The very famous American author James Michener (1907-1997) wrote more than forty books, of varying quality, in his lengthy writing career, including Mexico, a sweeping historical novel published in 1992. He began writing Mexico in 1961, but then abandoned the idea (or the manuscript was lost, depending on who’s telling the story) for about thirty years, before deciding to complete it. Shortly after its publication, Michener also released My Lost Mexico, giving his version of why and how he wrote the book’s first draft, why he’d abandoned it, and why and how it was eventually resurrected and completed.
According to American historian John Mason Hart, in his epic tome of 600+ pages Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War, Michener visited Chapala in the 1930s:
“In the 1930s James Michener resided at Lake Chapala, where he became fast friends with D. H. Lawrence and a small group of largely American writers then living by the lake. Lawrence was working on his famous novel The Plumed Serpent. The fledgling Michener attempted his own essay at the time, which he called “Mexico,” but deemed it his worst writing effort and shelved it. Fifty years later, I argued with him that the artist should not be the critic and that he should publish it for posterity. Unfortunately, his negative view of the manuscript proved correct.” (The endnote attached to this text is “Hart interview with James Michener, July 1985, Austin, Texas.”)
I have no idea what Michener actually told Hart during the interview, but clearly the first sentence is wildly inaccurate. Lawrence only visited Lake Chapala in 1923, when Michener would have been only 16 years old. Lawrence’s first visit to Chapala lasted about ten weeks from May to July 1923, and he returned to Chapala for a single day on 21 October that year. And, given that Lawrence died in Europe in 1930, the idea that Michener met Lawrence anywhere, let alone Chapala, in the 1930s is entirely fanciful!
Elsewhere, Michener himself has written that he spent three summers in Mexico in the 1930s, from 1936 to 1938 inclusive, while teaching in Colorado. In those years, he met Mexican bullfighters, ‘traveled the bullfight circuit’ and ‘traveled widely throughout Mexico.’ He even submitted a ‘compact novel on bullfighting’ to The MacMillan Publishing Company in 1937, but they weren’t interested. When Michener and his wife returned to Mexico in late 1959, it was to spend time in Mexico City and Guanajuato to research his next major book, but shelved the project in 1961 because of doubts about its structure, and some stinging initial criticism from Bennett Cerf, the then president of Random House. The draft lay unloved in a box until reemerging thirty years later.
It is possible that Michener visited Chapala, but IF he did, his visit was only very brief and has left no known footprint. There is no mention of Chapala in My Lost Mexico, and no indication whatsoever that the lakeside area would ever have appealed to Michener as possible background, inspiration or setting for a novel.
[Sadly, equally suspect, as I’ve written elsewhere is Hart’s account of the chronology and family of the New Orleans poet Mary Ashley Townsend, who had a genuinely close connection to Chapala in the second half of the 1890s, and was one of the first Americans to ever own a house there.]
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In the mid-1890s, New Orleans poet Mary Ashley Townsend, born in 1832, and her husband, Gideon, became, almost certainly, the first American couple to own property in the town of Chapala—and they didn’t even have to pay for it, because it was a gift from their eldest daughter, Cora.
Mary Ashley and Gideon lived in New Orleans, where she had established a reputation as a novelist and poet. She published under several pen names, including Xariffa (or Zariffa) for her serious poetry, and two “humorously masculine names”—Crab Crossbones and Michael O’Quillo—for satirical pieces. As “Poet Laureate of New Orleans,” she was commissioned to compose and recite a special poem for the opening of the New Orleans exposition in 1884.
Mary Ashley Townsend (American Women, 1897)
Mary Ashley was widely traveled and first visited Mexico in 1875. During her extended visits in various parts of Mexico, Mary Ashley published regular columns in papers such as the New Orleans Picayune with astute and informative observations of natural history, architecture, people at work and play, fashion, society, food, etc. She was working on a book based on these columns at the time of her death. The book was only rediscovered and published many decades later, as Here and There in Mexico: The Travel Writings of Mary Ashley Townsend.
Mary Ashley’s daughter Cora Alice Townsend de Rascón (born in 1855) was the widow of wealthy hacienda owner and diplomat José Martín Rascón, the first Mexican minister to Japan, and a confidante of President Díaz. Rascón died unexpectedly in 1893 in San Francisco on his way home to Mexico. After his death, Cora inherited and administered his substantial estate, including several haciendas in San Luis Potosí.
In 1895, Cora bought the Villa Montecarlo from English eccentric Septimus Crowe and gave it to her parents as a Christmas present. A few weeks previously, Cora and her mother had both attended the 11th Congreso Internacional de Americanistas in Mexico City, as had British consul Lionel Carden, who had already started building Villa Tlalocan, his own well-appointed home in Chapala, designed by English architect George Edward King.
Cora’s parents loved Chapala and spent several months each winter there. Gideon Townsend, a financier, liked it for the sake of his health and planted dozens of coffee trees. The Townsend house—at that time the “furthest west of all the cottages”— was a prominent local landmark. According to The Mexican Herald in 1897, “On the highest peak one sees a bright red and white house with a tower which looks as if it came from the old baronial castles of the middle ages.”
Mary Ashley Townsend wrote several poems in Chapala, at least two of which are about the lake. The first, titled “On Lake Chapala” is typical of her lyrical style and offers a halcyon view of her winter home.
“On Lake Chapala”
Oh Nature! soother of the heart that bleeds
Thou, with the boundless beauty of thy skies.
And mountain shapes which improbably rise,
Dost preach thine own among a thousand creeds.
Amid conflicting ways, of words and deeds,
Bewildered man his tangled pathway plies
To clutch at truth where truth his grasp denies,
While thou, the unfailing trinity his soul unheeds!
‘Tis writ oh, Nature! on the veiled winds,
On voiceless planets that our planet nears,
In limpid brooks, in the unfathomed sea—
Writ on the pebble that the lone shore finds,
Writ on the foreheads of the flying years,
Thine was, thine is, thine man shall ever be.
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The second poem, titled simply “Lake Chapala,” is, in my opinion, far more interesting.
“Lake Chapala”
A sunken city in thy depths tis said,
Fair Lake Chapala, lieth hidden deep,
And water weeds across its casements creep,
Or bar the doors on its unburied dead.
Upon its domes and towers are never shed
The sun’s bright beams, its ancient gateways keep
Grim wardens sleeping an eternal sleep
While through its streets the marching ages tread.
But, in the night time when the moon is low,
The murmuring waves which touch thy tropic shore
The songs of Aztec maidens with them bring
And stronger voices of warriors in their woe
And lovers’ tender accents come once more
Up from the sunken city wandering.
+ + +
This poem relates directly to an idea then circling in the U.S. that an early town or city at Lake Chapala had been submerged and now lay under water. Distinguished American anthropologist Frederick Starr (1858-1933) spent the winter of 1895-1896 at Lake Chapala investigating the rumors of this submerged city, rumors based mainly on the large number of pottery fragments recovered from the lake bed whenever the water level fell. After collecting and studying 261 individual specimens of pottery, Starr concluded that they were likely to be “offerings made to the lake itself or some spirit resident there-in,” and not utilitarian household items. Starr also recognized that changes in lake level might explain why the pieces were now found at some distance from the current shoreline.
In “Lake Chapala,” Mary Ashley Townsend, looking across the waters of the lake from her stately residence, Villa Montecarlo, indulged her imagination and poetic talents.
