Obituary of Charles Peter Gall

Gall, Charles Peter C. Peter Gall, 82, of Minneapolis, Minnesota, passed away March 9, 2019, in Edina, Minnesota, after a 14-year battle with Parkinson's disease. Peter's many interests, his dedication to lifelong learning and his deep commitment to social justice were reflected in his eclectic and extraordinary career.

Charles Peter Gall was born on April 22, 1936, in Detroit, Michigan, to Mary Elizabeth (Wagner) Gall and William Norman Gall. He grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and graduated from Grosse Pointe High in 1954, where he lettered in football, swimming and track. Peter attended Princeton University, graduating magna cum laude with a B.A. in the Special Program in European Civilization in 1958. After working briefly as a reporter for the Pasadena Independent and Star-News, Peter enlisted in the United States Army and attended the Army Language School in Monterey, California, where he became fluent in Russian. While attending the language school, he met Palmira (Pali) Dellamano, a University of California-Los Angeles graduate from Brookline, Massachusetts, and impressed her enough with his quick wit and questionable magic tricks for them to start dating. Peter was stationed in West Germany for two years as an intelligence officer listening in on Russian transmissions from East Germany, including one transmission he flagged for his superiors that included talk of construction battalions and massive amounts of concertina wire. When Pali came to visit him in Germany, he proposed. They married on the army base in Baumholder, Germany, on August 12, 1961, one day before the Berlin Wall was erected.

After the Army, Peter and Pali returned to California, and later Washington, DC, where they began to raise their family. He worked for several years as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, before becoming a press secretary for two U.S. senators and then the Public Affairs Director for the U.S. Office for Civil Rights (OCR). After quitting his job at OCR in 1970 on principle, Peter co-wrote, along with former OCR Director Leon Panetta, Bring Us Together: The Nixon Team and the Civil Rights Retreat.