Abducted Newsman Loved Lebanon, His Father Says

The father of kidnaped journalist Charles Glass said Thursday that his son loved Lebanon, perhaps because his mother’s parents were Lebanese.

“Charlie loved the country,” Charles Glass Jr. said in an interview at his Palos Verdes Estates home. “I guess he felt maybe he was part Lebanese.”

Glass, 66, said that his first wife, Joan Sawaya, died in an accident when her son was a teen-ager, and that his son has long been fascinated by the country and its people.

“Before the war started, he used to tell me what a beautiful place it was,” Glass said.

Glass, a Gardena attorney, said he last talked to his son on the telephone about three weeks ago. The younger Glass, who was home in London at the time, told him he planned to return to Lebanon and then meet his wife and five children in Italy in mid-July for a two-week vacation.

Despite the personal danger inherent in covering the Middle East, the elder Glass said he never really discussed it with his son.

“We all knew it was there, but I don’t recall really talking about it,” he said.

“He loved being a reporter, and obviously he went for it,” the elder Glass said when asked about his son’s work, including the exclusive interviews in 1985 with the crew and hijackers of TWA Flight 847 as the plane sat on a Beirut runway.

Glass, who last saw his son in London in December, said his son went to the Middle East shortly after graduating from USC in 1978 with a degree in philosophy. He enrolled in the American University in Beirut to pursue a master’s degree in the same subject, and “just sort of fell into” journalism, he said. The younger Glass initially had planned to study law like his father.

Glass said he is “very optimistic” that his son will be released soon.

“I think Charlie has an edge in that he knows a lot of people over there,” he said. “He knows the language and the customs. And he knows they like him.”