Life after being a hostage

After her release, she returned to the foreign service with assignments in Austria, Germany and Australia, retiring in 1996 to her home state of Iowa, where she taught at Wartburg. She never returned to Iran, for fear of worrying her family, but has Iranian friends and enjoys Iranian food.

In 1998, she got a second master's degree in religion from the Lutheran Theological Seminary. Recently retired from Wartburg, she jokes that work was interfering with her travel plans. Never married, she has no children, but lives within minutes of her four sisters, who are among her "best friends." She goes to water aerobics three times a week, works out with a "wonderful young trainer" and is dealing with some arthritis in her knees.

Throughout her life, she has learned much about overcoming adversity and jokes that she can deliver an entire speech about the topic. Her system for dealing with any problem, she said, is acknowledging it, accepting it, sorting out the alternatives, and then achieving results. "It's the four A's of senior living, I think," she said.

Today, she plans to attend her first reunion with the other hostages at the Thayer Hotel, on the grounds of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where the hostages were originally reunited with their families. She estimates that about 40 of them are still living.

"I was a political prisoner and a hostage, but there are people who are held hostage in everyday life, and that's so important that people understand that when you lose a job, there's a family crisis, kids don't turn out the way you want, this can turn you into a hostage to that situation," she said. "I didn't deal with it any differently than people deal with the things that they're dealt in everyday life. Mine just happened to be very public."

Kitty Bennett is a news researcher and writer based in St. Petersburg, Fla.