Growing Up With TWR in Tangier

Former Tangier missionary kid Bob Jackson on a visit to TWR’s offices in Cary, North Carolina, on June 27, 2025, with his wife, Ann, and four of their adult children. From left: Ben, Deborah, Elizabeth, Ann, Bob, Esther. [Photo by Alex Lemus] 

Bob Jackson grew up with TWR.

Now 74, Jackson developed a lifelong aversion to shots on his 5th birthday. It was in August 1955, in New York, and the Jackson family were getting the vaccinations required before they could move to Tangier, Morocco. There they would join a mission organization that was in its early days: The Voice of Tangier, the precursor to Trans World Radio. 

Except for a yearlong furlough, Tangier would be Bob Jackson’s home until shortly before he turned 14. He has lived in many places since then, but none quite matched Tangier. 

“That’s where I grew up, and it was a lovely place to grow up,” Jackson said during a recent visit to TWR’s present U.S. offices in Cary, North Carolina. “I could not imagine a better place to grow up than that.”

Jackson’s parents, Ray and Ann, heard the call to serve in the new radio ministry when they were still students at what then was Tennessee Temple University in Chattanooga, Tennessee, he said. They immediately started raising support and became the first American family to join the work in Tangier. When they arrived in September 1955, the couple had four children; two more would be born in Tangier.

Strategic Tangier

TWR’s origin story is well known: how Paul Freed wanted to reach Spain and how he turned to radio, realizing he could directly broadcast from Tangier to Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. The city’s status also gave Christian broadcasters more freedom than they might otherwise have enjoyed, Jackson pointed out. From 1923-56, Tangier was an international city, governed by a coalition of 40 countries. Tangier also had a long relationship with the United States. Its American Legation, now the American Legation Museum, is the only U.S. National Historic Landmark in a foreign country.

Jackson describes Tangier as one of the corners of the world. Pointing to a map, he explained how the city looks across to Europe, back across Africa, over the Mediterranean to the Middle East and Asia and back across the Atlantic to the Americas.

It was truly an international city, he said, with multiple languages and cultures represented. Contemporary accounts say Tangier at the time was cosmopolitan in the best and worst senses.

“It was the Mediterranean haven for money-changers and smugglers, bohemians and titled idlers,” Time magazine wrote in 1959.

Brush with notoriety

The list of characters who may have passed through Tangier included one who would later become notorious. Recently declassified documents related to the investigation into the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy mention the Jacksons, who are referred to as “Trans-World Radio Missionaries.”

After seeing coverage about Lee Harvey Oswald, the Jacksons reported to authorities that Oswald may have spent time in Tangier, and the investigators checked it out. The report mentions Bob’s older sister Shirley, who said she might have seen Oswald at a “beatnik hangout,” in the agents’ words.

After interviewing several other people, the agents didn’t see any reason to follow that angle further.

Colleagues

Ray Jackson worked as a technician at The Voice of Tangier, although that wasn’t his training. “He did everything. I mean anything and everything around the place that needed to be done, he was involved in it,” Bob said.

Looking at a photo displayed in the TWR boardroom of the Tangier staff, Bob Jackson named some of the familiar faces. There were Miguel and Maria Valbuena, who led Spanish-language ministries; and Nick Leonovich, who developed the Russian-language outreach. Nick’s son, Jimmy, was the same age as Bob’s younger brother Lee, and the three of them were buddies, Bob said.

By the time the Jacksons returned from furlough in September 1960, most of the staff already had left, Bob said. By then, Morocco had nationalized the radio stations and Trans World Radio was broadcasting from Monte Carlo. Its Spanish department, led by the Valbuenas, remained in Tangier. 

At one time, probably in the summer of 1962, Ray Jackson and Miguel Valbuena traveled to Spain to connect with listeners, Bob related. Ray and Miguel were worshipping in a small house church on a Sunday when police came and took them away, along with the church’s pastor. They were detained for eight hours before being allowed to go. (Under Generalissimo Francisco Franco, only Catholic worship services were then legal in Spain.)

Vietnam to Africa

The Jacksons left Tangier in 1962, relocating to Newport News, Virginia, with the help of TWR board member R.B. “Jack” Turney. Bob didn’t fare well academically, so his parents sent him to Ben Lippen School, a Christian boarding school that at the time was in Asheville, North Carolina. A year after graduating, Bob joined the Army, eventually serving as a military police dog-handler in Vietnam during the war.

As a civilian, Bob attended Biola University in California, then worked in marketing research and as a media buyer before joining Wycliffe Bible Translators. That was where he met his wife, Ann, who had been a Wycliffe missionary kid. The couple went on to spend 18 years in Burkina Faso, Niger and Cameroon before returning to the States, where Bob found a job in information technology. They have seven grown children (an eighth died at 1 month) and eight, soon to be nine, grandchildren.

For all of his experiences and travels, Tangier in the early days of TWR still holds a special place for Bob.

“It’s my home, in a very real sense,” he said.

Images: (top, banner) Former Tangier missionary kid Bob Jackson on a visit to TWR’s offices in Cary, North Carolina, on June 27, 2025, with his wife, Ann, and four of their adult children. From left: Ben, Deborah, Elizabeth, Ann, Bob, Esther [Photo by Alex Lemus], (middle, right) Ray Jackson (in bow tie) stands at the center in a 1959 photo taken at The Voice of Tangier. He’s flanked by (from left) Betty and Doug Griffin, Lois and Dan Harvey, Nick and Rose Leonovich and Marie and Miguel Valbuena. Ray Jackson was Bob Jackson’s father. [photo courtesy of TWR archives]