Unfortunately, tragedy would soon befall her family. Her eldest daughter, Cora, married Bannister Smith Monro, a New Yorker living in Europe, in 1896, and moved to Paris. The Monros’ daughter (Cora Monro) was born the following year, and their son a year later. Tragically, on 28 March 1898, Cora died within days of giving birth to their son, who died only a few weeks later. As if this wasn’t enough ill-luck, Bannister died on 15 August 1899. Young Cora Monro, orphaned before she was three years old, inherited the massive land holdings in Mexico, and was taken in by her maternal aunt, Mrs George Lee, in Galveston, Texas. Mary Ashley’s husband, Gideon, also died in 1899, meaning that Mary Ashley had lost her eldest child, as well as a grandson, a son-in-law and her own husband within two years. The run of bad luck did not end there. Mary Ashley was severely injured in a train crash in Texas, and suffered months of ill health prior to her own death on 7 June 1901.
The Montecarlo property was eventually acquired—the conflicting versions of how this occurred are impossible to reconcile and leave several unanswered questions—by Aurelio González Hermosillo (1862–1927), a wealthy lawyer and financier who owned the Hacienda Santa Cruz del Valle near Guadalajara.
Note that American historian John Mason Hart’s account of Cora’s life in Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War, is error-strewn. His claim, for example, that Rascón died in 1896 and that Cora Townsend then continued to run the hacienda, very successfully, for another decade, until her own death in 1906, is clearly wrong since Rascón died in 1893 and Cora in 1898.
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My sincere thanks to Michael Olivas for investigating the Stanton-Townsend Papers in the Special Collections Division of the Howard-Tilton Library at Tulane University, New Orleans.
Sources
James Mason Hart. 2002. Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico Since the Civil War. University of California Press, page 398.
Mary Ashley Townsend. 2001. Here and There in Mexico: The Travel Writings of Mary Ashley Townsend. (edited by Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.) University of Alabama Press.
The Salt Lake Herald: 16 November 1895.
Starr, Frederick. 1897. “The Little Pottery Objects of Lake Chapala, Mexico.” Department of Anthropology Bulletin II. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Comments, corrections and additional material are welcome, whether via comments or email.
A lakefront home in Ajijic was the setting in 1949 for the marriage of a Canadian author and an English nurse. The story of how they met and fell in love is one of the most endearing tales to emerge from my research into the authors and artists associated with Lake Chapala.
The venue for the wedding was Quinta Johnson, the home built by Herbert and Georgette Johnson, a British couple who had left France just as the second world war broke out and who first arrived in Mexico in 1939. The magnificent garden they created separating their residence from the lake was sufficiently famous that it featured, years later, in Elizabeth Schuler’s Gardens of the World (1962).
The groom at the ceremony in Ajijic was Harold Walter Masson, who was born in St. Raphael’s in South Glengarry County, Ontario, Canada, on 29 June 1915 and died in Hawaii at age 95 on 26 March 2011.
Prior to joining the Royal Canadian Air Force in October 1939 at the outbreak of the second world war, Masson had lived in Toronto and worked for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. In 1945, at the end of the war, “Hal” Masson, as he was known, joined the staff of Maclean’s magazine as the magazine’s assignments editor, with special responsibility for short fiction.
Over the next eighteen months the magazine published several of his short stories, starting with “These thy gifts” in November 1945 which has the memorable opening, “Black Joe and Little Joe sat at the worn kitchen table, elbows resting on the scrubbed pine boards, their faces shining in the uncertain light of the flickering kerosene lamp.”
By 1947, tired of the extreme winters in Ontario, Masson decided to emigrate to sunnier climes in the US. He crossed the border at Niagara Falls in June 1947 and, after a brief stay in California in September that year, continued driving south in pursuit of a warm winter.
Masson eventually landed in Ajijic where, in 1949, he rented the guest bungalow at Quinta Johnson and continued to write. A short story entitled “He knew what was wrong with her, and how to cure it” appeared in Collier’s Weekly in 1948, and another story—”The Worm’s Eye View”—was published in Argosy.
+ + +
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Herbert Johnson’s 29-year-old niece was making plans to visit her uncle in Ajijic. Helen Eunice Riggall (pronounced “Regal”), born in Langton, Spilsby, Lincolnshire, on 24 April 1919, was the daughter of Herbert’s younger sister. During the war, Helen studied for three years at St. Thomas’s Hospital in London, where she passed her exams to become a registered nurse in 1942. By the time the war ended, like many of her contemporaries, she longed to forget the worst of her war-time nursing experiences and begin a new chapter in her life in new surroundings.
She left Southampton for New York on 20 January 1949 aboard the SS America of the United States Lines. According to her US immigration form, Helen was unaccompanied and named the US as her country of “intended future permanent residence,” indicating that she had little or no intention of returning to the UK. However, before settling in the US, she wanted to visit her uncle and his wife in Ajijic.
While some details remain unclear, it appears most likely that from New York she traveled first by train across to California and then took a steamer south, to disembark in Mexico at either Manzanillo or (less likely) Mazatlán.
At this point, it is best if Helen’s daughter takes up her mother’s story:
Her uncle and his chiropractic friend met her… and planned to drive her to Lake Chapala. Unfortunately, the sun was setting and uncle Herbert was not able to see the road well and ended up driving over a cliff. My mother’s back was broken to the point the doctors fused it. Poor thing, she spoke no Spanish [and] was in a Mexican hospital [presumably in Guadalajara] sharing a room with a woman bullfighter! It was there that my father met her and began spending time with her while she recovered. As he had been there awhile he had picked up some Spanish, while she had none. The day she was released from the hospital, he proposed.”
Ann Medalie. c. 1945. Ajijic Landscape (oil). The Quinta Johnson garden.
Harold Walter Masson and Helen Eunice Riggall were married in the Quinta Johnson garden on 31 August 1949. Guests at their wedding included the Langley, Riggall, Masson, Butterlin, Johnson, Bauer and Stephens families, as well as Mrs Grace Wilcox, Miss Neill James and Miss Madeline Miedema. The witnesses to their union were Herbert B. Johnson and Guillermo González Hermosillo (owner of the Villa Montecarlo in Chapala) for the bride and, for the groom, German businessman Kurt Weinmann and Peter Lilley, the English writer behind the “Dane Chandos” books.
Interestingly, the formal registration of the wedding states that Hal was in Mexico as a tourist (normally valid for no longer than six months) while Helen was in possession of a “tarjeta especial para turistas forma 5B.” Never having heard of this category previously, I assume that her regular tourist card had expired while she was in hospital and that this was an “exceptional case” extension for a period of time—perhaps three months—which would have been about to expire by the time the newlyweds left Mexico for California in November.
When the couple crossed the border at Laredo, Helen stated her intention to become a permanent resident. Her entry paper lists a large scar on her left palm as a distinguishing feature.
The Massons revisited Mexico briefly in 1951.
While residing in Laguna Beach, Masson joined the staff of the Indian Valley Record in Greenville. When he contributed “The Sea Raiders” to that paper in 1951, it reported proudly that their new contributor had “recently crashed the American “big time” with a story in the Saturday Evening Post.” That story was entitled “Trouble Below the Border.”
Masson published several more short stories over the next few years, including “Fat Man’s Doom” in Cavalier (June 1953), “Señor, It Is a Pump”, in Bluebook Magazine (November 1953), which appeared alongside stories by John D. MacDonald, Leslie Charteris, Philip Ketchum and similarly famous writers; “The Last Quarrel” in Cosmopolitan, and “The Love Trap” in Canadian magazine Liberty.
