John Paul one who could joke and shed the regal traditions

VATICAN CITY -- I was on a plane, unshaven, bedraggled, wearing a creased safari jacket still damp from a monsoon in the Seychelles.

So I thought I should apologize to Pope John Paul II before joining him for dinner, duly explaining that these were my "working clothes."

"And these are my working clothes," he responded with a smile, clutching his white robe to make his point.

It was a remarkable moment, a pope joking and about to sit down to dinner with a journalist, whereas his predecessors had been held in such regal awe they were carried around on portable thrones.

From the Oct. 16, 1978, evening the name of Cardinal Karol Wojtyla was announced as the new pope, it was clear this would be a different papacy.

The 50 reporters who traveled with John Paul on his foreign pilgrimages got a close -- and different -- look at the Polish prelate.

We were beside him as he shuffled to the music of African bands in the Congo, as he winced when security guards roughly pushed back adoring faithful on his first trip home to Poland, when he was rushed to his plane after scuffles broke out between students in East Timor and Indonesian security forces.

Until his health began declining, he walked up and down the aisles of the plane answering questions in about a half-dozen languages, prompting bishops I knew to complain we had better access to him.

His last full-fledged airborne news conference in 1998. A year later, flying to India, he came back to greet the press and take one question. He didn't hesitate when asked his opinion of Pope Pius XII at a time when criticism was building over his possible beatification. "He was a great pope," John Paul said.

He was weary after a pilgrimage to New Zealand and Australia in 1986, but he asked a reporter and the Australian ambassador to the Holy See who were aboard the Qantas jetliner to join him.

He wanted to hear how we thought he did.

He seemed a little short with the ambassador, starting with the choice of wine when the envoy suggested a red and John Paul said he preferred a white, which he sipped while picking at his lobster salad.

After that it was downhill for the envoy. When he insisted Australians were more English than American in style, John Paul cut him off and snapped: "American."

It was on one of those trips that I learned just how powerful his private secretary, Archbishop Stanislaw Dziwisz, a fellow Pole, had become. The pope had dodged a question on a new wave of strikes against the communist government in Poland when turbulence cut off the news conference.

Later, Dziwisz called several reporters up to the pope's cabin and, whispering in our ears, suggested we ask the same question again.

Clearly some political calculations had been made in the interval, for this time, John Paul came out with a ringing defense of the right of workers to strike.

Like a politician on the stump, John Paul endured outlandish gifts and gestures -- a Mexican sombrero topping off his white robes, a coral necklace placed around his neck by Yasser Arafat as he sat at the Palestinian leader's headquarters during a 2000 pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

During the Australian visit, he was handed a koala -- one of the memorable photographs recording his 104 foreign trips. If he felt his dignity had been damaged he didn't say, but handed off the animal as quickly as he could.

The pope seemed as shocked as his bodyguards when the president of Yemen visited the Vatican in November, opened up a fancy leather case -- and presented John Paul with a traditional curved sword.