Evan Atkinson’s Candid View of Chapala in 1958

Canadian journalist and adventurer Evan Evans-Atkinson (who used the name Evan Atkinson for his early writing) wrote “Candid View of Chapala. An Honest Report on Retiring In Mexico” for the New York-based periodical Travel in 1958.

“Candid View” was one of several articles in the 1950s that publicized Lake Chapala as an option for inexpensive living. Earlier articles included Regina Shekerjian’s “You can Afford a Mexican Summer” (1952) and John Russell Clift’s “Chapala: Mexico’s Shangri-la” (1953).

However, unlike those articles, and two later short books—Thomas McLaughlin’s The Greatest Escape (1983) and R. Emil Neuman’s Paradise found (1986)—“Candid View” presents the arguments both for and against living cheaply in Mexico.

Who was Evan Atkinson?

Adventuring journalist Evan Evans-Atkinson (who used the name Evan Atkinson for his early writing) was born in Saskatchewan, Canada, on 13 December 1924.

His father, Capt. Norman Evans-Atkinson, was a UK-born, Cambridge-educated geologist and prospector who served in the British and Indian armies before arriving in Canada in 1921 for the Cedar Creek gold rush in British Columbia, where he made a living by staking and selling mineral claims, and helped save the first-growth cedars at Cedar Point, near Likely.

After graduating from St. George’s School in Vancouver, Evan, who began building and sailing boats during childhood, attended the University of British Columbia, and served in the Royal Canadian Air Force. He met his first wife, English-born Joan ‘Toni’ Henley, at the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club.

Aside: In 1950, during a solo motorcycle ride across North America, Toni had met Bob Hope. A photograph of Toni, with Bob Hope riding pillion on her bike in 1950, was published in The Harbour City Star in 2003, a few days after Hope’s death at the age of 100.

After Evan and Toni married in 1952 in Portsmouth, UK, they purchased a 27-foot ketch, which they sailed to Paris and lived on while Evan studied at the Sorbonne. Studies over, they spent almost a year exploring the Mediterranean, before selling the boat in Cannes, and returning to England to find a larger vessel to sail back to Canada.

They eventually located a 36-foot yawl, with ample headroom for 6’4″-tall Evan, and left England in the summer of 1954, calling in at Lisbon and the Canary Islands, before sailing west to the Caribbean. They landed at the island of Antigua barely two weeks before Toni gave birth to their first child, Wanda. Baby safely on board, they then meandered around the Caribbean Islands as far south as Barbados, from where Toni and baby returned to Vancouver, while Evan planned to sail the boat home via the Panama Canal. He made it as far as Costa Rica before a mechanical mishap resulted in significant damage to the boat. An American bought the boat, and Evan returned home aboard a banana boat.

According to one newspaper account of their exploits, Evan had “supported himself and the family for several years, during his venturesome voyaging, by selling children’s stories to English magazines,” while Toni had contributed to the family finances by painting and selling watercolors of boats.

Once back in Vancouver, Evan began his career in journalism. He worked for several newspapers, in a variety of positions, over the years, including The Province and The Sun, with several extended travel breaks away from the office.

Evan and Toni Evans-Atkinson, Ajijic (Travel, November 1958)

Soon after the birth of the Evan-Atkinsons’ second child, Bruce, in 1956, the family left for Mexico, where Toni developed her artistic talents, trying her hand at weaving, while Evan wrote. They lived part of the time in a converted school bus, and several months in Chapala, which gave Evan the material for “Candid View of Chapala.”

Candid View of Chapala

Subtitled “An Honest Report on Retiring In Mexico,” “Candid View” does indeed present both sides of the arguments for and against living cheaply in Mexico.

Atkinson states that “the cost of living is fantastically cheap when you know your way around.” However, he cautions, this is only “one side of this low-cost paradise. There is never a word about the real disadvantages of becoming a gringo on a low budget.” The following paragraphs offer stark warnings about noise, health issues, smells and pollution, concluding “On a low budget, there is no escape from the smell, squalor and clamor.”

And while the weather is “wonderful nine months a year . . . the other three can be miserable.”

In 1958, the lake was still recovering from its lowest ever level three years earlier: “The water is clouded with mud and, as its level has dropped ten feet in the last few years, mud flats up to a mile wide ring its shoreline. There are no real beaches and the coagulated slime of weeds and lilies squelch any pleasure from aquatic sports.”

How many foreigners were living at Lake Chapala in 1958?

“Some 500 gringos live in Ajijic and Chapala, and almost every one of them is completely and utterly idle. In spite of a reputation as an artist’s colony, the number of people making even the feeblest attempt at painting or writing is less than two dozen. Eighty per cent of this expatriate population is elderly, retired on pensions and waiting for the inevitable. Most of the remaining twenty per cent live on alimony or some similar disability pension, on their parents or on their wits.”

Some amenities were lacking at Lake Chapala. The nearest supermarket was in Guadalajara. “The mail service, apart from mangling parcels, works well and takes about three days airmail to New York and seven days regular… You can make long distance calls, yet are not pestered by a local telephone system. TV hasn’t found this place yet.”

Despite all the negatives, and the difficulties of establishing close friendships with Mexicans, Atkinson and his family all loved living in Chapala: “We are living in one of the most expensive towns in the area. We have a servant and a five-room house with water, electricity and sewer connections. Our cost of living averages out to $110 dollars a month.”

The article ends with a summary of Mexico’s “regulations for retirement.” At the time (1958), the minimum income required for a foreign retiree was US$320 a month.

Life after Mexico

In 1967, Evan and family left Canada for Polynesia on Pacer, a 41-foot trimaran they had built. They planned to sail around the world, but discovered that their son suffered from chronic sea sickness. They abandoned this dream and returned to Vancouver, where Evan resumed his career as a journalist.

In 1979, Evan Evans-Atkinson left his job at The Sun to work on the Canadian Constitution. He suffered a severe stroke in 1995, and died in Vancouver on 3 January 2011, at the age of 86.

Toni moved to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island in 1979, where she gained prominence as a noted watercolor artist; she died in Nanaimo in 1992.

Evan’s second wife, Mary—a student of fine arts and graduate of Le Cordon Bleu Paris—wrote British Columbia Heritage Cookbook (1984).

Sources

• Evan Atkinson. 1958. “Candid View of Chapala. An Honest Report on Retiring In Mexico.” Travel (New York), Volume 110, No 5 (Nov 1958), pp 19-22.
• The Harbour City Star (Nanaimo): 30 Jul 2003, A3.
• Nanaimo Daily News: 11 Jun 1981.
• The Province (BC, Canada): 2 April 1954; 10 May 1956; 14 Jan 1957; 20 Oct 1967; 21 Dec 1974.
• The Times Colonist: 28 Jul 1967.
• The Vancouver Sun. “Evans-Atkinson, Evan” (obituary). The Vancouver Sun, 15 January 2011.

Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.

Tony Burton

Tony Burton’s books include “Lake Chapala: A Postcard History” (2022), “Foreign Footprints in Ajijic” (2022), “If Walls Could Talk: Chapala’s historic buildings and their former occupants” (2020), (available in translation as “Si Las Paredes Hablaran”), “Mexican Kaleidoscope” (2016), and “Lake Chapala Through the Ages” (2008).

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