Harold became a naturalized US citizen in April 1953; a few years later, Helen also took US citizenship. In 1958, they visited relatives in the UK to show off their young daughter. The family subsequently settled in Hawaii, where Helen died in May 1986 and Hal in 2011.
The Masson-Riggall wedding was not the first marriage between two foreign tourists in Ajijic, and certainly not the last. That between David Holbrook Kennedy and Sarah Shearer—who had married in Ajijic in 1941—sadly ended in tragedy within months.
The stars were better aligned for the union of Hal and Helen, who shared their lives and their happiness for more than 36 years. The romance of Lake Chapala and “The Love Trap” of Ajijic had struck again.
Acknowledgments
My sincere thanks to Colette Hirata for helping me piece together this profile of her parents, and to Katie Goodridge Ingram for an email sharing her memories of Hal and Helen, and of the Johnsons.
Sources
El Informador, 9 September 1949.
The Glengarry News. 1939. “Other Enlistments”, The Glengarry News, 6 October 1939, 1.
The Glengarry News. 1945. “On Editorial Staff of Maclean’s”, reprinted in The Glengarry News, 23 November 1955, 1.
Indian Valley Record (Greenville, California), 30 August 1951, 10.
Hal Masson, 1951. “For Sale Cheap – One Snow Shovel” Oakdale Leader (Oakdale, California), 27 September 1951, 21.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcome. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
However, there is at least one vicarious Ernest Hemingway connection to Lake Chapala via Mary Duff Stirling (Lady Twysden) who lived in Chapala with her husband, the American artist Clinton King (1901-1979), for about three years in the early 1930s.
The British-born Twysden had first met King, her third (and final) husband, in Paris in 1927, where their mutual friends included Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Pablo Picasso. King was nine years her junior. Born in Texas, he was heir to his family’s candy company fortune. Shortly after they first met, Twysden moved in to live with King at his studio.
Before meeting King, Twysden had had a troubled time as regards relationships. Born Dorothy Smurthwaite in Yorkshire on 22 May 1892, she had changed her name to Mary Duff after her parents divorced, using her mother’s maiden name (Stirling) as her surname. Her first, brief, marriage, to Edward Luttrell Grimston Byrom, ended acrimoniously when she was unfaithful. A couple of years later she became Lady Twysden when she married Sir Roger Thomas Twysden, a naval officer and Baronet. When this marriage also ran into trouble, she moved to Paris with a cousin to live the high life, surrounded by the literary and artistic creme de la creme.
Twysden “embraced the new liberated woman role of the 1920s and pictures show a tall, thin boyish woman with hair cropped close to her skull, wearing rakishly tilted hats.” (Parker) She was the archetypal Paris flapper according to contemporary press reports and Hemingway was very much part of her social circle. It was a circle that drank hard and partied hard. Twysden liked men, especially if they paid her bar tab.
Hemingway lusted after Twysden but, since she was friends with his wife (Hadley), she refused to reciprocate his feelings. She did have a fling with writer Harold Loeb and they accompanied Hemingway, his wife and a group of friends to Pamplona in 1925 to see the Running of the Bulls. The characters and experiences on this trip became the subject matter of Hemingway’s first major novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926), in which Twysden was immortalized as the character Lady Brett Ashley.
Twysden divorced Sir Roger in 1926 and married King, in secret, in London in August 1928. King’s family disapproved and King lost both his allowance and his inheritance.
The couple lived briefly in New Mexico before opting to move to Mexico in about 1930. They lived in Mexico for the next three years, mainly at Lake Chapala but also, briefly, in Pátzcuaro.
Bernice Kert quotes King as describing their time in Chapala as more purposeful than their life in Paris: “We lived a different life from the rather senseless Montparnasse days. I worked all day at painting while Duff drew her amusing sketches in watercolor, or posed for me, or read a great deal.” They became good friends with economist-author Stuart Chase and his wife who visited Lake Chapala for a vacation.
The great American poet Witter Bynner, a long time resident of Chapala, knew the Kings well and his double sonnet about them, entitled “Expatriates”, was published in Guest Book (1935), his collection of masterful sonnets about his friends and acquaintances.
In summer 1933, the Kings left Mexico for New York, and then settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where Twysden died of tuberculosis on 27 June 1938, barely 46 years of age. Despite Hemingway’s claims that her casket had been carried by all her former lovers, there was no funeral; Twysden’s body was cremated and the ashes given to her loyal and devoted husband, Clinton King.
Twysden was portrayed by Ava Gardner in the 1956 film version of The Sun Also Rises and by Fiona Fullerton in the 1988 miniseries, Hemingway.
Sources
Lesley M.M. Blume. 2016. Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises. Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Witter Bynner. 1935. Guest Book. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
Comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios are welcomed. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Everyone knows that Lake Chapala has attracted hosts of famous writers over the years – after all, without them, this blog would have been a bit pointless! However, as I suggested in “Did Somerset Maugham ever visit Lake Chapala?“, some famous writers have been associated with the lake despite never visiting it. Is this also the case for the Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway? Did he ever actually visit or work at Lake Chapala?
Señor Google turns up several articles and websites claiming Hemingway-Lake Chapala links. One in particular, entitled “Neill James—Ajijic’s Woman of the Century!” and first published in the 19 February 2012 edition of the USA Today’s weekend feature, La Voz de Mexico, makes some strong claims about Ajijic and Hemingway.
Ernest Hemingway and his trusty Underwood typewriter [See Sources for image credit]
The article’s subject, author Neill James, first settled in Ajijic in the mid-1940s. James, the “Petticoat Vagabond”, had written several books prior to visiting Mexico and completed her final book – Dust on My Heart, which includes several chapters related to Ajijic – during her recuperation in the village following two dreadful accidents.
To quote the article:
“Her publisher was Scribner’s, who at the time was also publishing Thomas Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway—three of the most legendary writers of the 20th century.
Neill’s five books introduced and drew flocks of writers to Lakeside to share in her wealth of information. As the desire to travel began to subside and she settled in Ajijic, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, plus the editor of Life Magazine, came to visit her.”
The first sentence is fine: Neill James was indeed published by Scribner’s as were the other authors named, and it is perfectly conceivable (though by no means proven) that she met one or more of the other authors when visiting Maxwell Perkins at his offices in New York. It is even possible, as Laura Bateman wrote in Ajijic: 500 Years of Adventures, that, “Once, while waiting in Perkins’ outer office, Neill witnessed the notorious fist fight between Ernest Hemingway and Max Eastman.” That event occurred in August 1937.
The second sentence has some elements of truth about it, but the third – about Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, George Bernard Shaw, and the editor of Life magazine visiting James – is wishful thinking and completely unsupported by the available evidence.
There is no evidence that George Bernard Shaw ever visited Lake Chapala, though it is remotely possible that the great English philosopher met Miss James somewhere else. Note that, by the time James settled in Ajijic, Shaw was already 88 years old. I do have lots of sympathy for the idea that Shaw can be linked to Mexico since he apparently once said that, “The two most beautiful things in the world are the Taj Mahal and Dolores del Rio”! (Dolores del Río was a stunningly beautiful Mexican actress from Mexico’s golden age of cinema).
I have never found any evidence that any serving editor of Life magazine visited Chapala to call on James or anyone else, though three photographs of Neill James in Ajijic do appear in Leonard McCombe’s photo essay for Life magazine, published in 1957.
