5.3.2:The Mexican Field School

 

THE MEXICAN FIELD SCHOOL

The Murrays talked us into participating in Sam Houston's "Mexican Field School" at the University of Puebla in the summer of 1950. Jesse Burleson, Head of the Foreign Languages Department [Spanish and French], had spent many years in Mexico and was head of the field school. If you were "selected" for the faculty, you attempted to hustle enough students to pay your salary with their fees. I convinced enough of my students [Jim Dan Hill, Harvey Sabara, Thurman Patterson, Jack Smart and several others] to sign up and, more importantly, put up the cash. The Korean War had just broken out so, as a brand new Second Lieutenant, I had to obtain permission from Fourth Army Headquarters to leave the country.

The day we were to leave, I went to the college-owned home of the President, Dr. Harmon Lowman, to pick up the state car I was to drive to Puebla. He was a florid, fat little man with a mane of beautiful white hair whom Tom said had not been able to tie his own shoes for years. He was a nice man who looked and acted like the president of a state teachers college ought to look and act.

We left, in caravan like settlers going west in covered wagons, with Jesse Burleson, the trail boss, leading the way. We were at the rear of the convoy, with two female students in the back seat, a position I regretted when the motor began complaining before we got to Houston. Somewhere in the pack were the Murrays in another state car, Harvey Sabara in his new green ford with a truck air horn mounted on the side, the Kuhls in an old second hand Cadillac, and several other student-owned cars. Students who drove their own cars and transported other students got some reimbursement in addition to having the freedom that personal transportation provided for fun in Mexico.

We made it, as intended, to Brownsville, Texas the first day. The next morning we cleared customs in Matamoros and drove to Valles. That evening the sixty or so of us sat at tables in the zocallo [town square] smiling back at the friendly locals and smelling the tropical flowers. We drifted off to sleep while listening to the tree frogs outside in the fragrant gardens.

The third day we arrived in Mexico City in mid-afternoon and, for the first time, experienced Mexico City traffic. No one but Jesse knew the way through the city, so we tried to stay in convoy. "Fat Chance". It seemed that every macho Mexican in Mexico City who owned a car was determined to isolate every car with a Texas license plate. Somehow, we all made it through Mexico City and, in various states of hysteria, reassembled on the highway to Puebla. We reached Puebla around dark and checked into the Hotel Colonial, across the street from the University of Puebla, completely exhausted.

The next morning Mr. Sparrow, an administrator and our contact at the University, took Pat and me to a private home to look at a place to rent. I had learned French in New Caledonia
by living in French homes where no one spoke English, so I thought that would be a good way to learn Spanish while we were in Puebla. All the students and other faculty stayed in the Hotel Colonial.

When we entered the house, Mr. Sparrow introduced us to Senorita Fontange, a maiden lady in her sixties. Without thinking, I said "Je ponce ca sais un nome Francais, pas Espanol,
n'est pas". That was the end of the Spanish lessons. Mme. Fontange had not spoken French after her father had died many years before. We rented the room [actually several rooms with a
private bath]. We also received our meals as part of the arrangement. We had a private dining room overlooking an enclosed patio. Although we ate alone, Mme Fontange would almost always join us as we were finishing our meal for some after dinner conversation. We didn't learn any Spanish but I had a great review of my French. Pat, who had taken a year of French in college, was too shy to enter into the conversations but understood everything I said well enough to correct all my exaggerations.

The food was excellent; we were the only ones on the trip who never got sick. Mme Fontange somehow learned of my birthday and baked me a cake. For many years we received a Christmas card and a birthday card on my birthday from Mme. Fontange.

Puebla was our first taste of luxury. We lived about six blocks from the University of Puebla and the Hotel Colonial, where I taught my biology class. I walked to class each morning,
stopping at a barbershop for a shave, hair trim, and a shoe shine. The cost of the whole thing, including tip, was two pesos, which at 8 pesos to the dollar came to almost twenty five
cents. At Mme. Fontange's place we not only had all meals prepared and served, there were no dishes to wash, no beds to make, no bathrooms to clean, and even our dirty laundry
disappeared to reappear cleaned and ironed, including underwear.

Teaching the class was fun for me as well as the students. I did not have any formal lesson plan or textbook. I just talked about whatever biological subject came to my mind as I walked to work. We held the class in one of the hotel lobbies, all sitting in comfortable chairs and talking biology. In retrospect it was probably one of the best seminars I ever participated in.

After class I would walk home, have lunch followed by a siesta, then back to the Hotel Colonial either for a field trip, mostly collecting lizards, or playing poker in the penthouse of the hotel. Pat was justifiably annoyed with me for the poker; she and the Murrays spent most of the afternoons visiting museums, art galleries, historical sites and other cultural activities. Harvey Sabara skipped the poker sessions to take the women anywhere they wanted to go; he was particularly valued because he spoke Spanish fairly well.

