 60, she decamped to New Mexico, where three of her children lived. 

In Corrales, upstream from Albuquerque on the Rio Grande, Sally bought a decaying adobe with a barn, a paddock, and a malodorous green lagoon that had once been a swimming pool. She wore denim and turquoise; joined the mounted search-and-rescue team; rode with a pink-clad synchronized-riding troop called the Hot Flash Riders; and, in lieu of ambassadors, set her grandchildren to mucking out the stalls. Sally worked on the Bosque Commission, a citizen group charged with stewardship of the Rio Grande’s riparian forest. She rallied for equestrian-friendly village planning. Hosted lively political parties, helped elect the mayor, paraded on the 4th of July with her donkey Emma covered in pro-Dem placards. She became, once again, a center of gravity for those around her.

And she had a gratifying series of boyfriends. “I like having had many lovers in my life because I got to be a different person with each one,” she confided to a granddaughter. Her last partner was a pioneering New Mexico heart surgeon, John Wilson, known as Bud. He got Sally back into her hiking boots at age 88 and introduced her to northern New Mexico and his own vast and varied circle. Bud died in Sally’s bedroom in 2023. Sally retrenched. At 93 she mucked her last stall and rehomed her horses. Some felt a pang on her behalf, but Sally wasn’t one to look back. 

In late spring Sally had emergency surgery. Recovery was awful. No coffee ice cream, no dogs, no babies allowed in the hospital. “You’re doing so well, Miss Sally!” said her favorite nurse.  “Liar!” retorted Mom. She decided to go home to hospice. She would meet her new great-granddaughter, Isabel, snuggle her terrier, Archie, eat coffee ice cream, and move on. “I’d like that undertaker we got for Bud,” she said. On the summer solstice, three days after her 94th birthday, with 15 descendants and Archie at her bedside, Sally exercised her right to death with dignity – a badass to the end.

Sally is survived by her 6 children, 14 grandchildren, 2 and a half great-grandchildren, and, all over the world, many, many dear friends.