The Hemingway-Chapala claim, which has since been repeated in International Living, seems equally inaccurate. Hemingway’s life has been painstakingly analyzed by a small army of biographers, but Lake Chapala never makes an appearance.
So far as I am aware, the only significant time Hemingway ventured into Mexico was a visit to Mexico City (from Cuba) in March 1942, which later came to the attention of the FBI because he apparently checked into the Reforma Hotel under an assumed name and met Gustav Regler, a friend from his time in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. (Regler himself did visit Ajijic several years later.)
While I’d love to be proved wrong, the idea that Hemingway ever visited or lived at Lake Chapala is just one more literary myth.
Sources
Laura Bateman. 2011. “Neill James”, a chapter in Alexandra Bateman and Nancy Bollenbach (compilers). 2011. Ajijic: 500 years of adventurers (Thomas Paine Chapter NSDAR), p 79-84
Mary Dearborn. 2017. Ernest Hemingway – A Biography. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Tod Jonson. 2012. “Neill James—Ajijic’s Woman of the Century!”, in USA Today’s weekend feature La Voz de Mexico, 19 February 2012 edition; reprinted in El Ojo del Lago, September 2012.
Leonard McCombe. 1957. “Yanks Who Don’t Go Home. Expatriates Settle Down to Live and Loaf in Mexico.” Life, 23 December 1957.
David Ramón. 1997. Dolores del Río. Editorial Clío.
Nicholas Reynolds. 2012. “A Spy Who Made His Own Way. Ernest Hemingway, Wartime Spy”, in Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Extracts, June 2012).
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Fun-loving journalist Kate Karns, who has written many entertaining columns and articles about Ajijic over the years, lived in the village from 1971 to 2013. Karns was the local correspondent for the Mexico City News for several years immediately after Katie Goodridge Ingram. She also ran an art gallery for a time on Calle Colón, the main north-south street leading to the pier.
Katherine Julia Flaten (her maiden name) was born in Hennepin, Minnesota, on 25 September 1921. Curiously, the record of her marriage in 1944 to actor Todd “Rocky” Karns, when both were serving in the U.S. military in New Mexico, spells her first name Catherine with a “C”! She was court-martialed and reassigned shortly after marriage, not because of any spelling error, but because she had had the temerity, while serving in the ranks, to marry an officer.
Heading of article by Kate Karns, El Ojo del Lago, Nov 2013
Prior to the war, Kate was well on her way to becoming a Hollywood actress. She performed in high school shows in Milwaukee, studied drama at the University of Minnesota and attended the Maria Ouspenskaya acting school in Hollywood. Tod Jonson, who also lived in Hollywood for years before moving to Ajijic, has said that “Katy Karns, a talent in her own right, had been under contract to Paramount Studios and was a member of the Golden Circle of Players on their studio lot.”
Unfortunately for Kate’s career, the war intervened. She returned home to Milwaukee where she later joined the Army and was trained to fix radios. After the war, Kate and Rocky started a family and lived in Hollywood where Rocky built his acting career, eventually retiring from movies and television to work for the North American Philips Corporation.
Following some prompting by Kate, a profile of her family was published in the September 1950 edition of the Ladies Home Journal in its series, “How America Lives”. Not long afterwards, the magazine published an article featuring Kate modeling some elegant clothing.
When Rocky retired in 1971, the couple moved to Ajijic. Kate had been working for a fabric weaving business in the village for some time before federal authorities realized she lacked any work permit and ordered her to leave the country. She was soon able to sort out her paperwork and return. Kate also worked for seven years in local real estate, found time to be President of Lakeside Little Theater (in 1983/4), and combined family life and all this with writing and being the local correspondent for the Mexico City News.
Kate’s writing is always well-observed and often humorous, with many references to her own experiences in adapting to life in Mexico and to the myriad of quirky characters that Ajijic seems to have attracted in the 1970s.
One of my all-time favorite lines from Kate Karns is her description of the small town of Jamay, on the north shore of the lake, mid-way between Ocotlán and La Barca, in 1988 as “like a running sore; its feet in mud and garbage, its head covered by torn corrugated tarpaper held up precariously by half-finished grey cement-block walls and disintegrating bricks.” Jamay is very different now, but in 1988, her words were only a slight exaggeration.
Kate Karns, who has, with good reason, been critical of those in-comers who fail to learn any Spanish or make any real effort to integrate into the local community, continues to hold the highest regard for the people of Mexico in general, and of Ajijic in particular.
Her husband, Rocky Karns, passed away in February 2000. The couple had enjoyed 54 years of marriage. Kate continued to live in Ajijic until 2013 when she moved to Ellensburg in Washington state to be closer to her children and grandchildren.
The incomparable Kate Karns died on 11 December 2018, at the age of 97.
Anon. 1950. “How America Lives: Meet the Karns of California – Todd and Katherine Karns”, Ladies Home Journal, September 1950.
Jeanne Chaussee. 2011. “Laguna Chapalac”, Guadalajara Reporter, 30 September 2011.
Kate Karns. 1988. “Kate Karns in Lake Chapala”, Mexico City News, 3 July 1988, p16.
Michael Warren. 2015. “Lakeside Little Theater 50th Jubilee Season!” El Ojo del Lago, March 2015.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
Bet Lamoureux was a writer and artist with close links to Los Angeles and to Desert Hot Springs in California. A short news item in the Palm Springs-based Desert Sun newspaper in 1951 says that Lamoureux was flying to Mexico City and Guadalajara in order to spend several months in Ajijic, where “Once settled in her Mexican paradise, she will write the book for which she has been gathering bright and humorous material for the past four years.”
Audrey Bernice (sometimes “Bettina”, usually known as “Bet”) Martin (her maiden name) was born in Riverside, California on 14 May 1909. She married Howard Lamoureux; the couple’s only son, Albert Howard Lamoureux, was born in 1939.
In the early 1940s, Howard Lamoureux was among the first to purchase lots when the new town of Desert Hot Springs was founded. According to a later newspaper report, Lamoureux “had enough faith In Desert Hot Springs to purchase the first two lots.” By 1949, Bet and Howard Lamoureux were hosts at Miracle Isle in Desert Hot Springs, but tragedy struck in April of that year when Howard became critically ill and passed away shortly afterwards.
In November of 1949, Bet is mentioned as being the owner of the Village Store but the family’s run of bad luck continued and she decided to sell the store the following year in order to spend more time with her son Albert who had fallen ill. During Bet’s ownership of the Village Store, it occasionally held art exhibits, including one in November 1949 of paintings by Marie Ropp, a “Grande Dame of Art” in California and the West.
As a writer, Bet Lamoureux had contributed a “very clever and refreshing column” about Desert Hot Springs to The Palm Springs News “for over two years”, coining the phrase “the friendly village on the sunny slope” as the most appropriate epithet for her home town.
In February 1951, now working on a book, Bet flew from California to Mexico intending to spend several months in Ajijic. Things did not work out quite as planned. While she had originally planned to return to the U.S. in June, she remained in Mexico a little longer and married John Addington in Mexico City on 11 August 1951. Addington was an electrician in Desert Hot Springs. The couple apparently met at the Writing Center of the Mexico City College.
Over the next few years, Bet Addington as she was now known, featured prominently in numerous arts and crafts fairs in Desert hot Springs, turning her hand to flower arrangements and opening, with her husband, a restaurant-gallery named Addington’s. The gallery held weekly shows during the winter season and the restaurant gained an enviable reputation for fine food. Details are sketchy but it appears that Bet Addington visited Mexico again in the summer of 1953.