Our social life was with the Murrays or the students, mostly at the Hotel Colonial or nearby bars and restaurants. Early on some of the students discovered a resort on the edge of town called Agua Azul. There was a nice bar and swimming pool and it became our daytime party place. The owner, Senior Baratega, liked all of us, but he was infatuated with Lane Murray.

With Lane as bait, we and the Murrays were entertained royally, both at Agua Azul and his hacienda, by Senor Baratega. On one memorable occasion, we all sat in the huge living room while servants brought his favorite horses in for us to see [the floors were stone]. Lane went along with the deal so long as we never let Baratega get her alone. He told us he had previously been married to a blonde Norte Americana, so I guess he had developed a taste for Anglo women. Poor man, he must have been terribly frustrated. He spent much of the summer contriving situations for his planned seduction, but one of the three co- conspirators always spoiled his plans; we worked in relays to thwart him.

Weekends were mostly for trips. We spent several weekends in Mexico City, usually at the Hotel Reforma. Our entertainment was varied but always culturally uplifting. We spent hours in the Palace of Fine Arts, where all the contemporary as well past Mexican painters were well represented: Orizaba, Tamayo, Rivera, et cetera (we even watched Diego Rivera painting on one of his famous murals). Other cultural events included our first filet mignon at the Cadillac Bar--that eventually cost a lot more money than the price of that dinner, and live nightclub acts at places like the Uno, Dos, Tres [1,2,3] Club and the Catacombs. The latter was a spooky place, pitch dark except for a single candle at each occupied table. It had to have been the inspiration for the song "Hernando's Hideaway" in the Broadway musical comedy "Pajama Game". Robert Mitchum purportedly went there to smoke marijuana [if you had said "pot" back then people would have thought he was smoking in the toilet]. We didn't wonder why Robert Mitchell didn't stay in the safety and comfort of his hotel room or even back in Los Angeles rather than risk arrest [which rumor had it occurred to him in the Catacombs] as a "Dope Fiend".

One Friday morning we all left by car for a field trip to El Cordoba. We, along with two or three others, rode with Harvey Sabara. The route took us south on the 5,000-foot high Mexican Plateau, an arid plain mostly devoid of both plant life, except for an occasional cactus, and evidence of human habitation. There were, however, cones of numerous extinct volcanoes rising from the plain to break the monotony of the bleak moonlike landscape. About 10:00 AM we arrived at the edge of the plateau and could see the Central Valley of Mexico far below. We dropped, via a succession of terrifying switchbacks, almost a mile straight down to the valley floor, with both the vegetation and the temperature changing from high desert to tropical as we
descended.

We stopped for "coffee", mostly beer or cocktails after the terror of the descent, at a hotel in El Fortin des Flores. We sat at tables beside a swimming pool covered with gardenias. The odor of the flowers, floating on the surface of the water, was almost overwhelming, but no one complained. Jesse, after several attempts, finally got us out of the bar and back on the road to El Cordoba. We arrived there in time for lunch as guests of the local Rotary Club, probably the major, if not the sole, reason that Jesse, a Rotarion, had arranged the field trip. After lunch, we toured a local cigar factory, for which EI Cordoba was famous. I was into cigars then in the forlorn hope they would help me cut down on cigarettes. (They didn't, I had to have a cigarette as soon as I finished a cigar.) I bought several boxes, especially some huge ones, thick and about eight inches long, that Winston Churchill made famous by frequently being photographed with one of them clamped in his English Bulldog-like jaws. He ordered them in bulk from Cordoba and apparently never ran out even during the problems with the German U-Boats during World War II. "First things first", you might say. Those cigars were amazingly mild and because they took so long to smoke, probably did cut down on my cigarette consumption.

When we got into the car for the return to Puebla, someone, probably Harvey, said "lets go to Vera Cruz for the weekend; it's only a couple of hundred miles". As we approached Vera Cruz in the late afternoon, we passed a large complex of buildings on the beach with a large sign saying "Hotel Mocambo". We stopped, asked at the desk if they had vacancies, and registered when the answer was affirmative. After washing up, we regrouped in the bar. Not only did they have vacancies, we were the only patrons in the bar. After a delicious dinner, again the only guests in the restaurant, we sat out on the balcony, drinking Daiquiris and watching the moon come up over the Gulf of Mexico. Through the palm trees we could see the surf breaking gently on the deserted white beach. We felt RICH.

Not having expected to be away overnight, let alone for the weekend, no one had pajamas, clean underwear, a change of clothes or toilet articles, even a toothbrush. We showered a lot, slept nude (at least Pat and I did--didn't enquire into the others' room arrangements or sleeping attire). We went into Vera Cruz the next morning and toured the city; we found everyone friendly to the crazy Gringos.

