NEW Orleans - Peggy Polk, a globetrotting reporter who was bureau manager of UPI in Rome for 18 years, died Jan. 13 at her New Orleans home.

 

 A native of Towanda, Pa., who grew up in Brooklyn Heights in New York City, she was born Rose LW Polk but was always known as Peggy. She married Scott Sullivan, a former Newsweek correspondent, after she left United Press International.

 

 Ms. Polk reported on politics, religion and the arts for the wire service for 32 years, but she made news before she started reporting the news. While a junior at Radcliffe College, she became the first woman to complete 10 parachute jumps and earn a license from the US Parachute Association, her husband said. She eventually completed 16 jumps.

 

After graduating cum laude from Radcliffe with a degree in English literature, Ms. Polk earned a master's degree at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism.

 

When she joined UPI, Ms. Polk's first assignment was covering New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller before moving on to the wire service's Boston bureau. While there, President Lyndon B. Johnson tried to recruit her for a post in the White House press office, Scott Sullivan said, but she turned him down because she wanted to continue reporting.

 

Ms. Polk worked in UPI's New York City bureau for 10 years before being posted to Madrid, shortly after the death of the Spanish dictator, Generalissimo Francisco Franco. She spent two years there, two years in Rome and two years in Moscow before returning to Rome, where she was UPI's bureau manager for 18 years.

 

While in Rome, Sullivan said, Ms. Polk wrote about terrorism, which swept Italy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and the papacy. She traveled with Popes Paul VI and John Paul II.

 

After leaving UPI in the mid-1990s, Ms. Polk wrote for the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization before joining Religion News Service, for which she wrote from the Vatican until 2005.

 

 In August of that year, she and Sullivan traveled to New Orleans. They were married a year later and settled in the city. She was a member of Trinity Episcopal Church.

 

Survivors include her husband. She was 79.

 

A memorial service was to be held Saturday (Jan. 24) at 1 pm at Trinity Episcopal Church, 1329 Jackson Ave