In 1956, Bet Addington was instrumental in founding an artists’ group known as The Sand Witches. According to a local newspaper, the group was founded after Addington remarked that, “We are famous for our water and our wind. Let’s get in and feature our desert sand!” The sand paintings by members of the group were exhibited in clubs and art galleries all over California, sometimes as fund raisers for local charities. The other members of the group, active until at least 1960, included Dorothy Chester, Kay Farnum, Enola Hulbert, Betty Lukomski, Sally Sweet, Karen Thompson, Ginna Walker, Lillian Woods, Helen Young and Rae Taylor.
Grave marker for Bet Lamoureux. Photo courtesy of CRob (findagrave.com)
Bet Addington died in Orange County, California, on 29 March 1989. Sadly, we may never know whether or not this pioneering writer and artist of Desert Hot Springs ever completed the book she was working on when she visited Ajijic in 1951.
Sources:
Desert Sentinel (Desert Hot Springs, California): 10 February 1949, p4; 1 April 1949; 8 April 1949; 17 November 1949, p6; December 8, 1949, p6; 30 November 1950, p5; 14 December 1950, p9; 22 February 1951, p2; 23 August 1951, p1; 26 February 1953: p4; 16 April 1953, p1; 28 May 1953: p2; 13 August 1953, p5; 21 October 1954, p6; 20 November 1958, p 15.
Desert Sun: Number 30, 23 February 1951 p 8; Number 78, 19 May 1955; Number 234, 4 May 1967.
Independent Press-Telegram (Long Beach), 17 April 1960, p 87.
Mexico City Collegian, 14 Jan 1954 – vol7 #6.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts, or email us.
We looked in a previous post at the life and work of multi-talented German artist Paul “Pablo” Huf who spent his early childhood in Ajijic. Huf, born in Guadalajara in October 1967, is the elder son of two professional artists closely associated with Ajijic – Peter Paul Huf and Eunice Hunt. The family lived in Ajijic until Paul was six years old, at which point they moved to Europe, where they lived for a couple of years in southern Spain before eventually settling in Kaufbeuren in Bavaria, Germany.
After working as a car mechanic, social worker and educator, Paul Huf switched to art in his thirties and studied in Munich and Spain. After finding a box of his parents’ photos and mementos of Mexico while visiting them in Kaufbeuren, Paul Huf decided to research their courtship and revisit their old haunts. He returned to Mexico at age 40, for the first time since he had left as a child, and spent three months traveling to places where his parents had been more than forty years earlier, including San Blas, Ajijic, Zihuatanejo, Oaxaca and Veracruz.
The story of his parent’s romance is the basis for Huf’s fascinating contribution (“40 Años”/”40 Years”) to a group exhibition of work by German artists entitled Vistazo, La transformación de lo cotidiano, (“Glance, The transformation of everyday life“) held at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City from 15 March to 10 July 2007. During his travels, Huf wrote ten short texts that became the thread linking photographs and drawings recounting his parents’ love story. Here, for the very first time in English, are the ten short texts that Huf wrote for the exhibition.
1. San Blas
In January 1965 the Lions Club of San Blas organized a dance. Everyone attended. It had been a wonderful warm day, it grew dark early. The entrance was decorated with colored lanterns. Among the many guests who made their way to the party was a 25-year-old German.
Peter, who left Germany as a young man, had arrived a few weeks before from Texas and rented an apartment in the small fishing village to work on his art.
Eunice was 32, recently divorced after ten years of marriage. She had traveled to Mexico to rethink her life. She came from Canada, where she had studied art. Since she was the daughter of migrants from Banat, in Romania, she understood German.
Peter saw Eunice, and immediately liked her, but it was difficult to reach her because all the other men had also noticed this young woman. Peter pretended to know only German, so he managed to get some special attention. After the dance, they met every day in the square and took long walks with Eunice’s dog, Klara.
Eunice was impressed by an installation Peter had set up in his apartment. He darkened a room and hung a cord with an empty coconut from the ceiling. Inside the coconut was a candle. When the candle was lit, the cord swayed. Only with this flickering and unstable light could the black shapes be seen on the walls.
It was the beginning of a great love. In March, the couple moved to a large house on the square, where all rooms, except one, were uninhabitable due to spiders, dust accumulated over many years and piles of antique furniture.
Part of Paul Huf’s 2007 exhibit in Mexico City. Credit: Paul Huf.
2. Desertion
In May of 1965 they were on a bus on their way to Mexico City; Peter had to go to the German consulate because his passport had expired. On arrival, they told him that his name was on a list of deserters, because he had ignored his call to military service. By the time more call-up letters arrived, he was already abroad. Nothing had kept him in his hometown.
Peter’s father had written a letter to the recruiting office, informing the relevant people that he was unable to communicate with his son. He himself had participated from the first day of World War II and had been a prisoner of war in France. He could not understand then, wrote his father, the behavior of his son.
Peter told the consul that he would stay in Mexico if they did not renew his passport. They renewed it.
3. Dogs and first class
A dog is an animal and animals travel with peasants and Indians in third class, thought the inspector. I am the inspector of the first class and these strange gringos have a dog with them. Animals should travel in the luggage compartment, but by no means in first class! You have to get him out, he has no right to be here, but the stupid gringo, overbearing, shows me a ticket, telling me that they have bought one for the dog! Who, what asshole, at the station, sold them a ticket for the dog?! A train ticket for dogs in first class! The dog even has a name, who has seen something like that?! A dog with a female name! The woman repeatedly caresses the black dog and calls him Klara. What nonsense! But I am the inspector of the first class and with me animals do not travel, even if they have a ticket, let alone when they have a name! Now, the guy tells me, to make matters worse, that Mexico is a democracy! Democracy, who cares? Mexico may be a democracy, but there is no democracy on this train; here I am in charge!
Halfway there, the train gradually slowed, until finally it stopped. The compartment door opened, the inspector stood in front of the couple, accompanied by two soldiers armed with machine guns readied for use. Accompanied by the soldiers, the inspector, and the machine guns, the pair got off the train. Klara was on a leash, as it should be. The other travelers watched the small group with curiosity. They walked on granite ballast under the hot sun until they reached the end of the train. They reached the luggage compartment, where they had to tie up the dog. They did not untie it until they reached Oaxaca.
4. Do You Know Arthur Rimbaud?
“I know him,” thought Peter, “that narrow guy, with his long hair hanging in his face, his tight, striped suit!” Then it occurred to him that they had often seen each other in Paris in the discos where they sat, listened to the latest discs of John Coltrane, and smoked cigarettes. Over the music the Frenchman had asked him: “Do you know Arthur Rimbaud?”. But when he wanted to answer, a woman had come up to them and interrupted the conversation. That had been a few years ago.
Now here was the guy standing in a bar in Oaxaca. Peter went up to him and said, “Of course I know Arthur Rimbaud!”
5. Dance
Jean was with a group of friends, mostly American women. Eunice and Peter joined them for cocktails, the atmosphere was good-humored. It was a pleasant night in Oaxaca, the flowers had a sweet smell. Afterwards they wanted to go dancing and the bartender directed them to a small street around the corner. They searched for a while until they found a house with a neon sign that said Love. The men there had opted to sit idly in a ragged room. When the volume of music rose, the Americans began to dance freely. At first, the regulars were surprised, but the atmosphere became hot as everyone wanted to dance with a gringa! The men were then offended when any of the women refused an invitation to dance, while the others continued dancing. More and more men rushed to join the dance, for the news quickly spread that there was a lively party in the former brothel.