We spent most of the weekend chasing Iguanas for our lizard collection. The Iguanas were huge, three or four feet long including tail. They were everywhere: in trees, on the ground or on mounds near their burrows. We soon learned why they were so numerous; they could run like deer, climb like monkeys, dig like badgers and fight like tigers. Also, when apparently trapped, they would lash out with their tails like alligators. Equipped as they were with scales and a dorsal crest of spines, the tails were formidable weapons. Although we had our hands on several, I don't think we captured even one the entire weekend.

We sweated profusely in the midsummer tropical sun and, with no change of clothing, no deodorants, and a three day growth of beard on all the men, we were a motley and pungent crew when we arrived in Puebla on Sunday night. We all agreed, though, that it had been one of the greatest weekends any of us had ever had.

Another group had decided to go from Cordoba to a newly opened Resort in the small town of Acapulco on the Pacific Coast. The Vera Cruz veterans were fired up to go to Acapulco the next weekend, but the group that had gone there discouraged us. The roads were terrible, mostly unpaved and lots of mountain driving, there weren't many people and the ones they saw all looked like banditos, and there was only one hotel and nothing to do in Acapulco. Instead, we, accompanied by the Acapulco survivors and others who had heard our stories, returned to Vera Cruz the next weekend.

Several car loads of us checked into the Hotel Mocambo on Friday night, probably making it their biggest weekend of the summer. This time we were not the only guests; there were two or three friendly Mexican families who along with the hotel staff treated us like old friends. This time we had clothes, bathing suits, toilet articles and all the other accouterments for staying in a luxury hotel. The service was again superb, the food and drinks outstanding, and the moon appeared on schedule over the Gulf of Mexico.

During the week between trips to Vera Cruz, a friend from Baytown, Texas joined us for her vacation. Goldie Faye Harper was from northwestern Louisiana and she and Pat were sharing an apartment in Baytown when I returned from World War II. Goldie was a beautiful girl; she had a thick mane of the most beautiful dark red hair I have ever seen, alabaster skin and a gorgeous figure, despite the fact she could put away more food than any field hand I ever knew. Goldie Faye was a lot of fun, but I doubt she would have been a serious candidate for Phi Beta Kappa if Northwestern Louisiana College had had a chapter.

Goldie accompanied us to Vera Cruz and loved it. After dinner on Saturday night, we were in our accustomed place on the balcony overlooking the Gulf, drinking in both the ambience and the booze, when Goldie suddenly announced "I think I'll go brush my teeth". Pat got up and said "I'll go with you". Pat returned from the restroom a few minutes later and, in an incredulous voice said, "She actually is brushing her teeth". Everyone thought Goldie had something else in mind, but Goldie Faye didn't deal in euphemisms.

Most times an attempt to repeat a pleasurable event results in, at best, disappointment or, at worst, disaster, but the second trip to Vera Cruz was better than the first. We were, because of careful planning and advanced technology (shovels and a .22 rifle and shot shells) even successful in collecting some iguanas. And Goldie brushed her teeth after every meal and
sometimes in between.

We took Goldie to Mexico City for our last weekend before returning to the prosaic life of an assistant professor at a small East Texas teacher's college. Actually, we were on our
way back to Huntsville; the back seat was vacant because the two girls in the back on the way down who didn't say anything had either learned how to say yes or couldn't say no and had
established lasting relationships with two of the male students. (the relationships lasted through the summer and the trip back--I don't know if they led to more permanent arrangements).

We checked into the Hotel Reforma, either in a two room suite or adjoining rooms, left our bags, and went out to show Goldie the sights of Mexico City. After tiring of yet another
visit to the Palace of Fine Arts, the Plaza de la Reforma, and the leather and other tourist shops, Pat and I went back to the hotel for fun and games followed by a siesta.

When we awakened we were surprised that Goldie was not in her room. We checked several times, then, really worried, checked with the front desk. Goldie was a guest of the hotel; on returning to the hotel she had asked for her key, the right room number but the wrong floor. When she entered the room her luggage had "disappeared" we were not in the room next door and Goldie was abandoned in Mexico City. She apparently panicked and when she contacted the front desk in a state of hysteria, they sent the Hotel Physician to her room. He assuaged her fears (we never asked for details, but it at least included dinner) and would not accept our contention that we had not changed floors and taken Goldie's luggage with us. Dr. Alvarez gave his medical opinion with emphasis "Miss Harper has had a traumatic experience and should remain in the hotel, under my care, for several days".

The next morning we had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop, where Goldie, despite professing to be "sick as a dog", was able to put away a full order of Huevos Rancheros and the Crepes Suzettes that were called Pancakes and Strawberries on the menu. I loved them, even though they were sickeningly sweet-strawberry jam inside rolled up small pancakes. During breakfast, I decided Goldie was well enough to travel and got her, along with Pat, into the car and on the road to Texas before Dr. Alvarez found us.

The return trip was uneventful. We spent one night in Ciudad Victoria, a dirty little town populated mostly by scowling Pancho Villas. I never let Goldie out of my sight except for bedtime and discouraged all would-be Latin Lovers who approached us at meals and rest stops.