Peter was the first to catch on, bringing chairs from all sides so that the women could sit, but as soon as a chair was vacated, the regular customers took it immediately.
It became late. By dawn, the women were completely exhausted and Peter accompanied them to the hotel. One by one they said goodbye. When only four of them remained, they clapped hands and promised to return the following night.
6. In Paradise
Mr. Campos was very happy to have rented the small house behind his barn. In Zihuatanejo, before the rainy season, it was always very hot, so very few tourists came.
Eunice woke up the first night because of a noise: she could hear hundreds of little feet walking nearby. When she got rid of the big mosquito net hanging over her bed, she turned on the light and found nothing unusual. However, she had the impression that lots of small pairs of eyes were watching her curiously from all sides.
They got up at five and went to the beach for a swim. On the way back they went shopping in the market. Afterwards, it was too hot to be outside. Eunice grabbed a tame iguana, which belonged to a fisherman’s child. The boy had taken the animal home and put it on the table. There it stood, paralyzed, for hours, while Eunice drew him.
They became friends of the inhabitants of the town and, as their house was the only one with a stone floor, they all liked to visit them to dance. Paradise is a beautiful place. One night they awoke because of a loud noise. A fat rat had fallen into the stone tank they used as a sink. The rat was swimming continuously in circles so as not to drown. Peter grabbed a towel and put it in the sink. The rat grabbed it, climbed up, quickly reached the edge, shook himself like a dog, and disappeared.
7. MS Orinoco
Every day Peter would go down to the port and ask if there was work. The wonderful days in paradise soon ended, and after three months he had returned to San Blas. Apparently, all the insects there who knew how to sting had come out at the same time. And then to complicate matters further, a guy arrived who went to Vancouver by car, taking Eunice with him. He was alone again, and without money.
He traveled to Veracruz in third class. He had once worked on a ship and knew that it was a large port. In a bar he met Harald, a German who, like him, had no documents but wanted to work on a ship. They got together and asked every day from boat to boat. They were told that, perhaps, once they could have worked on a ship without papers, but not now. Their money was running out. They moved from a decadent hotel to a worse one. Peter wrote letters to Vancouver, but received no reply.
One morning the rusty Norwegian cargo ship MS Orinoco received a large load of watermelons, which had to be taken to Portland and the crew needed immediate reinforcement. This was the chance the two Germans had been waiting for. The MS Orinoco was a ship that did not follow a fixed route but traveled to whichever ports had goods to be loaded. So they reached Portland, then Jamaica, then sailed for a long time in the Caribbean. The sea in the Caribbean is so lovely, says Peter, that one feels it is calling you. One of the sailors, Peter says, threw himself into the water and never came back up.
8. Toothache
The MS Orinoco had left the Caribbean and gone to Newfoundland; From there it carried dry fish to Jacksonville, Florida. Peter wrote letters to Vancouver. At every port the packager brought mail for the crew, but there was never anything for Peter. In Jacksonville, he began to have toothache: one of his fillings had fallen out and he had pus. It felt like the foreman of the ship was pounding his nerve with a giant hammer. On the way to Pensacola, Florida, the pain grew worse.
Before reaching New Orleans, in the Gulf of Mexico, the captain realized that they were facing a hurricane. The ship could not dodge it because it was too old and slow, so the MS Orinoco continued on its way into the storm. Hurricane Betsy broke on the rusty boat, struck it hard, shook it, destroyed the antennas and radar, and flooded the bridge. The ship and its crew fought for ten hours; miraculously they did not sink.
When they entered the port of Pensacola, Florida, Peter remembered he had toothache. The dentist in the harbor said to him: This molar looks horrible, the pain must have been awful. Peter replied: Yes, it was excruciating!
9. American Express
The rusty MS Orinoco had defied the hurricane but was heavily damaged. Another cargo was delivered in the Caribbean, then the ship crossed the Atlantic and arrived in Rotterdam. Here the crew was laid off and the Orinoco sent to the dry dock for a general overhaul.
Harald and Peter took their wages and went up to Amsterdam. They settled in a cheap hotel on the Damrak, shaved and showered, and went to the city to get their bearings.
When they crossed the Rembrandsplein, they passed an American Express office. Peter paused and said, “Wait a moment, Harald, I’ll just take one last look to see if any letter has arrived.”
Harald replied, “There’s nothing for you, you can forget that.”
But there was a letter: Eunice had written to him saying she had booked a flight to Amsterdam.
10. Return
In January 1967 Eunice and Peter boarded a cargo ship in Rotterdam bound for Veracruz. The cargo ship had five cabins for the numerous passengers, but they were the only guests on board.
Eunice had received all his letters and loved them. She had answered them but, because she always enclosed a few dollars in the envelopes, her replies had been lost along the way.
The ship left the great port. The couple looked back, toward Europe, which seemed smaller and smaller, as they hugged each other. After fifteen days of travel on the high seas, calm as a mirror, they were back in Mexico.
Eunice and Peter Huf, ca 1967. Photo courtesy of Eunice and Peter Huf.
Note:
Sincere thanks to Paul Huf for granting his permission to reproduce the photo and texts of his exhibition in this post, and to Eunice and Peter Huf for permission to reproduce their photograph. All translations by Tony Burton.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Multi-talented German artist Paul “Pablo” Huf, the elder son of two professional artists closely associated with Ajijic – Peter Paul Huf and Eunice (Hunt) Huf – was born in Guadalajara in October 1967. According to his parents, his first word was alacrán (scorpion) because of the large number of those arachnids that shared their humble adobe-walled village home.
When Paul was six years old, the family moved to Europe, where they lived for a couple of years in southern Spain before eventually settling in Peter Huf’s home town of Kaufbeuren in Bavaria, Germany.
Paul Huf became an artist late in life and eventually returned to Mexico, at age 40, after finding a box of his parents’ photos and mementos of Mexico. He carried scans of them with him as he researched the story of how his parents first met and fell in love. This story formed the basis for Pablo Huf’s fascinating contribution to a group exhibition by German artists in Mexico City in 2007.
Huf does not consider that having being born in Mexico has had any particular influence on his art. His inclusion in this series of profiles of artists associated with Lake Chapala is justified on two counts: first, the fact that he spent his early childhood in Ajijic and, second, that he subsequently researched the history of his parents’ links to Ajijic and other parts of Mexico.
In his twenties, Paul Huf worked for several years as a car mechanic, studied social work and became a parole officer in Munich, but at the age of 30, he suddenly switched tracks and began seven years of formal art studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the Fine Arts Academy in Valencia, Spain. Since completing his studies in 2004, he has steadily built a career as a professional artist, with extended working periods in Sibiu (Romania), Amsterdam and in Pas du Calais (France).
Paul Huf’s artistic works combine photography, drawing and concept arts with writing.
Prior to his Mexico City exhibit, Huf spent time researching other artists who had been close friends of his parents in Mexico (such as Jack Rutherford, John K. Peterson and the other members of Grupo 68) and then spent three months in Mexico visiting places where his parents had been more than forty years earlier, including San Blas, Ajijic, Zihuatanejo, Oaxaca and Veracruz. One of his most surprising encounters was with someone who remembered partying with his parents in Zihuatanejo back in the mid-1960s!
Part of Paul Huf’s exhibit in Museo Carrillo Gil, Mexico City, 2007. Credit: Paul Huf.
Based on his travels, Huf wrote ten short texts that became the thread linking the photographs and drawings in his contribution (“40 Años”/”Forty Years”), which was 3 meters in height and occupied 24 meters of wall space in the group exhibition entitled Vistazo, La transformación de lo cotidiano, (“Glance, The transformation of everyday life”). (The other artists in this show, held at the Museo Carrillo Gil in Mexico City from 15 March to 10 July 2007, were Uli Aigner, Benjamín Bergmann, Heike Dossier, Martin Fengel, Tom Früchtl, Haubitz+Zoche, Heribert Heindl, Endy Hupperich and Martin Wöhrl). Huf’s short stories were painted “Mexican style” on the walls of the museum by two rotalistas (Mexican advert painters/calligraphers). In conjunction with the display, slides of old family photos, newspaper clippings and examples of the invitation cards used for 1960s art exhibitions were projected onto the wall.
As Paul Huf rightly concluded, and his exhibit demonstrated, his parents’ Mexican love story is both special and glamorous. In 2014, when my wife and I had the opportunity to visit his parents, it was evident that both Eunice and Peter Huf had particularly fond memories of Ajijic in the 1960s and felt honored to have had their story publicly retold by their son. It was equally clear that their time in Mexico had continued to exert a very strong influence, especially on Peter’s own artwork.
Paul Huf currently lives in Munich, Germany, with his wife and two young children. He returned again to Mexico in 2008 and showed work in an exhibition entitled Hermandades Escultoricas (“Sculptural Brotherhoods”) at the Museo Fernando García Ponce-Macay in Mérida, Yucatán.
Huf has regularly exhibited works in Munich galleries since 2000. In addition, he has participated in shows in Rimini, Italy (2002); Amsterdam (2006); Belgium (2008); Sibiu, Romania (2008); Dunkirk, France (2008); Pecs, Hungary (2010) and Berlin, Germany (2011).
His work, ranging from a radio play to a “soccer-literature contest”, has won several awards, and one of his diptychs (two hinged plates), a work entitled “USA, 2005” was acquired for the Bavarian State Painting Collection. As a writer, he has published several collections of short stories, including You have to be as cool as Alain Delon, sagte Zelko (2006) and Vom Tod und vom Alkohol (“Of death and alcohol”) (2006).
Paul “Pablo” Huf may have tried in his twenties to escape the artistic magnetism of a childhood at Lake Chapala, but his inner creative drive eventually emerged and won out. The journey he then undertook to retrace his parents’ love story and compile an exhibit to celebrate his family’s time in Mexico, makes his contribution to the art world, and to the story of the artists associated with Lake Chapala, a very special one.
Acknowledgment
I am very grateful to Paul Huf for generously sharing memories and information about his life and career via emails and Skype (September 2016; February 2017).
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Regina Alma (deCormier) Shekerjian and her husband, photographer Haig Shekerjian, spent several months living in Ajijic over the winter of 1950-51, and returned frequently thereafter, including numerous times in the late 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s.
Illustration by Regina and Haig Shekerjian
Regina deCormier Shekerjian (1923-2000) was a well-known poet, author, translator and illustrator of children’s books.
She was born in Poughkeepsie, New York, on 22 December 1923 and died on 21 April 2000 at the age of 76. DeCormier was the daughter of Robert DeCormier, a public school teacher born in Maine, and his Swedish-born wife, Selma.
After graduating from Poughkeepsie High School, where she was an active member of the Dramatic Club, Regina studied art at Skidmore College and then began classes at the University of New Mexico. In 1944, she married U.S. Navy Seaman Second Class Haig W. Shekerjian in Pensacola, Florida, where he was then stationed. Shekerjian had studied at the Eastman School of Photography in Rochester, New York, and had been a fellow student at the University of New Mexico, before joining the Navy in November 1943.
After Haig Shekerjian left the Navy in 1945, the couple, and their two sons (Tor and Jean-René) lived for many years in New Paltz, New York, where Haig was Art Director of the Media Services Center at the State University College.
Regina Shekerjian published under various names, including Regina Tor, Regina deCormier (or Decormier) and Regina Shekerjian.
As Regina Tor, she co-wrote, with Eleanor Roosevelt, Growing Toward Peace (Random House, 1960). This book, translated into 15 languages, was written for the United Nations and describes the various programs offered by that organization, with many attractive illustrations, presumed to be the work of Regina.
Regina Shekerjian had written to Eleanor Roosevelt several years earlier, in 1953, sending her a copy of her recently-published first book (Getting to know Korea) and seeking help with getting funding to travel to Germany to research her next book in the series. In a diary entry, Roosevelt includes quotes from Shekerjian’s letter to her:
“A letter addressed to me that accompanied the book interested me very much because I discovered that the author, Regina (Tor) Shekerjian, is a very near neighbor. She lives in Pleasant Valley, N.Y., a nice, quiet little village about 10 miles from Poughkeepsie. She told me that this book was her first and she hoped it was just the beginning of a series. The next would be on Germany . . . She is still looking for some way to get there so that this second volume can be written. She introduces herself by saying: “You don’t remember me, but I had lunch with you one summer day. I was 21 that year and I was running for alderman on the Democratic ticket in the city of Poughkeepsie. I was the first woman ever to have run for that office. I was also the youngest, I guess.” “Of course, that was eight summers ago and I was only one of about seven young Democrats, but I remember well that day. There were hot dogs and tiny, perfectly shaped red tomatoes and salad, and ice cream and you speaking about peace and the future of the world, and the part young people must play—the responsibility which belonged to each of us not only to preserve this great country but to help make it even greater.” [Eleanor Rooseveldt, 19 April 1953]
Regina first visited Ajijic when her husband took a sabbatical break over the winter of 1950-51 and they spent several months living in the village. Regina wrote an article in 1952 entitled “You can Afford a Mexican Summer” for Design in which she extolled the virtues of Ajijic as an ideal location for an inexpensive art-themed summer break.
Regina Shekerjian wrote at least six books for young readers: Getting to know Korea (1953); Getting to know Puerto Rico (1955); Getting to know Canada (1956); Getting to know the Philippines (1958); Getting to know Greece (1959) and Discovering Israel (1960), which won a National Jewish Book award.
Shekerjian illustrated several books, including River winding (1970); 19 Masks for the Naked Poet (1971); The Chinese Story Teller (1973); and Menus For All Occasions (1974).
Together, Regina and Haig Shekerjian illustrated several books, most of them written by Nancy Willard and aimed at young readers. They included The Adventures of Tom Thumb (1950); Life in the Middle Ages (1966); The boy, the rat, and the butterfly (1971); King Midas and the Golden Touch (1973); Play it in Spanish : Spanish games and folk songs for children (1973); The merry history of a Christmas pie : with a delicious description of a Christmas soup (1974); All on a May morning (1975); How Many Donkeys? A Turkish Folk Tale (1971); and The well-mannered balloon (1976).
The Shekerjians also co-wrote, with Regina’s brother Robert deCormier, A Book of Christmas Carols (1963); and A Book of Ballads, Songs and Snatches (1965).
Turning to poetry, Regina deCormier had poems published in numerous journals, including American Poetry Review, American Voice, ACM/Another Chicago Magazine, The G. W. Review, Kalliope, Kansas Quarterly, The Massachusetts Review, The Nation, Nimrod, Poetry East, and Salmagundi.
A collection of deCormier’s poems, entitled Hoofbeats on the Door: Poems, was published in 1993 by Helicon Nine Editions of Kansas City, Missouri. Several of the poems in this strong collection have obvious connections to Ajijic and Lake Chapala.
Several of the poems in this strong collection have obvious connections to Ajijic and Lake Chapala. The longest and most complex is “From the Bellringer’s Wife’s Journal”, a rich, powerful, three-part poem set in Ajijic.
By the lake, bent over a wheelbarrow of water, a woman guts a large salmon-gold carp, gives a friend a recipe for curing the bite of a scorpion, and one for the heart that breaks.
The poem also includes references to Calle Ocampo and, across the lake, the mountain named García.
The poem entitled “Testimony” describes the near-death experience of “Guillermo”.
“Rain” is a delightful tribute to one of Ajijic’s most famous residents ever, a legendary former ballet star who lived in Ajijic for decades prior to her passing in 1989:
[We] huddle over the photographs of Zara, La Rusa, the legendary one, the dancer from the Ballet Russe who came to this village longer ago than anyone can remember, the one who went everywhere on horseback, the one who still believes horses are spirits from another realm…
“Lupe”, the title of another poem in the collection, turns out to be the daughter of the village baker, “Tito”:
Tito shoves the long-handled wood paddle into the adobe oven, lifts out five perfectly round loaves of bread, round as his wife’s breasts… . . . By five, all the loaves are ready, heaped in wide shallow baskets, lifted to the heads of their two youngest sons who trot them off to the store.”
Her poems were chosen for at least two anthologies: “Snow”, “Grandmother” and “The Left Eye of Odin” were included in Two Worlds Walking (New Rivers Press, 1994) and “At the Cafe Saint Jacques” appeared in Claiming the Spirit Within: A Sourcebook of Women’s Poetry, edited by Marilyn Sewell (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).
Michael Eager, the owner of La Nueva Posada hotel in Ajijic, remembers Regina as a very quiet person, who rarely talked much. He recalls her as being slender and pretty, with dark hair, and usually dressed casually, often in hand-embroidered blouses. Like her husband, Regina loved the local people, music and traditions.
Sources:
Regina Shekerjian. 1952. “You can Afford a Mexican Summer: Complete Details on how to Stretch your Dollars During an Art Trek South of the Border”, in Design, Volume 53, Issue 8, pp 182-197.
Poughkeepsie Journal, Poughkeepsie, New York, 19 February 1944, p5.
Note: This is an updated version of a post first published 4 July 2016.
Sombrero Books welcomes comments, corrections or additional material related to any of the writers and artists featured in our series of mini-bios. Please email us or use the comments feature at the bottom of individual posts.
Three brief references in the archive of the Guadalajara Reporter to Max Pointz, a “well-known writer”, caught my eye earlier this year. While I have so far failed to unearth any evidence that he ever had any books or magazine articles published, my research has shown that Max Pointz had close connections to Vancouver Island where I now live, and was married in a school chapel that is only twenty minutes drive away from my home.
Maxwell Desmond Poyntz, the youngest son of an Irish-born doctor, Louis Pointz and his wife, Mary, was born in British Columbia (presumably in Victoria) on 4 January 1918 and died in Canada, at the age of 81, on 29 November 1999.
Poyntz and his family spent some months at the La Quinta hotel in Jocotepec in 1964. During that time, he held a party for his son (Guadalajara Reporter, 16 July 1964) and appears to have been putting the final touches to a book. The 10 December issue of the Guadalajara Reporter says that Poyntz’s El Caramba, or What the Hell’s a Taco?, the first of a trilogy, is to be published by Random House the following Spring. The book “follows a family named Wanderbugs who start out from the Canadian Northwest for Mexico”, telling the “hilarious adventures that befall this family” as they “find their place on the map of life”. Despite these details, I have been unable to find any evidence that the book was ever actually published.
In his youth, Poyntz attended Victoria High School, B.C., where he was a member of the rugby team. The school magazine for 1935-36 described him as follows: “This young fellow is quite a charmer. But Max will never solve the mystery of X by spending his time at parties. Or will he?”
With the second world war looming, Poyntz joined the Canadian Army. Before leaving for overseas duties, he became engaged to Miss Pamela Shirley Fox, of Vancouver, in November 1939, with the couple’s marriage taking place the following month in the chapel of the Queen Margaret’s School in Duncan, B.C. At the time of his marriage, Poyntz was a sergeant in the First Battalion of the Canadian Scottish. By the time his military career ended, he had risen to the rank of Lt. Colonel.
Pamela, born in 1922, died on 11 March 1968 and was buried in Kelowna Memorial Park Cemetery, Kelowna, BC, with Poyntz buried alongside her thirty years later.
In November 1942, Poyntz, an alumnus of the University School in Victoria, played for the Canadian Scottish in a rugby match held in England against the Canadian Seaforths. The Seaforths won 13-3.
Poyntz also served in the Canadian forces during the Korean War, as described in this extract from Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War, 1950-1953, by Ted Barris (Macmillan, Toronto, 1999):
Maxwell “Duke” Poyntz came to Korea with the RCR [Royal Canadian Regiment] in 1951. A long-time quartermaster, Poyntz had served in the Canadian army occupation force in Germany, where he ran the recreational services of the McNaughton Club. He’d earned the nickname “Duke” because he was often seen in Oldenburg driving a glistening Mercedes-Benz car. Behind the lines with “B” Company of the 2nd Battalion RCR in Korea, Duke drove a jeep and became the regiment’s unofficial social director. In his first days behind the lines, Poyntz organized a nine-man section with the sole job of manufacturing recreational venues. The group managed to obtain the first motion pictures since the men had left Pusan. They brought a US Army show through. They build volleyball courts, baseball diamonds and a horseshoe pitch in every company area. They dammed a stream into a sizeable swimming and bathing hole. Pooling their financial resources, Duke’s section of do-gooders bought $500 worth of Korean silks, kimonos and other souvenirs for resale at cost to the unit.
Still, Max Poyntz’s crew is best remembered in Korea for its culinary initiative. Armed with well-scrubbed packing cases as pastry boards, empty beer bottles as rolling pins and empty ration tins as dough cutters, the privates and corporals in Poyntz’s unit began manufacturing doughnuts for the troops. With no bookkeeping and no access to unit rations, the group managed to procure 200 pounds of flour, 150 of lard and 60 of sugar, two cases of powdered milk and two of powdered eggs for the daily production line. Each day, the tent known as Duke’s Donut Dive served up as many as 6,000 doughnuts—including jelly, iced, cake and slab—along with fresh coffee, cold chocolate, lemonade or eggnog. What’s more, it was all for free.”
Sounds like a likeable guy! Did he ever actually write a book? The evidence suggests that he didn’t, but the chase to find out proved, once again, to be a fun ride!
Sources:
Ted Barris. 1999. Deadlock in Korea: Canadians at War, 1950-1953. (Macmillan, Toronto, 1999). Chapter 10.
The Black and Red, July. 1943 No. 73,
Camosun, Volume 28, No. 1 Victoria High School 1935-36.
The Daily Colonist, Victoria. B.C. 24 November 1939; 15 December 1939.
Guadalajara Reporter: 16 July 1964; 1 Oct 1964; 10 Dec 1964.
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In “Lake Chapala,” Mary Ashley Townsend, looking across the waters of the lake from her stately residence, Villa Montecarlo, indulged her imagination and poetic talents.
